SHORT STORIES
for Students
Advisors Erik France: Adjunct Instructor of English, Macomb Community College, Warren, Michigan. B.A. and M.S.L.S. from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Ph.D. from Temple University. Kate Hamill: Grade 12 English Teacher, Catonsville High School, Catonsville, Maryland. Joseph McGeary: English Teacher, Germantown Friends School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ph.D. in English from Duke University. Timothy Showalter: English Department Chair, Franklin High School, Reisterstown, Maryland. Certified teacher by the Maryland State Department of Education. Member of the National Council of Teachers of English. Amy Spade Silverman: English Department Chair, Kehillah Jewish High School, Palo Alto, California. Member of National Council of
Teachers of English (NCTE), Teachers and Writers, and NCTE Opinion Panel. Exam Reader, Advanced Placement Literature and Composition. Poet, published in North American Review, Nimrod, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among other publications. Jody Stefansson: Director of Boswell Library and Study Center and Upper School Learning Specialist, Polytechnic School, Pasadena, California. Board member, Children’s Literature Council of Southern California. Member of American Library Association, Association of Independent School Librarians, and Association of Educational Therapists. Laura Jean Waters: Certified School Library Media Specialist, Wilton High School, Wilton, Connecticut. B.A. from Fordham University; M.A. from Fairfield University.
SHORT STORIES
for Students Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories
VOLUME 28 Sara Constantakis, Project Editor Foreword by Thomas E. Barden
Short Stories for Students, Volume 28 Project Editor: Sara Constantakis Rights Acquisition and Management: Beth Beaufore, Jacqueline Flowers, Kelly Quin, Robyn Young Composition: Evi Abou-El-Seoud Manufacturing: Drew Kalasky Imaging: John Watkins Product Design: Pamela A. E. Galbreath, Jennifer Wahi Content Conversion: Katrina Coach Product Manager: Meggin Condino
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Table of Contents ADVISORS
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WHY STUDY LITERATURE AT ALL? (by Thomas E. Barden) . . . . . . INTRODUCTION
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LITERARY CHRONOLOGY .
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CONTRIBUTORS .
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AMIGO BROTHERS (by Piri Thomas) .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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THE BASS, THE RIVER, AND SHEILA MANT (by W. D. Wetherell). . . . . . . . . . 23
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . .
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24 25 26 28
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Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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DAY OF THE BUTTERFLY (by Alice Munro) .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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FEDERIGO’S FALCON (by Giovanni Boccaccio) .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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THE FIRST YEAR OF MY LIFE (by Muriel Spark) .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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GAMES AT TWILIGHT (by Anita Desai) .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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. 92 93 94 95 97 98 99 100 101 113 114 115 116 116 117 118 121 122 123 124 136 137
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THE GOLDEN KITE, THE SILVER WIND (by Ray Bradbury) . . . . . . . .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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HOUSE TAKEN OVER (by Julio Corta´zar).
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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MARIGOLDS (by Eugenia W. Collier)
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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138 139 139 140 141 143 144 147 147 159 160
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HOW MUCH LAND DOES A MAN NEED? (by Leo Tolstoy) . . . . . . . . .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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THE MEDICINE BAG (by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve) . . . . . . . . . .
Author Biography . . . . . . . Plot Summary . . . . . . . . .
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Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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A MYSTERY OF HEROISM (by Stephen Crane) 247
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .
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ONCE UPON A TIME (by Nadine Gordimer) .
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . .
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TWO FRIENDS (by Guy de Maupassant)
Author Biography Plot Summary . . Characters . . . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading . GLOSSARY .
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CUMULATIVE AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX .
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CUMULATIVE NATIONALITY/ETHNICITY INDEX.
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SUBJECT/THEME INDEX
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Why Study Literature At All? Short Stories for Students is designed to provide readers with information and discussion about a wide range of important contemporary and historical works of short fiction, and it does that job very well. However, I want to use this guest foreword to address a question that it does not take up. It is a fundamental question that is often ignored in high school and college English classes as well as research texts, and one that causes frustration among students at all levels, namely why study literature at all? Isn’t it enough to read a story, enjoy it, and go about one’s business? My answer (to be expected from a literary professional, I suppose) is no. It is not enough. It is a start; but it is not enough. Here’s why. First, literature is the only part of the educational curriculum that deals directly with the actual world of lived experience. The philosopher Edmund Husserl used the apt German term die Lebenswelt, ‘‘the living world,’’ to denote this realm. All the other content areas of the modern American educational system avoid the subjective, present reality of everyday life. Science (both the natural and the social varieties) objectifies, the fine arts create and/or perform, history reconstructs. Only literary study persists in posing those questions we all asked before our schooling taught us to give up on them. Only literature gives credibility to personal perceptions, feelings, dreams, and the ‘‘stream of consciousness’’ that is our inner voice. Literature wonders about infinity, wonders why God permits evil, wonders
what will happen to us after we die. Literature admits that we get our hearts broken, that people sometimes cheat and get away with it, that the world is a strange and probably incomprehensible place. Literature, in other words, takes on all the big and small issues of what it means to be human. So my first answer is that of the humanist we should read literature and study it and take it seriously because it enriches us as human beings. We develop our moral imagination, our capacity to sympathize with other people, and our ability to understand our existence through the experience of fiction. My second answer is more practical. By studying literature we can learn how to explore and analyze texts. Fiction may be about die Lebenswelt, but it is a construct of words put together in a certain order by an artist using the medium of language. By examining and studying those constructions, we can learn about language as a medium. We can become more sophisticated about word associations and connotations, about the manipulation of symbols, and about style and atmosphere. We can grasp how ambiguous language is and how important context and texture is to meaning. In our first encounter with a work of literature, of course, we are not supposed to catch all of these things. We are spellbound, just as the writer wanted us to be. It is as serious students of the writer’s art that we begin to see how the tricks are done.
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Seeing the tricks, which is another way of saying ‘‘developing analytical and close reading skills,’’ is important above and beyond its intrinsic literary educational value. These skills transfer to other fields and enhance critical thinking of any kind. Understanding how language is used to construct texts is powerful knowledge. It makes engineers better problem solvers, lawyers better advocates and courtroom practitioners, politicians better rhetoricians, marketing and advertising agents better sellers, and citizens more aware consumers as well as better participants in democracy. This last point is especially important, because rhetorical skill works both ways when we learn how language is manipulated in the making of texts the result is that we become less susceptible when language is used to manipulate us. My third reason is related to the second. When we begin to see literature as created artifacts of language, we become more sensitive to good writing in general. We get a stronger sense of the importance of individual words, even the sounds of words and word combinations. We begin to understand Mark Twain’s delicious proverb ‘‘The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.’’ Getting beyond the ‘‘enjoyment only’’ stage of literature gets us closer to becoming makers of word art ourselves. I am not saying that studying fiction will turn every student into a Faulkner or a Shakespeare. But it will make us more adaptable and effective writers, even if our art form ends up being the office memo or the corporate annual report.
better human beings. But I want to close with a warning. If your study and exploration of the craft, history, context, symbolism, or anything else about a story starts to rob it of the magic you felt when you first read it, it is time to stop. Take a break, study another subject, shoot some hoops, or go for a run. Love of reading is too important to be ruined by school. The early twentieth century writer Willa Cather, in her novel My Antonia, has her narrator Jack Burden tell a story that he and Antonia heard from two old Russian immigrants when they were teenagers. These immigrants, Pavel and Peter, told about an incident from their youth back in Russia that the narrator could recall in vivid detail thirty years later. It was a harrowing story of a wedding party starting home in sleds and being chased by starving wolves. Hundreds of wolves attacked the group’s sleds one by one as they sped across the snow trying to reach their village. In a horrible revelation, the old Russians revealed that the groom eventually threw his own bride to the wolves to save himself. There was even a hint that one of the old immigrants might have been the groom mentioned in the story. Cather has her narrator conclude with his feelings about the story. ‘‘We did not tell Pavel’s secret to anyone, but guarded it jealously as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party had been sacrificed, just to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure.’’ That feeling, that painful and peculiar pleasure, is the most important thing about literature. Study and research should enhance that feeling and never be allowed to overwhelm it.
Studying short stories, then, can help students become better readers, better writers, and even
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Thomas E. Barden Professor of English and Director of Graduate English Studies, The University of Toledo
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Introduction Purpose of the Book The purpose of Short Stories for Students (SSfS) is to provide readers with a guide to understanding, enjoying, and studying short stories by giving them easy access to information about the work. Part of Gale’s ‘‘For Students’’ Literature line, SSfS is specifically designed to meet the curricular needs of high school and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and researchers considering specific short fiction. While each volume contains entries on ‘‘classic’’stories frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries containing hard-to-find information on contemporary stories, including works by multicultural, international, and women writers. The information covered in each entry includes an introduction to the story and the story’s author; a plot summary, to help readers unravel and understand the events in the work; descriptions of important characters, including explanation of a given character’s role in the narrative as well as discussion about that character’s relationship to other characters in the story; analysis of important themes in the story; and an explanation of important literary techniques and movements as they are demonstrated in the work. In addition to this material, which helps the readers analyze the story itself, students are also provided with important information on the literary and historical background informing each work. This includes a historical context essay, a box comparing the time or place the story was
written to modern Western culture, a critical overview essay, and excerpts from critical essays on the story or author. A unique feature of SSfS is a specially commissioned critical essay on each story, targeted toward the student reader. To further help today’s student in studying and enjoying each story, information on audiobooks and other media adaptations is provided (if available), as well as reading suggestions for works of fiction and nonfiction on similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include ideas for research papers and lists of critical and reference sources that provide additional material on the work.
Selection Criteria The titles for each volume of SSfS were selected by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various school districts. Some of the sources surveyed include: literature anthologies, Reading Lists for College-Bound Students: The Books Most Recommended by America’s Top Colleges; Teaching the Short Story: A Guide to Using Stories from around the World, by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE); and ‘‘A Study of High School Literature Anthologies,’’ conducted by Arthur Applebee at the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Input was also solicited from our advisory board, as well as educators from various areas.
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From these discussions, it was determined that each volume should have a mix of ‘‘classic’’ stories (those works commonly taught in literature classes) and contemporary stories for which information is often hard to find. Because of the interest in expanding the canon of literature, an emphasis was also placed on including works by international, multicultural, and women authors. Our advisory board members—educational professionals—helped pare down the list for each volume. Works not selected for the present volume were noted as possibilities for future volumes. As always, the editor welcomes suggestions for titles to be included in future volumes.
How Each Entry Is Organized Each entry, or chapter, in SSfS focuses on one story. Each entry heading lists the title of the story, the author’s name, and the date of the story’s publication. The following elements are contained in each entry: Introduction: a brief overview of the story which provides information about its first appearance, its literary standing, any controversies surrounding the work, and major conflicts or themes within the work. Author Biography: this section includes basic facts about the author’s life, and focuses on events and times in the author’s life that may have inspired the story in question. Plot Summary: a description of the events in the story. Lengthy summaries are broken down with subheads. Characters: an alphabetical listing of the characters who appear in the story. Each character name is followed by a brief to an extensive description of the character’s role in the story, as well as discussion of the character’s actions, relationships, and possible motivation. Characters are listed alphabetically by last name. If a character is unnamed—for instance, the narrator in ‘‘The Eatonville Anthology’’— the character is listed as ‘‘The Narrator’’ and alphabetized as ‘‘Narrator.’’ If a character’s first name is the only one given, the name will appear alphabetically by that name. Themes: a thorough overview of how the topics, themes, and issues are addressed within the story. Each theme discussed appears in a separate subhead, and is easily accessed through the boldface entries in the Subject/Theme Index. Style: this section addresses important style elements of the story, such as setting, point of view, and
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narration; important literary devices used, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary terms are explained within the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary. Historical Context: this section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the author lived and the work was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities of the time in which the work was written. If the story is historical in nature, information regarding the time in which the story is set is also included. Long sections are broken down with helpful subheads. Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation of the author and the story, including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding the work. For older works, this section may include a history of how the story was first received and how perceptions of it may have changed over the years; for more recent works, direct quotes from early reviews may also be included. Criticism: an essay commissioned by SSfS which specifically deals with the story and is written specifically for the student audience, as well as excerpts from previously published criticism on the work (if available). Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material used in compiling the entry, with bibliographical information. Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may prove useful for the student. Includes full bibliographical information and a brief annotation. In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, set apart from the main text as sidebars: Media Adaptations: if available, a list of audiobooks and important film and television adaptations of the story, including source information. The list also includes stage adaptations, musical adaptations, etc. Topics for Further Study: a list of potential study questions or research topics dealing with the story. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, world history,
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science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc. Compare and Contrast: an ‘‘at-a-glance’’ comparison of the cultural and historical differences between the author’s time and culture and late twentieth century or early twenty-first century Western culture. This box includes pertinent parallels between the major scientific, political, and cultural movements of the time or place the story was written, the time or place the story was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after 1990 may not have this box. What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might give a reader points of entry into a classic work (e.g., YA or multicultural titles) and/ or complement the featured story or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works from various genres, YA works, and works from various cultures and eras.
Other Features SSfS includes ‘‘Why Study Literature At All?,’’ a foreword by Thomas E. Barden, Professor of English and Director of Graduate English Studies at the University of Toledo. This essay provides a number of very fundamental reasons for studying literature and, therefore, reasons why a book such as SSfS, designed to facilitate the study of literture, is useful. A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the SSfS series. A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index breaks down the authors and titles covered in each volume of the SSfS series by nationality and ethnicity. A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be studying a particular subject or theme rather than a single work. Significant subjects from events to broad themes are included. Each entry may include illustrations, including photo of the author, stills from film adaptations (if available), maps, and/or photos of key historical events.
Citing Short Stories for Students
style; teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, thus, the following examples may be adapted as needed. When citing text from SSfS that is not attributed to a particular author (for example, the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.), the following format may be used: ‘‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County.’’ Short Stories for Students. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 19–20. When quoting the specially commissioned essay from SSfS (usually the first essay under the Criticism subhead), the following format may be used: Korb, Rena. Critical Essay on ‘‘Children of the Sea.’’ Short Stories for Students. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 39–42. When quoting a journal or newspaper essay that is reprinted in a volume of Short Stories for Students, the following form may be used: Schmidt, Paul. ‘‘The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler.’’ Southwest Review 41.3 (Summer, 1956): 270–77. Excerpted and reprinted in Short Stories for Students. Vol. 1. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 29–31. When quoting material from a book that is reprinted in a volume of SSfS, the following form may be used: Bell-Villada, Gene H. ‘‘The Master of Short Forms.’’ Garcı´a Ma´rquez: The Man and His Work. University of North Carolina Press, 1990. 119–36. Excerpted and reprinted in Short Stories for Students. Vol. 1. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 89–90.
We Welcome Your Suggestions The editorial staff of Short Stories for Students welcomes your comments and ideas. Readers who wish to suggest short stories to appear in future volumes, or who have other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may contact the editor via E-mail at: ForStudents
[email protected]. Or write to the editor at: Editor, Short Stories for Students Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535
When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of SSfS may use the following general forms to document their source. These examples are based on MLA
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Literary Chronology 1313: Giovanni Boccaccio is born in Tuscany, Italy.
1914: Julio Corta´zar is born on August 26 in Brussels, Belgium.
1353: Giovanni Boccaccio’s short story ‘‘The Falcon’’ is published in Decameron.
1918: Muriel Spark is born Muriel Sarah Cambergon February 1 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
1375: Giovanni Boccaccio dies on December 21 in Certaldo, Italy.
1920: Ray Bradbury is born on August 22 in Waukegan, Illinois.
1828: Leo Tolstoy is born on August 28 in Yasnaya Polyana, Tula, Russia.
1923: Nadine Gordimer is born on November 20 in Springs, near Johannesburg, South Africa.
1850: Guy de Maupassant is born on August 5 at Fe´camp in Normandy, France.
1928: Eugenia W. Collier is born on April 6 in Baltimore, Maryland.
1871: Stephen Crane is born on November 1 in Newark, New Jersey.
1928: Piri Thomas is born Juan Pedro Tomas on September 30 in New York City, New York.
1882: Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘‘Two Friends’’ is published.
1931: Alice Laidlaw Munro is born on July 10 in Wingham, Ontario, Canada.
1886: Leo Tolstoy’s short story ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ is published. It is translated into English in 1887.
1933: Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve is born on February 21 on the Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota.
1893: Guy de Maupassant dies following a suicide attempt resulting from mental deterioration brought on by syphilis on July 6 in Paris, France.
1937: Anita Mazumdar Desai is born on June 24 in Delhi, India.
1895: Stephen Crane’s short story ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ is published in the Philadelphia Press. 1900: Stephen Crane dies of tuberculosis on June 5 in Badenweiler, Germany. 1910: Leo Tolstoy dies on November 7 in Astapovo, Russia.
1946: Julio Corta´zar’s short story ‘‘House Taken Over’’ is published as ‘‘Casa tomada’’ in the periodical Los Anales de Buenos Aires. 1948: W. D. Wetherell is born on October 5 in Minida, New York. 1953: Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ is published in Epoch magazine and the collection The Golden Apples of the Sun.
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1968: Alice Munro’s short story ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ is published in the collection Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories. 1969: Eugenia Collier’s short story ‘‘Marigolds’’ is published.
1978: Piri Thomas’s short story ‘‘Amigo Brothers’’ is published in the collection Stories from El Barrio. 1984: Julio Corta´zar dies of a heart attack on February 12 in Paris, France.
1974: Nadine Gordimer is awarded the Booker Prize for The Conservationist.
1985: W. D. Wetherell’s short story ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant’’ is published in the collection The Man Who Loved Levittown.
1975: Muriel Spark’s short story ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ is published in the New Yorker. 1975: Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s short story ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ is published in Boy’s Life magazine. 1978: Anita Desai’s short story ‘‘Games at Twilight’’ is published in the collection Games at Twilight.
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1989: Nadine Gordimer’s short story ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ is published in a shortened version in the South African newspaper, the Weekly Mail, and in the American journal Salmagundi. 1991: Nadine Gordimer is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 2006: Muriel Spark dies on April 14 in Florence, Italy.
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Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/ Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of SSfS. Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN SSfS, VOLUME 28, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: Afro-American Red Star, v. 103, September 10, 1994. Copyright 1994 Afro-American Newspapers. Reproduced by permission.—Akwesasne Notes, v. 2, March 31, 1996. Copyright Ó 1996 Akwesasne Notes. Reproduced by permission.—The Antigonish Review, spring, 1984 for ‘‘Julio Corta´zar’s Fiction: The Unfinished Quest,’’ by Amaryll B. Chanady. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Ariel, v. 29, April, 1998 for ‘‘Alice Munro’s ‘Day of the Butterfly’: An American Source’’ by Darlene Kelly. Copyright 1998 The Board of Governors, The University of Calgary. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the
author.—Atlantic Monthly, v. 222, October, 1968 for ‘‘The Miracles of Muriel Spark,’’ by Peter Davison. Copyright 1968 by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, MA. Reproduced by permission of the author.—The Bilingual Review, v. 25, May-August, 2000. Copyright Ó 2000 by Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingu¨e, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Black Issues in Higher Education, v. 13, December 12, 1996; v. 14, March 20, 1997. Copyright Ó 1996, 1997 Cox, Matthews & Associates. Both reproduced by permission.—The Booklist, v. 104, June 1, 2008. Copyright Ó 2008 by the American Library Association. Reproduced by permission.—The Canberra Times, March 28, 2009 for ‘‘Collections Open the Doors to Bradbury’s Imagination,’’ by Colin Steele. Copyright Ó 2009, Rural Press Limited. Reproduced by permission of the author.—The English Journal, v. 91, May 2, 2002. Copyright Ó 2002 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—The Explicator, v. 56, winter, 1998. Copyright Ó 1998 by Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Reproduced with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 200361802.—Fly Fisherman, v. 30, March, 1999. Copyright Ó 2009 InterMedia Outdoors, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—The Hollins Critic, v. 23, February, 1986. Copyright 1986 by Hollins College. Reproduced by permission.—Italica, v. 4, spring, 1969; v.
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70, spring, 1993; v. 84, winter, 2007. Copyright Ó 1969, 1993, 2007 by The American Association of Teachers of Italian. All reproduced by permission.— Journal of Modern Literature, v. 11, July, 1984; v. 20, summer, 1996. Copyright Ó 1984, 1996 Indiana University Press. Bothreproduced by permission.— Journal of Southern African Studies, v. 18, December, 1992 for ‘‘Jump and Other Stories: Gordimer’s Leap into the 1990’s: Gender and Politics in Her Latest Short Fiction,’’ by Karen Lazar. Copyright Ó 1992 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, Ltd., http//:www.tandf.co.uk/journals and the author.—Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, v. 14, 2005 for ‘‘Hallucinations and Pathological Visual Perceptions in Maupassant’s Fantastical Short Stories - A Neurological Approach,’’ by Luis-Carlos Alvaro. Copyright Ó 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, Ltd., http//:www.tandf.co.uk/journals and the author.— McClatchy-Tribune Business News, February 15, 2009. Copyright Ó 2009, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio. Reproduced by permission.—MELUS, v. 26, fall, 2001. Copyright MELUS: The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2001. Reproduced by permission.— Modern Fiction Studies, v. 36, summer, 1990; v. 54, fall, 2008. Copyright Ó 1990, 2008 by Purdue Research Foundation, West Lafayette, IN 47907. All rights reserved. Both reproduced by permission of The Johns Hopkins University.—The Modern Language Review, v. 75, January, 1980; v. 82, April, 1987. Copyright Ó1980, 1987 Modern Humanities Research Association 1980, 1987. Both reproduced by permission of the publisher.—New Statesman, v. 130, October 15, 2001. Copyright Ó 2001 New Statesman, Ltd. Reproduced by permission.— News From Indian Country, v. 13, July 31, 1999. Copyright Ó 1999 Indian Country Communications. Reproduced by permission. www.Indian CountryNews.com—Partisan Review, v. 54, summer, 1987 for ‘‘An Interview with Muriel Spark,’’ by Sara Frankel. Copyright Ó 1987 by Partisan Review. Reproduced by permission of the authors.—Philosophy and Literature, v. 24, 2000. Copyright Ó 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced by permission.—Publishers Weekly, v. 248, February 19, 2001; October 22, 2001; v. 251, October 18, 2004. Copyright Ó 2001, 2004 by Reed Publishing USA. Both
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reproduced from Publishers Weekly, published by the Bowker Magazine Group of Cahners Publishing Co., a division of Reed Publishing USA, by permission.—Research in African Literatures, v. 25, spring, 1994. Copyright Ó 1994 Indiana University Press. Reproduced by permission.—The Review of Contemporary Fiction, v. 3, fall, 1983. Copyright Ó 1983 The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Reproduced by permission.—The Slavic and East European Journal, v. 22, winter, 1978. Copyright Ó 1978 by AATSEEL of the U.S., Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Southwest Review, v. 81, spring, 1996. Copyright Ó 1996 Southern Methodist University. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in American Fiction, v. 30, autumn, 2002. Copyright Ó 2002 Northeastern University. Reproduced by permission.— Studies in Short Fiction, v. 32, winter, 1995; v. 34, winter, 1997 Copyright Ó 1995, 1997 by Studies in Short Fiction. Both reproduced by permission.— Style, v. 27, fall, 1993. Copyright Ó Style, 1993. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.—Sun Reporter, v. 29, September 2, 1972. Copyright Ó 1972 Sun Reporter. Reproduced by permission.—UNESCO Courier, v. 46, October, 1993. Copyright Ó 1993 UNESCO Courier. Reproduced by permission.—Virginia Quarterly Review, v. 72, autumn, 1996. Copyright 1996, by The Virginia Quarterly Review, The University of Virginia. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.— Whispering Wind, v. 30, August 31, 1999. Copyright Ó 1999 Whispering Wind. Reproduced by permission.—World Literature Written in English, v. 30, spring, 1990 for ‘‘Interview with Anita Desai,’’ by Florence Libert. Copyright Ó 1990 World Literature Written in English. Reproduced by permission of the author. COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN SSfS, VOLUME 28, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS: Fusco, Richard. From Maupassant and the American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Copyright Ó 1994 by The Pennsylvania State University Press. Reproduced by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press.—Newman, Judie. From ‘‘Jump Starts: Nadine Gordimer After Apartheid,’’ in Apartheid Narratives. Edited by Nahem Yousaf. Rodopi, 2001. Copyright Ó Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam 2001. Reproduced by permission.
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Contributors Susan Andersen: Andersen holds a Ph.D. in English literature, and after teaching for many years, is now a professional writer. Entry on Games at Twilight. Original essay on Games at Twilight. Bryan Aubrey: Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. Entries on The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind and How Much Land Does a Man Need?. Original essays on The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind and How Much Land Does a Man Need?. Cynthia A. Bily: Bily is a freelance writer and editor. Entry on Once Upon a Time. Original essay on Once Upon a Time.
on The Medicine Bag. Original essay on The Medicine Bag. Sheri Metzger Karmiol: Karmiol teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the University Honors Program. Entry on Day of the Butterfly. Original essay on Day of the Butterfly. Laura Pryor: Pryor is a freelance writer with over twenty years’ experience in professional writing, with an emphasis on fiction. Entry on A Mystery of Heroism. Original essay on A Mystery of Heroism.
Jennifer Bussey: Bussey is an independent writer specializing in literature. Entry on Amigo Brothers. Original essay on Amigo Brothers.
Bradley A. Skeen: Skeen is a classics professor. Entry on Two Friends. Original essay on Two Friends.
Catherine Dominic: Dominic is a novelist, freelance writer, and editor. Entry on Federigo’s Falcon. Original essay on Federigo’s Falcon. Joyce Hart: Hart is a published author and creative writing teacher. Entry on The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant. Original essay on The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant.
Leah Tieger: Tieger is a freelance writer and editor. Entries on The First Year of My Life and House Taken Over. Original essays on The First Year of My Life and House Taken Over.
Diane Andrews Henningfeld: Henningfeld is a professor emerita of literature who writes widely for educational publications. Entry
Rebecca Valentine: Valentine is a freelance writer who holds a B.A. in English with minors in philosophy and professional communications. Entry on Marigolds. Original essay on Marigolds.
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Amigo Brothers Published in Piri Thomas’s 1978 short story collection Stories from El Barrio, ‘‘Amigo Brothers’’ is the story of two seventeen-year-old boys in a tenement neighborhood who keep themselves focused on the positive things of their great friendship and their love of boxing. Antonio and Fe´lix love the sport and the heroes who make it great. They are impressive athletes in their own right who have fan followings in their community. When the time inevitably comes that they must face each other in an important competition, they must make mature decisions that benefit both their friendship and their boxing careers.
PIRI THOMAS 1978
‘‘Amigo Brothers’’ reflects many of the elements that define and motivate Thomas’s work as a whole. Many of Thomas’s stories are set in Spanish Harlem, where he grew up and got into trouble as a youth. The setting of the story reveals the author’s love for Spanish Harlem and the people in it. Thomas’s stories feature a message of encouragement to stay positive and avoid the pitfalls of gangs, drugs, and violence. ‘‘Amigo Brothers’’ shows two boys who are making something of themselves without destroying anything or anyone in the process. But while Stories from El Barrio shares many of Thomas’s common themes, the collection is unique among Thomas’s works. It is a collection of fiction by an author known for his series of three autobiographies. The first of the
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three was published in 1967 and the third in 1974; by the time he published Stories from El Barrio, he had completed the autobiographies, established his reputation, and examined his own life and work. The short stories are the work of an introspective, mature writer. In addition, Stories from El Barrio is written for young adults. After finishing his prison term and getting his life in order, Thomas started working with children and youth to teach and encourage them. This collection of stories written specifically for youth is an extension of that passion.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Thomas was born John Peter Thomas, or Juan Pedro Tomas (he changed his name to ‘‘Piri’’ as a teenager), on September 30, 1928, in New York City. Thomas was reared in Spanish Harlem and attended New York City public schools. Thomas was the oldest of seven children born to Delores (of Cuban descent) and John, a laborer of Puerto Rican descent. His childhood was made difficult by the Depression and the pressures of racism. As a child, Thomas found hope and escaped his troubles at the public library, where books opened worlds to him beyond the barrio, or neighborhood, where he lived. He saw that there were other kinds of places, people, cultures, attitudes, and experiences in the world. Thomas’s mother died in the poor-patient’s ward of the Metropolitan Hospital when she was only thirty-four years old; he was seventeen. After that, Thomas became involved in gang and drug activity, and he served a prison term for armed robbery from 1950 to 1956. During those years Thomas took the time to reflect on his own life, and he realized that he had not been born a criminal, but somehow he had become one and could become something else; it was during this time that he started writing. Upon completing his term, he started volunteering for drug programs in the community where he grew up; he continued this work for a number of years. Thomas married Daniela Calo on April 20, 1958, and the couple has a son named Ricardo and a daughter named San-dee. In the early 1960s, Thomas joined the Harlem Writers’ Guild, where he interacted with other writers who were doing serious literary work in their community. Thomas won the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation Grant in 1962, and a Lever Brothers community service award in 1967.
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The year 1967 was an important one for him: besides winning the service award, he saw his first book, an autobiography called Down These Mean Streets, published, and he started work as a staff associate for the Center for Urban Education in New York City. Down These Mean Streets was a labor of love, as Thomas had done the work on the book while in prison, but the original manuscript was destroyed. Rather than give up, Thomas told himself that if he could do it once, he could do it twice, so he did. The book was written in a dialect that combined his Spanish Harlem roots with what he learned in prison. Critics applauded the effort because the voice was authentic, and Thomas was able to reach readers on a personal level that transcended language barriers. Three years later, in September 1970, Thomas’s play The Golden Streets was produced by the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre in New York City. Only two years later, in 1972, Thomas’s second autobiography, Saviour, Saviour, Hold My Hand, was published; a third, Seven Long Times, was published two years later. His second autobiography demonstrated the writer’s growing maturity and ability to step back and look at his life with more objectivity than in his first book. Critics noted a definite shift as the writer gained more perspective on his own life and culture, a process many believed was completed in the third autobiography. His writing confronts stereotypes of Puerto Ricans and African Americans, whose heritages comprise Thomas’s background. Thomas’s collection of short stories, including ‘‘Amigo Brothers,’’ was published for the first time in 1978’s Stories from El Barrio. Thomas and Daniela divorced. For seven years, he was married to an attorney named Betty, with whom he traveled to the United Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland. This opened his eyes to injustices taking place all over the world. Sadly, Betty passed away, and Thomas later married Suzanne Dod, who had been a friend of his and Betty’s. As of fall 2009, they lived in El Cerrito, California.
PLOT SUMMARY The main characters of ‘‘Amigo Brothers,’’ Antonio and Fe´lix, are seventeen years old, best friends, and serious about boxing. The
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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
Every Child Is Born a Poet is a film about the life and work of Thomas. It is a documentary, but it includes his readings and dramatizations to bring his experiences to life. It was released by CustomFlix on DVD in 2005. Directed by Jonathan Robinson, it stars Eric Camacho, Jeremy Sanchez, and Piri Thomas, as himself.
narrator describes how the boys have known each other since childhood and consider themselves more brothers than friends. Despite their closeness, the two boys are very different in appearance and in fighting style. But they share the common dream of someday being the lightweight boxing champion of the world. They train together, work out together, and encourage each other. Although many boys their age are caught up in the negative aspects of life on the streets, Antonio and Fe´lix keep their minds and lifestyles positive. They are more interested in reading fighting magazines, watching matches, and being experts on all the fighters than gangs or drugs. As fighters themselves, they have both won many matches and represented their community well. They are proud of themselves and their roots. The narrator explains that while Antonio is a better boxer, Fe´lix is a better slugger. When they train and fight together, the match is always close because of their contrasting styles. At the time of the story, the boys have learned that because of their success in a series of matches, they will face each other in the division finals. The winner will be the Boys Club representative in the Golden Gloves Championship Tournament. This is a big deal, and a great opportunity.
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them. He knows they have to acknowledge what is different between them, and they need to handle it in such a way that their friendship will not be affected. They speak honestly with one another, each admitting that he wants to win that match, and that he will have to do his best in the match. They have been losing sleep worrying about the tension between wanting to win and having to fight hard against a brother. The integrity of the sport is important to both of them, and neither wants to go easy or give up the fight; they want to bring their very best to the sport, and win a fair match. They agree to train separately and not see each other until the match, and then each boy will do his best to win. There is no ulterior motive and no resentment. They know that doing it this way will be better for them emotionally and psychologically, so they part ways at that moment and train individually. The time passes more slowly, since they are not seeing each other. Even though they are training apart from each other, each hears about how the other’s training is going. The night before the fight, Antonio finds a quiet place on a rooftop to be alone and resolves to make it as easy as possible on Fe´lix by knocking him out as quickly as he can, to avoid prolonged hurt and injury. Meanwhile, Fe´lix goes to a movie about a fighting match. As he watches, the champion is getting violently beaten by the challenger, but just as the challenger is about to win, the champion rallies, defeating the challenger with an awesome blow. Fe´lix decides to psyche himself up for the fight by imagining himself as the champ and Antonio as the challenger. He walks through the neighborhood at night, and some gang members check him out. When they see his boxing moves, they decide to leave him alone. He continues on to his aunt’s house, looking for rest. The movie and the walk had not calmed him, and he hopes some sleep will do the trick. But the sounds of the fight in his head keep him from sleeping deeply.
Antonio and Fe´lix continue training together, but the feeling between them is different. One morning about a week before the match, they start their early morning run, but Fe´lix stops
On the rooftop, Antonio thinks about how this fight will impact his relationship with his best friend. Although friendship should be irrelevant to someone with a professional mindset, he has doubts. He does some quick footwork and jabs to clear his head, and he goes to sleep. He and Fe´lix pray for the same thing—a quick knockout in the first round, and then it will all be done.
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All over the neighborhood, there are posters promoting the fight. It seems that the entire neighborhood is involved, and fans on both sides place bets, excited about the match. The fight has been moved from the Boys Club to Tompkins Square Park because the Boys Club would not be big enough for all those who wanted to attend. Tompkins, however, will allow everyone to see. On the day of the fight, the park starts to fill up early. A nearby junior high school opens up a few rooms for the fighters to get dressed and prepare. Antonio is in his room, and he thinks he sees Fe´lix waving at him across the corridor from another room. He waves back just in case it is his friend. The fighters get changed into boxing trunks, shoes, and robes with their names on the backs. Over the speakers, they hear the event starting with numerous presenters addressing the crowd. They all make a point about being honored to be part of such an important historic event. Between speakers, other fights take place, and Antonio and Fe´lix hear the action and the results. When it is finally their turn, Fe´lix is relieved; he is tired of waiting. Antonio and Fe´lix are each led out of the junior high by their trainers and fans. When they enter the ring, the crowd goes wild with excitement. This is the main event of the day, and it is about to begin. Despite the energy and anticipation in the crowd, and the importance of the day, the two fighters catch each other’s eyes for just a second, nod at each other, and go to their corners. At the sound of the gong, the crowd quiets. The announcer introduces the two boys, reminds the audience that there will be no draw, and states that the winner will go on to the Golden Gloves championship. As the crowd cheers wildly, the boys listen to the referee review the rules before they fight. They agree, touch gloves, and head back to their corners to take off their robes and listen for the bell. When the bell sounds, the two boys come out fighting. Fe´lix rushes in, but Antonio manages some hard hits. Fe´lix pulls himself together, goes back in, and gets in some hard hits, but then Antonio returns them. Just as the bell rings, both fighters stop punches in the air, and the crowd cheers for their sportsmanship. The first round is over, and neither has succeeded in getting a quick knock-out. Both trainers advise their young fighters, and the bell rings for the second round. The fighters exchange powerful blows, with neither dominating the other. At one point, Fe´lix’s legs
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buckle, but he still manages to hold Antonio off. After a few more solid punches, Antonio gets too close to Fe´lix, and Fe´lix lays into him with a ‘‘toe-to-toe slugfest.’’ They continue to fight hard, neither giving up any lead. Fe´lix drops Antonio, but then Antonio drops Fe´lix. The bell rings, and the fighters have a chance to catch their breath in their own corners. They are both hurt but not letting the crowd know. The doctor checks both fighters and clears them to continue. The bell rings for the third and final round, and everyone knows that this round will decide the winner. They both fight aggressively and with a lot of heart. Fe´lix’s eye is swollen shut, and Antonio’s nose is bleeding profusely. The crowd has gone completely silent. Even though the bell rings, Antonio and Fe´lix do not hear it through the intensity of the fight. The referee and trainers pull the fighters apart from each other and pour cold water on them. This clears and calms them, and they rush toward each other in the ring. The crowd is aghast, thinking they are going to kill each other. But when the two embrace, the crowd erupts in cheers. The judges tally the points, and as the referee announces the winner, he turns to see that both fighters are gone. They have already left the ring, arm in arm. They are not interested in who actually won the match at this moment because they know that they are both champions. Their friendship is more important than glory. The reader does not find out who won.
CHARACTERS Antonio Cruz Antonio is seventeen years old and is Fe´lix’s best friend. Like Fe´lix, Antonio is a great boxer who loves to train. He and Fe´lix both have a dream of becoming world-famous boxing champions. Antonio is described as ‘‘fair, lean, and lanky,’’ with hair that falls over his eyes. He has avoided all the negative influences of his neighborhood, such as gangs and drugs, and is instead focused on boxing. Not only does he train himself as an athlete, but he reads about boxing and boxers, and he really knows the sport. As a boxer, he has proven himself over and over in competition, and he has a fan base in his community. He is known for his excellent boxing skills and ability to use his speed and height in a match.
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The most important relationship for Antonio is his friendship with Fe´lix. No other friends or family are mentioned in the story, and he is careful to preserve this important relationship. Fe´lix helps him stay focused on boxing, which is productive and good for him. When Fe´lix suggests they train separately for the fight, Antonio readily agrees. He understands that Fe´lix is right, although he has a little harder time making the break. When they agree to train apart from each other, Antonio is ready to finish their run together, but Fe´lix says they should go ahead and split apart right then until after the fight. Also, when they are at the junior high getting ready for the fight, Antonio thinks he sees Fe´lix waving at him, so he waves back. Whether or not it was wishful thinking, the reader does not know, but Antonio’s reaction shows a deep desire to see his friend again. He wants to train hard, be completely ready, and do the compassionate thing by knocking out Fe´lix right away in the first round. When they do meet, Antonio fights as hard as Fe´lix does, and they both take and deliver a lot of hard hits. When the match is over and the bell rings for the last time, however, they immediately stop being boxers and leave together as amigo brothers. Antonio’s friendship with Fe´lix is far more important than knowing who won the fight.
Fe´lix Vargas Fe´lix is seventeen years old, and is Antonio’s best friend. He and Antonio are both boxers who take their sport seriously and love to train to become better. Fe´lix is described as ‘‘dark, short, and husky,’’ with his hair in an Afro. Like Antonio, he dreams of becoming a boxing world champion someday and has chosen boxing over gangs and other negative elements in his community. He studies the sport, reading boxing magazines and knowing all the boxers’ stats. He trains hard as an athlete, and he has a fan base as a result of his many wins in competition. He is known for his powerful hits, so his boxing strategy is to get in close to his opponent and start slugging. Fe´lix’s relationship with Antonio is extremely important to him, as they have been friends since childhood. Antonio is like a brother to Fe´lix, who helps Fe´lix stay out of trouble and focused on positive things like boxing. It is Fe´lix who initiates the conversation about training separately for the match so that he and Antonio can separate their friendship from the work they
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must do. The night before the fight, Fe´lix goes to see a movie about boxing and imagines himself and Antonio as the main characters. This demonstrates that even when he tries to distract himself from the fact that he will have to fight his best friend, his loyalty to his friend is always present. He wants to win, but he wants to do it by knocking his friend out quickly and cleanly in the first round. In the end, he leaves the match with Antonio without even hearing who won. He had missed his friend, and being the amigo brothers is more important than which champion won the title.
THEMES Friendship The main theme of ‘‘Amigo Brothers’’ is friendship, and Thomas starts to build it from the beginning. By the end of the first paragraph, the reader knows that Antonio and Fe´lix consider themselves brothers because they have been such good friends for so long. The reader also knows that the two boys are from the same neighborhood and thus have a similar cultural background and upbringing. The reader soon learns that the boys also share a passion for boxing, and they train together and encourage each other as athletes. Boxing is important common ground in their friendship—they train together daily—and it keeps them out of trouble and focused on the positive. When the inevitable time comes that these two accomplished boxers must face each other in a championship bout, they are both concerned about the fight affecting their friendship. Although they have both dreamed of becoming world champions, the opportunity to fight in a Golden Gloves tournament is tempered with the reality that one of them will have to beat the other. Their friendship is so strong that they agree to train separately for the first time and to fight their best in the competition. They know they can approach the fight like professionals and still walk away friends, but they need to train apart from each other. Otherwise their affection for each other will interfere. Both Antonio and Fe´lix want to win the fight, and they train toward that goal, but they do not want to embarrass or hurt each other. Without consulting one another, they each decide that the best thing to do is to knock out
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Read Paul Volponi’s young-adult novel Black and White, a story about two friends of different races who are bonded by friendship, basketball, and crime. Compare this story with Thomas’s ‘‘Amigo Brothers.’’ Consider the characters, the nature of their friendships, their situations, and the decisions they make. Write a review in which you critique of the two stories, drawing comparisons and contrasts. Teachers and readers should be aware that Volponi’s books contains some language that may be objectionable. Antonio and Fe´lix share a strong bond of friendship. What do you think makes it so strong? Do you have any friendships like theirs? What do you think you have in common with Antonio and Fe´lix, if anything? Create a Venn Diagram expressing your observations. Research whether sports are important to inner city culture today. What purposes do sports serve in these communities, and is there anything else on a par with sports? Assume the role of an inner-city youth who
the other quickly and cleanly in the first round. Antonio decides that if he trains hard enough, he can do this to save his friend pain and anguish, and yet still win. Fe´lix comes to the same conclusion. On fight day, they exchange respectful glances, and set off into a fight that is so equally matched, it goes through three full rounds. When the final bell rings, both fighters shed their desire to win and rush toward each other. Only seconds before, they had been fighting intensely, so the crowd thinks they are going to kill each other. But the fighters are relieved that the fight is over and that they can drop the professionalism and be friends again. Without finding out who won, Antonio and Fe´lix walk away arm in arm. As important a fight as theirs was,
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has a dream to make it big in something. What dream will you choose for your character, and why? Write journal entries (at least six) spanning a six-month period for your character.
What are the economic conditions in Spanish Harlem? Research demographics for this area or another similar urban area, looking for a better understanding of what makes the culture, the struggles, and the art of these communities so unique. Put together a packet explaining your findings and analysis by using computer or online software that makes your work visually appealing. Be sure to include images and photographs of the community you studied.
Thomas leaves the ending intentionally vague, so the reader does not know who won the boxing bout. Write an afterword or a sequel in which you continue the story by telling who won, and what happened after the events of ‘‘Amigo Brothers.’’ Be sure your story line and characterization proceed logically and naturally from the original story.
they both value their friendship far more. The fight shows the reader that they also have enormous respect for each other as competitors.
Integrity A character trait shared by both Antonio and Fe´lix is integrity. They love boxing, and they want to compete with honor. The story shows them training diligently and consistently together and admiring the greats of the sport. They do not speak badly about other competitors, complain about bouts they have lost, or look for shortcuts in their workouts or boxing strategies. They both want to compete in the sport honorably, and this is never more evident than when their match-up is announced.
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Boxing combat (Image copyright Ronan Boidek, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
Neither Antonio nor Fe´lix ever considers throwing the match so the other can win, even though they love each other like brothers. They want the match to be as great as it should be, and giving it away or cheating to win it is never even considered. When they talk about the match and decide it is best if they train separately and wait to see each other after the match, Fe´lix suggests they make a promise to each other. Antonio’s response is that as long as the promise is fair, he is willing. Fe´lix assures him that it is fair and states plainly that when they fight each other, they need to do it as professionals, both of them in the fight to win and doing his best. Antonio agrees, adding, ‘‘No pulling punches.’’ Without reservation, they both agree that the integrity of the sport, and their personal integrity, demands that they fight the right way. Because integrity is so important to them, they understand each other at a deep level, and they both have confidence that fighting to win will not damage their relationship. At the end, this is exactly what happens. The reader sees that the fighters’ sense of integrity is real as they fight hard to win, but ultimately value the friendship over the title.
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STYLE Setting Thomas pays such close attention to the setting of ‘‘Amigo Brothers’’ that it becomes a prominent part of the story. He is specific in letting the reader know—in the very first paragraph—that this story takes place in a particular area of New York City. He goes so far as to tell the reader in which tenement building Antonio and Fe´lix live. The address of the Boys Club is given, as are the locations for two other gyms. These are the places the main characters frequent to exercise and practice boxing. Even when the boys go running, Thomas lets the reader know that they are running along East River Drive, and that the edge of the river is dirty. When they stop to talk, Fe´lix leans on a railing and looks across at Brooklyn. In a poignant moment on the night before the fight, Antonio is on a rooftop. Thomas describes the sights and sounds around Antonio. Even the neighborhood toughs and the throngs of boxing fans are described, so that the setting is more than the buildings and features, but it is characterized by the people who live in it.
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Thomas’s attention to the setting of the story accomplishes a couple of things. First, it gives the story depth and realism. The story seems much more realistic and believable when it is placed in such a real setting. The voice of the narrator and the backgrounds of the characters have more authenticity. Second, the details of the setting speak directly to the people who live in that area. Thomas knew Spanish Harlem and New York City, and his writing was about them. To the people who know the same neighborhoods, Thomas’s story has more credibility and relevance.
Language Known for his unusual use of language and dialect in his autobiography Down the Mean Streets (1967), Thomas is skilled at using these elements to bring his stories to life and stay true to his own experience. He does the same thing in ‘‘Amigo Brothers’’ by incorporating slang and Spanish words. Antonio calls Fe´lix panı´n, which is a word for a pal or a buddy. Fe´lix says that he and Antonio are cheverote fighters, meaning that they are really cool. The word hermano means ‘‘brother,’’ and ¿sabes? means ‘‘understand?’’ During the fight, Antonio and Fe´lix are described as fighting with mucho corazo´n, meaning that they fought ‘‘with a lot of heart.’’ In addition to Spanish vocabulary, some of which is specific to American Spanish speakers, Thomas incorporates some of the slang of the time. When he says that the boys rapped positive, he means that they talked about positive things. The term ‘‘slapped skin’’ is what today is called ‘‘high fived.’’ Thomas’s use of Spanish and street language makes his story and characters more interesting and realistic.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Boxing in the 1970s In 1970, Muhammad Ali returned to boxing after his prison sentence for refusing to join the military was reversed. Although his license was reinstated, his title was not. But his great ability in the sport combined with his public persona made him a great favorite among boxing fans of all races. Although he was vocal in his support of black Islamic efforts and in his opinions on controversial issues, many white fans were not threatened by his growing popularity. In a time
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of racial tension, Ali was uniquely able to bring people together. In 1971, Ali had his chance to fight for the heavyweight title when he went up against Joe Frazier. Like Fe´lix, Frazier’s style was to bring the fight in close and hit hard. The fight took place in Madison Square Garden and went fifteen rounds. The bout was brutal, and although Frazier won in the end, both fighters went to the hospital. Ali and Frazier met again in 1974, again in Madison Square Garden, but this time Ali won in twelve rounds. Also in 1974 was the famous fight in Zaire called ‘‘The Rumble in the Jungle,’’ in which Ali was pitted against George Foreman. Although Ali was a great fighter, there were doubts that his recently broken jaw was ready to stand up to Foreman’s powerful blows. It was an exciting and strategic fight, and Ali won. The next year, Ali and Frazier met for the third time at ‘‘The Thrilla in Manila.’’ After another battle between two powerhouses, Frazier’s side called it quits after fourteen rounds, and Ali won the match. In the coming years, Ali seemed tireless in fighting to defend his title until 1978 when Leon Spinks beat Ali in fifteen rounds. Later that year, Ali and Spinks fought again, and this time, Ali won his title back. Soon afterwards, Ali retired. For most sports historians, the 1970s were a thrilling time for boxing, with Ali as the face of the sport for that decade.
Gangs in New York City Gangs in the United States originated in New York City, dating all the way back to pre-Civil War years when gangs of tough Irish youths banded together to commit street crime, provoke riots, and make themselves available for hire. Until the mid-twentieth century, most gangrelated activity took place in New England, with New York City as the major center of such activity. During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, there was an influx of Puerto Rican and black immigrants into New York City inner-city neighborhoods. This included Thomas’s parents’ generation. Although these groups hoped to find greater opportunity in the city than they had found in rural areas, the opportunities were just not there. Youths started grouping together claiming certain territories, and challenges were often violent. Alliances were often racial, but not always. In the midtwentieth century, fights were done hand-to-hand
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1970s: The term Nuyorican emerges as a way to categorize writers, artists, and musicians of Puerto Rican descent in and around New York City. Because these artists have a name; their culture is given more presence and interest as they express their unique artistic points of view. Thomas resists being called Nuyorican because he does not want to be categorized, preferring to be the sum of his own identity as a citizen of the world. Today: Writers, artists, and musicians are still categorized as Nuyorican, and the term has become more popular and well known. Although Thomas still prefers not be categorized, it does not bother him as much as it did in the past.
1970s: Muhammad Ali is the face of boxing, and his great athleticism and skill with the media makes him a favorite across racial lines. To many, he is admired as a hero in and out of the ring. Other heavyweight champs of the day include Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, Ken Norton, and Leon Spinks. Americans dominate the sport.
with all kinds of weapons short of firearms. Most of the crimes committed by gangs were not terribly serious, and they certainly were not killing and dealing drugs as later generations of gangs have done. Gang members were more motivated by the need to belong to a group than to make money.
Today: No single boxer stands out as the dominating force in the sport or in the media. Among the heavyweight champs of the 2000s are Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis, John Ruiz, and Wladimir Klitschko. Champions come from all over the world. 1970s: As a result of criminal activity (including arson) and ‘‘planned shrinkage’’ policy (in which city services are withdrawn from an area so it becomes less populated), many buildings in Spanish Harlem are in serious disrepair. In the late 1970s, efforts are made to restore some of the buildings so they can be used as low-income housing. Today: ‘‘Go Green East Harlem’’ is an initiative to bring better health care, parks, environmental progress, transportation, and quality food to Spanish Harlem. Already, community features like farmer’s markets are improving the lives of the people in that community. More people are also choosing to move to Spanish Harlem because it is close to Manhattan and has reliable subway transportation. Like other areas of Harlem, it is regarded as a more desirable neighborhood.
tendency for gangs to be involved in more serious and violent crimes intensified.
In the 1960s, America’s young people became more politically active and willing to be outwardly rebellious. As a result, many gangs formed around an agenda, and they were out to fight against the injustice they had identified. When the War on Poverty failed to deliver on its promises to significantly impact the struggling lower class, more gangs focused on the petty crimes of the past and the lucrative business of drugdealing. This continued into the 1970s, and as the spread of gangs moved across America, the
At the time Thomas was writing ‘‘Amigo Brothers,’’ gangs had become very common in the inner city, and New York was a hot spot of gang activity. In Thomas’s neighborhood, gangs formed along racial and territorial lines. For many adolescent boys, a gang provided a strong identity and perhaps the closest thing to a family they might have. High rates of divorce and the long hours many parents spent at work to provide for their families had a devastating effect, pulling families apart. In the story, Thomas describes Fe´lix and Antonio telling each other to be careful; clearly, there was more safety for them when they were together. Later, Fe´lix is
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A fistfight (Image copyright Starcea Gheorghe Silviu, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
walking the streets after dark when he is regarded as stranger on gang turf and must show that he is tough or risk attack. Thomas makes a clear point that Antonio and Fe´lix have made a conscious choice to avoid the negatives of their surroundings and not be members of a gang. Instead, they seek something positive and support each other in keeping clean.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW Thomas has earned a reputation as a unique American voice, telling the story of his experience in Spanish Harlem and the pitfalls of making negative choices. He came onto the literary scene with his first autobiography, 1967’s Down These Mean Streets. Through authentic use of language and an unblinking look at his own life to that point, he demonstrated a strong voice and important perspective. Thomas tells Lisa D. McGill of Bilingual Review, ‘‘I was one of the first Puerto Rican writers in the U.S. to write about the conditions we were living under. . . . I wrote about what was happening to us—or at
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least to me—and the surroundings in those years.’’ He adds that the book caused a stir when it was released, and that people in the publishing industry wanted to know if people really talked the way Thomas describes in the book. Critics embraced the book, and readers felt that their eyes were opened to an entire world about which they had known nothing. McGill observes that the book has been ‘‘acclaimed by the American mainstream.’’ On his Web site, Thomas quotes Daniel Stern of the New York Times Book Review, ‘‘It claims our attention and emotional response because of the honesty and pain of a life led in outlaw, fringe status, where the dream is always to escape.’’ Down These Mean Streets has never gone out of print, and is considered a classic today. After such an auspicious start, Thomas continued to deliver, writing two more autobiographies, a play, and Stories from El Barrio, a collection of short stories for young adult readers. Critics find that the short stories are a natural extension of Thomas’s work and allow him to show life and characters in the barrio in a new way.
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CRITICISM Jennifer Bussey Bussey is an independent writer specializing in literature. In this essay, she considers three ways Piri Thomas’s ‘‘Amigo Brothers’’ speaks directly to the people of Spanish Harlem, where the author was raised. While serving a prison term for armed robbery, Piri Thomas realized that what he had become was not who he was born to become. Moreover, he still had plenty of time to turn his life around and make something of himself. He encouraged himself to strive for better, and he found his writing voice. Since then, he has used his life and his career to make a positive impact on his family and his community. He has worked with prisoners, youth, and children, motivating them to find the best path they can find for their lives. He brings hope and wisdom to those who need it, and he is able to speak from experience and personal struggle. One of the ways he reaches out to people is through his stories, such as ‘‘Amigo Brothers,’’ a short story in his 1978 collection. In the story, two teenage boys who love boxing and love each other like brothers must face off in a championship boxing match. It puts their determination and friendship to the test. Set in Spanish Harlem, the story has not just a universal message for all readers, but specific messages for the people in Thomas’s community. Just as he has used his time and experience to encourage the people of his heritage, here he uses a short story to do the same thing.
IT DOES NOT MATTER WHERE SOMEONE LIVES, BUT IT IS IMPORTANT THAT THEY SEE BEYOND THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES TO WHAT MIGHT BE. IN THE END, ANTONIO AND FE´LIX ARE WELL ON THEIR WAY TO MAKING THEIR DREAMS COME TRUE.’’
paragraph, barely into the story at all, he writes, ‘‘While some youngsters were into street negatives, Antonio and Fe´lix slept, ate, rapped, and dreamt positive.’’ From the very beginning of the story, Thomas wants his young readers to understand that they have the power to make good choices, and that these protagonists are doing just that. The narrator also reveals that the two boys dream of becoming the lightweight champion of the world. Even in their humble surroundings, where discouragement is around every corner, they have great ambitions. Their dreams are constructive and motivating, and the boys are not jaded or brought down by the negative influences of other boys their age.
The first way Thomas’s story speaks to the young people of Spanish Harlem is through his strong message about staying positive and not getting pulled into negative influences that can ruin a young man’s life. Having gone down that road himself, Thomas knows that it is a road of destruction where people are hurt, killed, or— like him—imprisoned. Although he experienced first-hand the devastating effects of those choices, he reveals in an interview for Bilingual Review, ‘‘When I came out of prison, I didn’t want to be out in the streets, because it was too tempting to pull into the negative.’’ He had to prepare and strengthen himself to be around those influences because he knew that they were so strong, they could pull him back into that lifestyle. In ‘‘Amigo Brothers,’’ he lets his reader know early that there are different paths a young man can take, and that it is important to choose wisely. In the fourth
In a later scene, Fe´lix is watched by some local gang members. The narrator says that even though they were Puerto Rican like Fe´lix, the territorial issue could mean problems. The gang members are watching Fe´lix to see if they should go after him, but when they see his boxing moves, they decide to leave him alone. In this scene, Thomas subtly demonstrates that Fe´lix is more powerful and in control, even though he is alone against the gang members. It is a metaphor for the larger message about making positive choices, even though many other people make negative choices every day. The pay-off for focusing on the positive is being more in control and stronger than those who make negative choices. This scene also hints at the effect a person’s choices have on his character. Fe´lix has made good, productive choices, and he means no harm to anyone, although he is prepared to defend himself if necessary. In contrast, the gang members are looking for someone who is weaker than they are; they want an easy target to attack so they can feed the delusion that they are powerful and strong. When they see that Fe´lix is a threat to their skewed sense of identity, they leave him alone. This shows their
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
Published in the Fall 2001 issue of MELUS, and conducted by Dorothee von Huene Greenberg, ‘‘Piri Thomas: An Interview’’ allows readers to hear directly from Thomas about his background, his decision to write, his writing influences, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, his work with children and youth, and his impressions of his own reputation. Arthur Laurent’s classic musical West Side Story (1961) is a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story told against the backdrop of two rival gangs, one American and one Puerto Rican. The story is also available as a novelization by Irving Shulman, published in 1990. Marta Sanchez’s 2006 book Shakin’ Up Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965-1995) explores the relationships between ethnic cultures in the United States. Sanchez believes it is important to study not just individual cultures, but cultures as they relate to each other. In her book, she also considers issues of gender and stereotype. Ron Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for his writing about Cedric Jennings
weakness of character because their motives are anything but pure. Another message in ‘‘Amigo Brothers’’ is about the power of friendship to keep a young person on a good path. Their friendship is incredibly important to Antonio and Fe´lix, and when they are faced with the opportunity to fight in the championship round—an opportunity they have trained for years in hopes of earning—they are more concerned about the fight damaging their relationship than they are about losing. The story shows clearly how their mutual interest in boxing, training together, quizzing each other about fighters’ stats, and encouraging each other has
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and inner city African American students who endured one of the worst high schools in Washington, D.C. to make it into Brown University. Suskind’s book A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (1999) tells the whole story, offering inspiration to readers of all ages.
Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967) was his first autobiography, and is now considered a classic American work, especially in the area of ethnic literature. The book’s enduring popularity is evident in the numerous editions that have remained in print, including the most recent, the thirtieth anniversary edition in 1997.
Todd Tucker’s young-adult novel Over and Under (2008) is a story of friendship being tested in a very different setting. Taking place in the summer of 1979, the book explores the class dynamics between the families of Andy and Tom, two fourteenyear-old best friends whose fathers work for the same company, one in management, one in labor. When the laborers go on strike, the boys’ friendship is put to the test.
played a major role in bonding these two young men together. There is little mention of family members and no mention of any other friends in the story. The impression is that Antonio and Fe´lix only have each other, but that their friendship and influence on each other is enough to keep them positive, motivated, and moving forward in the right direction. The contrast with the gang members shows how important peer influences are and how important it is not to be alone in this neighborhood. Antonio and Fe´lix stick together and look out for each other. Besides serving the important purpose of keeping the boys safe and on the right track,
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the friendship fills the need for fellowship and connection. They consider each other brothers, and their relationship fulfills them both and makes them happy. When they are training separately, they miss each other. When the fight is over, they rush toward each other, glad that their time apart has come to an end. In agreeing to train separately, they agree to fight like strangers, but they reunite as if nothing had happened. They need each other’s company, and their loyalty and affection runs very deep. The third message Thomas seems to be sending to his community is one of hope. There are people all around Antonio and Fe´lix who are either content to be where they are or struggling with their lot in life, but the boys have dreams beyond their tenement. Thomas contrasts them not with those who are living full and productive lives in Spanish Harlem, but with those who are not. The gang members, for example, have lost hope that they can achieve something great. Their need for identity and acceptance in a group is so great that they are willing to risk their futures by joining a gang. Clearly, they do not see anything in their futures they are not willing to risk. If they had something valuable ahead, they would make different choices, as Antonio and Fe´lix do. The two friends dream of becoming world-class boxers, and they believe they can make it. If they lost hope in their dreams, they would not take working out and practicing so seriously. But they are determined and diligent in their training because they love it and believe their dreams could come true. They have a bigger vision than the gang members do, and this is what Thomas wants his young readers to see. It does not matter where someone lives, but it is important that they see beyond their circumstances to what might be. In the end, Antonio and Fe´lix are well on their way to making their dreams come true. One of them is Golden Gloves-bound, and the other knows he is a champion with a bright future, too. If Thomas had meant for ‘‘Amigo Brothers’’ to be just for the young people in Spanish Harlem, he would not have included it in a published work. Instead, he would have told the story to the youth and children of the neighborhood as he worked with them. There is definitely a universal message of the power of friendship and the enduring encouragement of dreams. Thomas is careful with his setting, including lots of details and language style to bring it to life. For readers whose background is not in Spanish Harlem, these details bring a richness and authenticity
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Boxing gloves (Image copyright Samara, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
to the story that makes it all the more engaging. But for children and youth in Spanish Harlem (or somewhere similar), the story packs a real punch. They are able to see themselves in Antonio and Fe´lix, see their buildings in the neighborhood, and see the challenges in the gang members. When the setting comes to life like that in the mind of a reader who knows it so well, the messages of the story speak more loudly and more clearly. Thomas wants those readers especially to understand the importance of positive choices, the power of friendship, and the possibilities of having great vision. Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on ‘‘Amigo Brothers,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Dorothee von Huene Greenberg In the following excerpt, Greenberg and Thomas discuss the effects of race and race relations on Thomas’s work as a writer. Born in Harlem in 1928, Piri Thomas was a child of the Depression. His mother was a
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light-skinned Cuban; his father a Puerto Rican whose darker complexion Thomas alone of all the children inherited. The cruel racism that he experienced within his own family, in the dehumanizing environment of New York City’s ghetto streets, and in the white suburbs, impelled the youthful Thomas to search for his true racial identity, first in the American South and then traveling the world in the Merchant Marine. Thomas pursued this quest with total and searing honesty. Later he was driven by rage, poverty, and despair into involvement with crime, including armed robbery. In 1955 he ended up in prison. There he found both the inner strength to survive this ordeal and his own ‘‘voice.’’ Now he was able to write with tremendous candor and integrity and to free himself from his past. Emerging as a parolee in 1961 after six horrifying years in prison, Thomas joined the Harlem Writers’ Guild. His electrifying, psychologically penetrating autobiographical novel Down These Mean Streets was published in 1967 and won him instant and lasting acclaim. Since then he has published Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand and Seven Long Times, both autobiographies; and Stories from El Barrio as well as numerous articles, many in The New York Times. In addition to his writing, Piri Thomas has devoted much time and effort to helping troubled youths and prison inmates overcome the terrors and burdens of their past and of the oppressive prison system that he, too, knows from the inside. A popular speaker, Thomas has addressed audiences at many universities including Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Howard, Rutgers, Fordham, Brown, and Erlangen in Germany. This interview was conducted on January 28, 1998, in an apartment at 410 East 6th Street in Manhattan and supplemented by telephone conversations with him at his home in Berkeley, California, on March 8; and in El Cerrito, California, on April 12 and 23, 1998. Interviewer: At what point in prison did you begin to write about your experiences? Piri Thomas: I had kept a diary in the Merchant Marine, and it was stolen with my duffel bag from the Seamen’s Home in lower Manhattan. The main work in prison was surviving, and I was learning another language, the language of positive thinking, and I began to want to write to find expression for what my life was all about. I was always a storyteller. I came from a long,
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YOU THINK I COULD FINISH WHATEVER WORK I HAD TO DO? I HAD TO MAKE A CHOICE AND BE IN THE COMMUNITY WITH THE KIDS AND GOING TO THE SCHOOLS AND THEM INVITING ME AS WELL, OR BECOME A HERO.’’
long, long line of storytellers. We passed our history on by word of mouth, for centuries and centuries. Slave masters would have us killed for even learning how to read, and it was the same in Puerto Rico. If we learned some history, we passed it around. We had no books. We passed it down to little children so that we wouldn’t forget. Those who were found expounding these thoughts in those days were immediately killed. So our minds were programmed that way. Interviewer: So you knew that you had slavery in your background? Piri Thomas: Of course. Anywhere you went in the street or wherever you talked to someone, they would tell you what happened. The reason they didn’t talk about it in front of white men: the white men would kill them. The white men didn’t even want them to talk English and to be able to say things like ‘‘a conglomeration of a manifestation.’’ No, they wanted you to say ‘‘yousah, boss; yes, sir, boss.’’ You had to play a part to survive. You did things that you didn’t want to do because you had children, and besides, people who had a hatred like that, they would kill you just from boredom. You didn’t count as a human being simply because they had learned how to dehumanize people by making them sub-humans, varmints. That’s the God’s honest truth. Racism comes in all the colors. Just like greed. Greed comes in all the colors; it’s just that some colors who have the power to make right by might took it all. So we had democracies that were military democracies. I was looking for the other democracy where we could have a world in which we could have caring and sharing, and where the greatest priority would be the children of earth. Give them all high priority, for they are the ones that represent the future.
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Interviewer: You said in prison you developed a routine of reading and learning. Piri Thomas: No, I already had a routine of learning out in the streets. I got introduced by a very beautiful teacher in the school to a very beautiful librarian in the ghettos of 110th Street where we had a library when I was, God, I don’t know, seven or eight years old, when I started going to school. I was quick. I was determined, you know. I didn’t realize that they thought I was an alien or that I was a person of color. I always thought I was a human being. Interviewer: So you read quite a bit then already. Piri Thomas: Oh, yes. I used to go to the library. Let me tell you about there. They gave me a library card, and they allowed me to take out my two books. I devoured those books, and when I went back again, they would only give me two more. So I returned my two, got two new ones, but I hid three more under my shirt. For years I was doing that—a little kid with a big stomach going in and coming out. It was not until Down These Mean Streets was published and I was invited to a conference on censorship at the University of Connecticut, and I was doing the flow—the flow meant that I was talking,— and I was telling the story about the books and, oh, my goodness, a little old woman put her hand out, and I said, ‘‘Yes?’’ and she said, ‘‘Mr. Thomas, I was the librarian, and I knew you were taking those books, and I was so glad that you were going to read, and I was also glad that you brought them back.’’ That’s a true story. I was determined—not able to put it in so many words—but I was determined that I was not going to serve time, but that I was going to make time serve me. I was not going to eradicate my mind; I was going to educate it. I was going to be born anew. I’d make it all good again, ’cause I was not born a criminal from my beautiful mother’s womb, Dolores Montanez. I was born like any other child, very beautiful, into a very criminal world of racism and bigotry, horror, hunger, pain, despair, and promises that never came to be, which made me sing (singing to the tune of ‘‘The Star Spangled Banner’’), ‘‘Oh, Jose, say can’t you see?’’ Can’t you see? We are Americans too . . .
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Piri Thomas: People that were doing things that were for the good of the people and not having their eye on some theology or some ideology . . . just to save their own necks. My mother taught me how to read people like you could read books, to search their sincerity, because not all you perceive is received through your ears. Mama said that every hair on my body is an antenna, every pore is an ear, like a flower that absorbs by osmosis. . . . Piri Thomas: . . . The South was a very dangerous place, but so was here up North. The same hatred was there. You can’t understand how terrible it is if you haven’t got colored skin. That’s why reading the book about this man who stained his skin black was so important to me. Interviewer: Black Like Me? Piri Thomas: Yes, and then I went to see the movie so many times. He understood what it was to be black all of a sudden. Every—every, how you say, civility and every courtesy extended to whites wasn’t yours any more. Interviewer: When did you read that? Piri Thomas: Oh, a long time ago in prison. I think it’s that old, yes, and the actor who played him in the movie, James Whitmore, was a very fine hero to me. You should go see it, Black Like Me. I’m going to see it again because it was so real. Interviewer: What other writings did you read in prison, by black writers or white writers, that influenced you?
Interviewer: What individuals or literary groups impacted on your writing? Who were your mentors, your role models?
Piri Thomas: When I went to prison, I began to read whatever I could. I read Man and Superman by J. Rogus; The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; John Oliver Killens’ Young Blood about a kid growing up, and he was not white; The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale; some of Nietzsche, who had cried out about the madness of believing in a god; Jack London through and through; Robert Louis Stevenson; Zane Gray’s books about cowboys. We had long discussions among ourselves, a small circle of inmates of all colors, where we discussed life and philosophy. And I read The New York Times, which was smuggled into prison. We were hungry to hear what was happening in the world, and over the radio in prison they only gave us music, but nothing about what was happening in the world . . . .
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Interviewer: You got out of prison in 1955, and the Civil Rights Movement began in 1960. How did you feel when it started? Piri Thomas: Little by little I kept getting out, more out, meeting people, like John Oliver Killens; I read his books back in prison, Young Blood. I remember that when I finally met him I was all over him. ‘‘Oh, my God,’’ I said. ‘‘Do you know that I read your books when I was in prison?’’ blah, blah, blah, blah. We became brothers, best of friends, until he passed away. He was a statesman, he was a lawyer, and a man for ‘‘La Lucha,’’ the struggle. He was the one who opened the doors and brought me into the Harlem Writers’ Guild, where I met a couple of people. I remember I had to keep saying to myself, ‘‘learn, don’t burn.’’ I wanted there to be unity among us, and I knew that I had an explosive voice, and if I did say ‘‘BURN’’ there would be young bloods ready to jump and follow me. They wanted to burn. I knew the responsibility I had. I wanted to come through with a fine education. I didn’t want to be one of those who plunge us into war. I was one of those who wanted us to forgive each other and start from scratch. I had to be careful. Since I was in prison for shooting a policeman, a felony, there were many of those police who would have loved to get me back again, and I would have died in prison. So I had to be careful, but my voice was always there; my presence always felt. Interviewer: It was hard for you to get involved with that movement, not because of your sentiments but because of your history? Piri Thomas: Yes. I felt that I had better play this as a game of chess, and since I wasn’t out to be a chief or the head of an organization getting all the publicity, I didn’t [Pause] I didn’t ride the skyline. I was here, and I was there, and I joined the army of people, the peace army, the army that wanted no more wars. I was involved—like an invisible man. I didn’t write a skyline; I wasn’t out there trying to get publicity. If I was speaking somewhere and I’d finish a flow, I’d leave the place right away, before a reporter got to me. I didn’t really want to be in the newspapers. I told you I was an introverted extrovert. I’d do my flow, and I didn’t want to be under surveillance. I had work to do. You think I could finish whatever work I had to do? I had to make a choice and be in the community with the kids
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and going to the schools and them inviting me as well, or become a hero. One young kid said to me, ‘‘Why don’t you go to allow yourself to get busted for civil disobedience?’’ I replied, ‘‘I was there already.’’ I knew what it was like, and I knew that this time I wouldn’t survive it. Would you consider me a hero if I had gone back and been beaten to death and tortured? I’m a warrior, but I’m the poet first, and I send that poet out for the wisdom that it brings. I don’t have to prove nothing to no one. I know who I are. Popeye the Sailor Man said it, ‘‘I am what I am because that’s what I am,’’ and that’s good enough for me. I wasn’t one to fight political battles. I tried to get into the scene where others were in the power, but they ignored me. They didn’t want any part of me. I could name the names right now. For example, I met Jesse Jackson, and told him ‘‘I’m Piri.’’ ‘‘What, Buddy?’’ he answered. I gave him a copy of my book. He never called me, and there were others I tried to make contact with. But, like I said already, I am a loner. That does not mean I am lonely, because I meet other loners who respect each other. I’m not out for the medals, and I’m not out for this and for that. I do my piece. I’m a poet. Outside, after I came out of prison, I couldn’t talk in a straight conversation. It all had to be done through the poetry . . . . Source: Dorothee von Huene Greenberg, ‘‘Piri Thomas: An Interview,’’ in MELUS, Vol. 26, No. 3, Fall 2001, pp. 77–102.
Lisa D. McGill In the following interview, Thomas reflects on how growing up in Spanish Harlem influenced his role as a writer and activist. Piri Thomas is the author of the autobiographical classic Down These Mean Streets, first published in 1967. In Down These Mean Streets, Thomas chronicles his growing-up years in Spanish Harlem, years filled with the bittersweetness of life in a close-knit Puerto Rican enclave and the harsh realities of an urban ghetto. His memoir was one of the first written by a Puerto Rican in the United States to be published by a major press and acclaimed by the American mainstream. His other works include Savior Savior, Hold My Hand (1972) and Seven Long Times (1974), as well as plays, short stories, and poetry.
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MAKE YOUR INNER JOURNEY. FIND YOURSELF. ASK YOURSELF QUESTIONS. DON’T EXPECT TO GET ANSWERS FROM VOICES, BUT YOU’LL GET THE FEELING. YOU WERE BORN TO BE SOMETHING.’’
This interview was conducted on 4 December 1999. Thomas discusses Down These Mean Streets, his poetry, and his current work with children in the interview. With his particular style and what he identifies as his ‘‘flow,’’ Thomas enthusiastically articulates his role as writer, activist, and advocate for justice. LM: What was the inspiration for your autobiographical novel Down These Mean Streets? What made you want to share your story of imprisonment and life in el barrio? PT: Well, I was released from prison in 1957, and I certainly had learned a lesson. When I went to prison I said to myself, ‘‘This is no good.’’ I said, ‘‘I’m not going to serve this time. I’m going to have time serve me. I’m going to educate my mind, not eradicate it.’’ I got to do a lot of thinking, and I decided I was going to write a book. I got to the notebook, and I said to the paper, ‘‘Paper, I’m going to tell you a story.’’ I named the book Home Sweet Harlem, which later turned out to be Down These Mean Streets. LM: Why the change in the book’s title? PT: My editor, Angus Cameron from Random House, had sent my manuscript to several people to read. One took a quote or something from a writer who had said, ‘‘A man who himself is not mean can walk down these mean streets. I had known those streets as mean all of my life, so it jarred something in myself. I said, ‘‘Yes, of course, mean.’’ Thus, I named the book Down These Mean Streets. LM: There was a ten-year stretch between your release from prison and the release of Down These Mean Streets. What were some of the things taking place in your life during those years? PT: When I came out of prison, I didn’t want to be out in the streets, because it was too tempting to pull into the negative. So, I started to
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go to my aunt’s church. It was a Pentecostal Church on 118th street. Then I started working with kids, and [since] I had learned how to play a little guitar in prison, I started to write lyrics. Before I knew it, I had a little choir, with kids singing and the whole flow. Then I started to work with kids in gangs in the streets. I got an offer by a Christian organization, and I started dealing with a flow called Godin Street Talk. With my background, I was able to tell them that bopping was not the way to go, but learning was the way to go. Using all of my experience from what I learned from the streets and prison, I became a peacemaker in the barrio. LM: You have mentioned that John O. Killens’s Youngblood was a big influence on your becoming a writer. PT: Yes, he was a good brother of mine! He’s in the spirit now, but his energy is still alive. LM: How did his novel speak to you? What was it about Youngblood that made you think that you could be a writer? PT: I like the way he wrote. I said, ‘‘I can write, too.’’ Writing is like telling a story, and I come from a long line of storytellers. With writing, I was going back in time: to see the sees, and do the dos, hear the hears, and feel the feelings all over again, and bring the story into the present. LM: Were you friends with Killens after your release from prison? PT: Yes. I read his book Youngblood and then got involved with this group, the Harlem Writers’ Guild. LM: I hadn’t realized you were a part of that group. PT: Yes, I came in it near the end. I was the only Puerto Rican in it—in that sense. John Killens brought me into it. LM: What was the atmosphere there? PT: At that time we were running through a lot of things. The marches began and the sixties. I would go with John to universities down south. We would talk about the cause, the cause of freedom, the cause of justice, the cause of peace with justice. LM: So in the late fifties and sixties you considered yourself both a writer and an activist? PT: Yes! Since they called me a ‘‘nigger,’’ I became an activist. LM: Did you have John Killens read through your manuscript of Down These Mean Streets?
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PT: Yes. When I got out of prison and I went to the Harlem Writers’ Guild, and I saw that John Killens was there, I said to him, ‘‘Wow! John Killens! Hey, man, I read your book in prison! I read And Then We Heard the Thunder and Black Man’s Burden.’’ He [John] smiled. I showed him some of my stuff and he said, ‘‘Keep wailing, bro, keep wailing,’’ meaning ‘‘keep writing.’’ When the book came out, he told me, ‘‘Listen, now that the book came out, you jump on your horse and you spread it, or they will let it die in Boise, Idaho.’’ LM: Were you a part of other writers’ groups? PT: Here and there. Mostly I was a loner in a sense. I was in the Harlem Writers’ Guild off and on, but I was always John Killens’s friend, his brother. LM: People often link your works to those of African American male writers such as Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and Claude Brown. Do you think your works fit in the same canon as works by those authors? Or are there noticeable differences between their works and yours? PT: We were all in the same flow during the period—maybe with small differences. Malcolm X and I went through the same thing with the days of the zoot suits and the ‘‘pegged’’ pants and the conked hair. They were going their ways and I was going my way, but it was all for one thing: to get our sense of dignity and respect as human beings. Being into writing, I learned that words could be bullets or butterflies. I learned that words like ‘‘minority,’’ for example, were just another way of calling us ‘‘niggers’’ and ‘‘spics.’’ You have to listen to the words because children become what they learn or don’t learn. They become what they are taught or not taught. LM: What was the publishing climate for Down These Mean Streets, particularly with regard to Puerto Rican writers in the United States? PT: I was one of the first Puerto Rican writers in the U.S. to write about the conditions we were living under. Other Puerto Ricans wrote, but they wrote about Puerto Rico and their home. I wrote about what was happening to us—or at least me—and the surroundings in those years. LM: What was your audience for Down These Mean Streets? Were you writing for a Puerto Rican audience?
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PT: I was writing to get it out of me—like a catharsis. I was bursting with all of that rage that was in me. The only way to get at it was to put it onto a paper. So I was writing for human beings—those who believe in justice. I wanted people to step in my book like Alice in Wonderland and see it for themselves how it was. I wanted them to live it how I had lived it in my time. Everything I write I write as a story. On my web page, you see the letters coming in from kids all over the country. Folks that have never really read before began by reading Down These Mean Streets. They couldn’t put the book down simply because it related to them. There was Mami and there was Papi in there. There were words that were feeling, and words that were Spanish. Down These Mean Streets was for everybody because it was all human. LM: You mentioned the use of Spanish in the book. I have read that you made a conscientious decision to write Down These Mean Streets mostly in English. Can you discuss the use of language in the book—the mixing of English and Spanish? PT: I was writing it like it was. If it was black, it was ‘‘Hey, bro, what you puttin’ down?’’ It was the language of the streets. Or it was ‘‘Oye, panin, como estas?’’ You look at books that are written in English, and you will see words that are in French or Italian. That’s the feeling of the flow. So, I said, ‘‘Well, if they can do it, I can certainly do it in Spanish.’’ I wanted the readers of the book to feel the realness of what it was about. LM: I was wondering what the overall response to Down These Mean Streets was at its release in 1967. PT: It created quite a stir. In fact, the publishing world was asking me if people really talked like that. That’s right, I thought, you ought to come down and live with us. LM: When the book was released, was the Puerto Rican community in particular receptive to the book? PT: There were some people who asked, ‘‘Why didn’t you say the good things about Puerto Ricans?’’ I was writing about the rank and file, about those of us who were barely surviving and those of us who were rejected from birth. Why didn’t we have a quality education? The country had all the resources to do that. I am a man that believes that every child of
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whatever color should receive a quality education at birth—not just those that come from a wealthy family. LM: What about the censorship of the book? PT: Yes, the book was censored all over the place. I went to some of these places such as Darien, Connecticut. A bond issue was in question unless the book was taken off the shelf So many different places! I went to some of these places and I told them, ‘‘Listen. If you can prove to me that what I have written does not exist or is not true, then I’ll take the book off myself.’’ But every word is there—that happened. LM: What was their response? PT: There were a lot of attempts to take it off the shelves; but with the lawyers fighting it, it had to be reinstated. It [the censorship] was all over. When they read the book, they felt the book was going to poison the children’s minds. I told them that this was the reality. I even wrote for the New York Times and went to Darien, Connecticut. I spoke at a major college [in Darien] and said, ‘‘Listen, you can’t keep your kids in a greenhouse. This is the reality of what’s happening.’’ LM: One of the central themes in Down These Mean Streets seems to be the coming to terms with the reality of racism especially. In particular, you deal with coming to terms with a black identity and what that means for your life in New York. Was a black identity central to your concept of self?
PT: I didn’t want to be categorized. With Nuyorican, I was given a name. I really wanted to be a citizen of the world. I wanted to be free because all of my life they were putting me in categories. LM: Are you more comfortable with the term now, especially since it is so popularized? PT: No, it’s like when you buy a pair of shoes. If you want to wear those shoes, you wear those shoes. Everyone has accepted Nuyorican, so I just go along with it. LM: So what are some of the projects that you are working on today? PT: Recently, I’ve been involved in a documentary. We are working on a documentary of my life called Every Child Is Born a Poet. The poem goes ‘‘Every poet is born a child, and every child is born a poet.’’ LM: When did you start poetry? In the sixties? I’ve noticed that you are doing a lot of it now. PT: (Chuckles.) I’m one of the godfathers of poetry. I’m the oldest rapper you’ll want to meet. We were rapping poetry when we were kids, and the rapping was called playing the dozens. But my poetry has developed into the energy of like: Hey the street’s got its kicks like a bargain show. It’s got cool breeze; it’s got love like anyplace else. It’s got high-power salesman who push mucho junk, And hustlers who can swallow you with a chunk. It’s got light, And the shine of the dark that makes it seem like new. Hey, it’s got stuff that you don’t need, And never let you know what you blew. And it’s got all over our beautiful children Living in all kinds of hell, Hoping to survive and making it well. Swinging together in misty darkness With all their love to share. Hey, smiling a Christlike forgiveness That only a ghetto cross can bear. Oh, yeah. Street’s got life like young tethered selves, And justice looks like a long-awaited dream to come. For all children are beauty with the right to be born— Not two-faced, racist scorn.
PT: First of all, I wanted to be accepted as a human being—not as a color. I was what I was. My greatest philosopher was Popeye the sailor man, who said, ‘‘I am what I am, because that’s what I am.’’ Yes, I come from Puerto Rico. My people come from Puerto Rico, and my father comes from Cuba. I have different bloods in me: African blood, Taino blood, blood of the conquistadores. But I am a human being. Period. LM: Then do you see yourself as a cultural bridge between different communities? PT: Sure, why not? I feel my blood. I feel my whiteness, as I feel my blackness, and I feel the Indian in me, because that’s what I am. Everyone came to Puerto Rico, and we are the outcome of that. LM: I’ve also read that you had problems with the term Nuyorican when it first appeared in the sixties and seventies. Can you talk about that?
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All children are beauty with a right to be born. Born anew at each a.m. A child of the twilight flying for sunlight. Hey, born anew at each a.m. Poetry is spiritual. Poetry can heal. LM: Incredible! What are some of your other projects? PT: I’m working very slowly, but it’s growing, growing on a book called A Matter of Dignity. It’s about the whole flow, where I go back further than Down These Mean Streets. I delve more into growing up among the family structures and what was happening and the feelings. I also go into the Merchant Marines and things like that. I ended Down These Mean Streets on sort of a cliffhanger. I wanted to pick up from there. I pick up A Matter of Dignity from around the last chapter [of Down These Mean Streets] as I walked around the corner, wondering about what I had—nothing but today and a whole lot of tomorrows. LM: What about your phenomenal work with children since the late 1950s? PT: I—as was everyone else—was born from my mother. There was a childlike quality that I always fought to keep within me: that was my sense of amazement and wonderment and joy. I write a lot of short stories, and I travel to colleges and schools and prisons and ‘‘juvie’’ halls. I do that part as my dues, because I promised when I was in prison that whenever I got out alive I’d do my very best to help out. LM: Does your spiritual life play a role in your work with children and young adults? PT: When I came out of prison, I couldn’t stay out on the streets. They were too strong. So I joined my aunt’s church. It was a Pentecostal church. From there I started getting my flows together. I always believed that God was the smile on a face of the child that wasn’t being wasted. I didn’t see God as an altar with a lot of gold. Every human being has a spirit. If you want to call it God, call it God. I put an O in God’s name and made it good—good, good, good, good. I had to program my own mind. Because, as I say, every child becomes what they learn or don’t learn—or are taught or not taught. They can be programmed. That’s what I tell the children: ‘‘The slavemasters call you ‘nigger,’ and you call yourself ‘nigger,’ too!’’ ‘‘Why do you do that?,’’ I ask. And they answer: ‘‘To let
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them know it doesn’t bother us.’’ I say to them: ‘‘Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never harm you? Words will harm you when they are negative. You are not a nigger! You are not a spic! You are a beautiful creation, an earthling—born of earth and universe. Make your inner journey. Find yourself. Ask yourself questions. Don’t expect to get answers from voices, but you’ll get the feeling. You were born to be something. Believe in yourself and don’t let anyone doubt for you.’’ LM: Do you think that for people to get the ‘‘feeling’’ of who they are they need to make that spiritual or psychological journey back to a cultural heritage? PT: Absolutely. Call it what you want, but I feel my spirit. I feel my ‘‘me.’’ Life is about feeling— good, bad, indifference. But the thing you have to find is the wisdom so you can make the right choice. I tell the kids not to walk around in arrogance, but to walk around with their sense of dignity. My poppa said, ‘‘No one can take away your dignity; only you can give it away or sell it.’’ LM: How do you get that sense of dignity? PT: By being proud of yourself. Having pride in what you do. By educating your mind, not obliterating it. By being able to absorb that which is right. When everyone is shouting, ‘‘Yeah, let’s go beat these people up,’’ then you say, ‘‘No, that’s not my stick.’’ To have the courage to say ‘‘no’’ when everyone else is saying ‘‘yeah’’ to a negative thing. It means a lot to know who you are. LM: Do you often serve as a mentor for other (Puerto Rican) writers who are new or up-andcoming? PT: Yes, I get a lot of calls from people I’ve inspired—young brothers and sisters wanting to write the flow. I’m an inspiration. They call me ‘‘Mr. Inspiration.’’ (Laughs.) Because in lifting the children up, I lift my own spirit up. As you sow, so shall you reap. Source: Lisa D. McGill, ‘‘A Conversation with Piri Thomas,’’ in Bilingual Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, May-August 2000, pp. 179–84.
John Morris In the following article, Morris provides an account of the influences that growing up in Spanish Harlem had on Thomas’s literary career. The author of Down These Mean Streets returns to el barrio in a high-energy sequel to
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his widely acclaimed autobiography. In Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (Doubleday, Sept. 8) Piri Thomas pictures the poverty and squalor as well as the spirit and vitality of the ghetto in a dramatic story that is blunt, painful, absorbing and profoundly moving. His book begins with his return from prison, where he had served six years of a sentence for armed robbery. Back home in New York’s Spanish Harlem, he found friends dying on heroin, or getting rich selling it. Looking for a job, he found the unions closed to him—not because he lacked skill and training, but because he lacked a white skin. Then there was an indomitable aunt who brought him to her church, where he met the woman who became his wife—after an elaborate courtship in the proper Puerto Rican style—and where he began to take an interest in helping others. Eventually, he got a job working with street children, helping them find highs other than drugs, trying to cool rivalries fueled by frustration, persuading gang leaders to surrender weapons intended for bloody street battles. But even with success came bitter disappointments. Pervasive discrimination forced Thomas and his young family to give up a suburban home. And an appallingly hypocritical and selfish boss forced him out of his job—and almost back into prison. Piri Thomas writes of these experiences with unselfconscious candor and compassion in a book The Kirkus Reviews called ‘‘an engrossing, lively autobiographical account . . . alive with ‘beau coup’ sincerity, toughness and joie de vivre.’’ Piri Thomas—author, poet, playwright— was born in New York City in 1928, the oldest of seven children. Faced with the dual frustrations of racial discrimination and economic shortages, he drifted into drugs, youth gangs, and eventually more violent crimes. He served six years in prison for armed robbery, and on his release tried to start a new life in Spanish Harlem—the experiences which provide the basis for his new book, Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand. He became a street worker in Spanish Harlem, involved with youth gangs; his success at reducing tensions and drug use first brought him to public attention. A grant from the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation enabled him to complete his highly regarded autobiography Down These Mean Streets, which marked the beginning of his career as a professional writer. A playwright member of Lee Strasburg’s Actor’s Studio, he has written several plays for
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community organizations, a number of poems, a short story and a short film for children, and an original screenplay about the problems and lifestyles of Puerto Ricans in New York, to be produced by Ossie Davis and directed by Jose Garcia, in association with Third World Cinema. A former addict, Mr. Thomas worked with Dr. Efren Ramirez, Director of the Hospital of Psychiatry in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, in developing a program of rehabilitation. He is also a member of the New York State Task Force on Drug Addiction and has served as an expert witness before a number of state and federal legislative bodies studying urban crime and drug addiction. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the ‘‘Kerner Commission’’), the 1970 White House Conference on Children and Youth and other organizations have sought his advice and assistance. Mr. Thomas has lectured and read his poetry to a wide range of organizations— educational, civic and professional. He and his family live in New York City. Source: John Morris, ‘‘Piri Thomas; Author’s New Book,’’ in Sun Reporter, Vol. 29, No. 36, September 2, 1972, p. 32.
SOURCES Colo´n, Jesu´s, The Way It Was and Other Writings (Recovering U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage), Arte Publico, 1993, pp. 7–31. Delaney, Tim, American Street Gangs, Prentice Hall, 2005, pp. 35–64. Evans, Gavin, Kings of the Ring: The History of Heavyweight Boxing, WN, 2008, pp. 144–79. McGill, Lisa D., ‘‘A Conversation with Piri Thomas,’’ in Bilingual Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, May-August 2000, pp. 179–85. Stern, Daniel, ‘‘One Who Got Away,’’ in New York Times Book Review, Vol. 72, May 21, 1967, p. 44. Thomas, Piri, ‘‘Amigo Brothers,’’ in Stories from El Barrio, Freedom Voices, 1992, pp.105–18. ———, ‘‘Biography,’’ in World of Piri Thomas, http:// www.cheverote.com/ (accessed September 16, 2009).
FURTHER READING Adams, Michael Henry, Harlem: Lost and Found, Monacelli, 2001.
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As a resident of and expert on Harlem, Adams brings his in-depth knowledge of Harlem and its architecture and buildings to photographs by Paul Rocheleau to provide the readers a visual tour of Harlem. Reviewers find the photos combine beautifully with Adams detailed knowledge of the style, social history, and modern-day changes in Harlem. Boyd, Herb, The Harlem Reader: A Celebration of New York’s Most Famous Neighborhood, from the Renaissance Years to the 21st Century, Three Rivers Press, 2003. Focusing primarily on the writings and influence of African Americans, this collection offers the reader an inside look at the people who have been shaped by Harlem and its culture. Boyd spans the history of Harlem in his selections so the reader can follow the changes, controversies, inspirations, and importance of this area of New York City.
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Flores, Juan, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, Columbia University Press, 2000. Flores has written much about Puerto Rican Americans, and here he considers their impact on American culture, and vice-versa. He differentiates Puerto Rican Americans from other Latin ethnicities, and explores the ways this ethnic group keeps its heritage alive within the culture and communities of America. Kanellos, Nicolas, ed., Herencia: An Anthology of Hispanic Literature in the United States, Oxford University Press, 2003. Ten years in the making, this anthology includes works reaching as far back as the age of Spanish exploration in America, and bringing the reader up to the present. Profiles of the writers give important context, and the diversity of writers (including Nuyorican selections) gives the reader a breadth of perspective on this literature.
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The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant Though W. D. Wetherell’s ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant’’ did not receive a lot of media attention when it was first published, this comingof-age short story has become a perennial favorite in literature courses. The fourteen-year-old male narrator portrays a classic character, one that is as relevant today as it was a quarter-century ago, when the story first appeared. The story relates the experiences of a teenage narrator who, like all youth, struggles to forge a unique personal identity.
W. D. WETHERELL 1985
The main scene of the story places the nameless protagonist in his favorite setting—a canoe on a placid river—where he faces one of the most challenging decisions in his young life. The biggest fish he has ever hooked is desperately trying to get away and will do so if the narrator does not take decisive action. Inside the boat, sitting nonchalantly in the moonlight, is the biggest date the narrator has ever landed. If he makes a move to haul in the fish, the chances are great that he will lose the girl. The author thus sets these two great prizes at odds with one another and presents the narrator with a complex dilemma: Since he cannot have both the fish and the girl, which one will he choose? It is the narrator’s critical choice that teaches him a lesson that he will carry with him into the future, forming an indelible memory that helps to mold the young boy’s adulthood. ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant’’ was published in 1985 in Wetherell’s prize-winning
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Canoe on a river (Image copyright Mike Totten, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
collection of short stories The Man Who Loved Levittown. The collection won the 1985 Drue Heinz Literature Prize awarded by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Wetherell was born on October 5, 1948, in Minida, New York, a small town on Long Island. In 1973 he earned a bachelor’s degree from Hofstra University, in Hempstead, New York. His first novel, Souvenirs, was published in 1981, but it was his 1985 collection of short stories The Man Who Loved Levittown (1985) that brought him media attention. ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant’’ was included in this award- winning collection. Wetherell’s 1990 novel Chekhov’s Sister has proven to be one of his most critically acclaimed fictional works. The story speculates about what the famed Russian author’s sister (the book references details of the life of Anton Chekhov) might have done to preserve her brother’s legacy.
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Over the years, Wetherell has produced several more novels, including The Wisest Man in America (1995) and Morning (2001). He has also published several short-story collections, including Wherever That Great Heart May Be (1996) and Hills Like White Hills (2009). In addition to his fictional writing, Wetherell is also well known for his essays. His collections of essays include Upland Stream: Notes on the Fishing Passion (1999) and This American River: Five Centuries of Writing about the Connecticut (2002). In 2008, Wetherell turned to the memoir genre and wrote Soccer Dad: A Father, a Son, and a Magic Season about his experiences following his son’s soccer team as its members attempted to win the state championship. Continuing in the genre of memoir, Wetherell wrote about his own mid-life crisis while camping out in Yellowstone National Park. This 2009 memoir is called Yellowstone Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous Land. Besides the 1985 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for The Man Who Loved Levittown, Wetherell has also won three O. Henry Awards
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for his short stories: ‘‘The Man Who Loved Levittown’’ (1985), ‘‘If a Woodchuck Could Chuck Wood’’ (1987), and ‘‘Watching Girls Play’’ (1999). Wetherell is married to Celeste Tousignant. They live in New Hampshire and have two children.
PLOT SUMMARY Wetherell’s short story ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant’’ takes place in August (sometime in the 1960s) on the shores of a New England river that runs between New Hampshire and Vermont. The narrator of the story is an unnamed fourteen-year-old who is spending his summer vacation with his family at a cabin. Next door is the girl of the narrator’s dreams, seventeen-yearold Sheila Mant. The Mant family celebrates the summer with parties, which the narrator longs to join. His family is not as social as the Mants, and his parents think the Mants are too flamboyant. This does not keep the narrator from sneaking out at night to observe the festivities taking place next door, which fuels the narrator’s fantasies of capturing Sheila’s heart. Sheila is used to a lot of attention. Though the narrator has a crush on her, he describes her as being ‘‘all but out of reach.’’ Much of the narrator’s day is spent studying Sheila, especially when she is sunbathing. From his observations the narrator believes he has correctly interpreted Sheila’s moods based on the different poses she assumes. For example, if she lies on her side with her head ‘‘propped up by her arm,’’ she is ‘‘observant.’’ But, the narrator warns, one must be careful when approaching her. According to the narrator, the best time to make contact with Sheila is while she stretches her body in preparation to dive into the river. This is Sheila’s signal that she is willing to permit a social connection. The narrator is aware that Sheila has many suitors. For instance, he has seen the way the young men of the Dartmouth College crew team become distracted whenever they row down the river past Sheila. He suspects they are all in love with her. The narrator believes there is a difference between himself and the older suitors. They see Sheila as the essence of female innocence. The narrator, on the other hand, views her as the epitome of female sophistication.
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athleticism will impress her. Unfortunately, Sheila seldom pays attention. On one occasion, when he is surprised to find her looking at him, he completes several complicated dives off the raft. His efforts still go unheeded. Rather than quashing his passion for the young girl, Sheila’s lack of attention actually increases the narrator’s longing for her. The main focus of this short story occurs on one of the last days of August, when the narrator musters the courage to approach Sheila. Propelling himself through the bushes that separate their houses, he finds himself in the middle of a softball game. Sheila takes a long time to acknowledge him, but when she finally does, instead of asking her out the narrator tells her she is standing too far away from the base she is supposed to be defending. Only afterward does he invite her to attend a concert in a nearby town. Sheila asks if he has a car. The narrator cleverly saves himself from having to acknowledge he is too young to drive by saying he would rather go by canoe, which Sheila agrees to. The boat trip provides the gist of the story, its main themes and conflicts. The narrator spends the next day polishing his canoe so as to further impress Sheila. He supplies pillows for Sheila to lean on, a radio, and of course his fishing rod, which is a permanent fixture on the boat. The narrator does not intend to fish during the trip downstream, but he confesses that he never goes boating without his rod. His favorite pastime, other than watching Sheila and fantasizing about her, is fishing. After all preparations are completed, the narrator paddles in circles upon the river to ease his impatience. Out of habit he also absentmindedly baits a hook and lowers the line into the water. At eight that evening, he pulls up in front of Sheila’s house. As Sheila approaches, the narrator notices a ‘‘dubious expression’’ on her face. Before entering the canoe, Sheila suggests they take her father’s car. However, the narrator coaxes her into the boat, promising he will get her to town safely. After settling into the canoe, she looks at him at close range for the first time. The narrator is so mad with excitement that he wants to dive into the river.
To gain Sheila’s attention, the narrator swims across the river and back, hoping his
As the narrator rows away from the shore, he comments about the extra paddle in the canoe, which Sheila has thus far ignored. Instead of helping him row, she takes off her shoes and dangles her feet over the edge of the canoe. As
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they move downstream, the narrator describes the band they are going to hear. Sheila talks about Eric Caswell, a member of the Dartmouth crew who has shown an interest in her. She says Eric will be at the concert. Sheila expresses concern when they hear a splashing noise close to the canoe. The narrator looks and is surprised to see a big bass. It is at this point that Sheila states that ‘‘fishing’s dumb.’’ This embarrasses the narrator. His main intention is to impress Sheila. The narrator is faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, he fears making himself appear ‘‘dumb in Sheila’s severe and unforgiving eyes,’’ while, on the other hand, by the flexing of his fishing pole he can tell he has caught one of the largest bass he has ever seen. The narrator considers rowing closer to the shore and flinging his fishing pole into the bushes. He also thinks about pushing the rod over the side of the canoe, sacrificing his equipment in the name of his love for Sheila. Instead he compromises by shoving the rod in a more inconspicuous space under his legs. In this way, he hopes to keep the fish on the line without Sheila knowing. The tension grows as the narrator realizes this could prove to be the biggest bass he will ever catch. He understands that whatever he decides, he cannot let Sheila know what he is doing. It is as if he has been given a chance to catch two of the biggest fish he has ever captured in his life—a huge bass and Sheila Mant. Though he tries his best to keep them both, he also knows he must eventually let one of them go. While the narrator tries to figure out how to keep the fish and prevent Sheila from guessing what he is thinking, she talks about which college she wants to attend and why. Her reasons are frivolous. She prefers one school because of the opportunities to ski. She also mentions that Eric has told her that she is pretty enough to become a model. She wants to get a new hair style, something that makes her look like the 1960s actress Ann-Margret. She interrupts her monologue when she notices that the canoe is moving backward. To relieve Sheila’s concern, the narrator lies again, saying there is a strong current and they must counter it. In truth, the bass is pulling the canoe.
turn, the narrator will have to maneuver around a sandbar that lies under a narrow bridge. This will provide an opportunity for the fish to escape. In the meantime, Sheila is talking about wanting to keep her skin as white as Jacqueline Kennedy’s. While the narrator reflects on his luck at keeping the fish, he is caught off guard by Sheila’s beauty. He is consumed by the sight of her. His concentration is disturbed. Before him is the girl of his dreams. Behind him is the bass. The narrator has reached a critical point. The dock for the concert is just a few yards ahead. If he paddles to the shore, he knows the bass will escape. If he stands up in the canoe and starts pulling in the line, he will have landed the prized fish. Suddenly he sees Sheila stretch. This motion emphasizes the shape of her body and makes the narrator all but forget about the fish. He pulls out a pocket knife and cuts the fishing line. As the fishing rod loses its bend, he feels a sudden attack of nausea sweep over him. The story concludes quickly. The narrator remembers little else about that night except that he may have danced with Sheila one or two times. When the band is finished playing, Sheila tells the narrator she is going home with Eric Caswell. To conclude the story the narrator confesses that his obsession with Sheila faded rapidly. The same was not true for that bass. The fish, the narrator confides, continues to haunt him. ‘‘There would be other Sheila Mants,’’ he says. There would also be other fish. He tells his readers that he ‘‘never made the same mistake again.’’
The narrator only half-listens to Sheila. His attention is focused on his secret attempts to land the bass. The canoe has reached the point where they must take a side stream. Once they
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CHARACTERS Eric Caswell Eric Caswell technically does not appear in the story. Readers learn about him only through comments the other two characters make about him. Sheila talks more about Eric than the narrator does and is flattered by Eric’s complimentary remarks about her. She tells the narrator that Eric owns a fancy car and has told her she has the right looks to become a model. Eric obviously has gained Sheila’s attention through his flattery and because of his status as a college (older) boy who also has money. In the end, Eric wins the honor of taking Sheila home in his car, sparing her the more unusual trip via the river
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with the narrator. In many ways Eric is the complete opposite of the narrator.
Sheila Mant Although Sheila makes only a brief appearance in this story and has little to say, she appears to be a major character because the protagonist is so focused on her throughout the narrative. Sheila is a seventeen-year-old beauty used to a lot of attention—especially from young men. From her attitude toward the narrator readers might conclude that Sheila thinks every boy around her age is enthralled by her. Like the narrator, Sheila is not only aware of her looks but is somewhat obsessed with them. During the canoe trip with the narrator, one of the main topics she discusses deals with how she plans on improving her appearance. She watches other women who have attracted media attention and hopes to emulate them—at least on a physical level. She wants to copy their hair style and considers sunbathing less so she can have whiter skin. She thinks of women in terms of their appearance rather than their talents or skills. This suggests that Sheila’s thoughts are rather shallow. For instance, even though she plans to attend college, she makes no reference to what she might study but rather how she will entertain herself while on campus. Sheila also demonstrates a lack of compassion. For example, she is unwilling to help row the canoe despite the fact that the narrator has provided an extra paddle. This unwillingness does not appear to be a conscious decision since it is unclear if she even notices the extra paddle or ever considers helping out. She merely takes her cushioned seat, removes her shoes, and leans back, assuming the narrator will do all the work. Unlike the narrator, who is completely at home in nature, Sheila is apprehensive and lacks basic information about nature. She is squeamish about the unfamiliar sounds she hears and somewhat naively accepts the lies the narrator tells her about what is happening around them. She has little interest in what is occurring because she is so caught up in her own selfish thoughts. She never asks the narrator about his life and has no knowledge of the narrator’s dilemma concerning the bass he has caught. She does not recognize the signs around her, such as the bent fishing rod, the narrator’s distraction, or the pull on the canoe. Sheila spends most of the time in the canoe talking about herself. She appears content with who she is
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and could care less about anyone else. This lack of compassion is fully apparent when she decides to let Eric Caswell take her home, leaving the narrator to row his canoe home alone and not considering that she might have hurt his feelings.
Narrator The narrator is never given a name. Readers only know he is fourteen years old and has a passion for fishing. He also has a serious crush on Sheila Mant. For the narrator the events of this story represent a turning point in his life. At the beginning of the story, the narrator is innocent and a bit naive about girls. He is easily blindsided by his crush on Sheila. Her beauty and confidence stun him. He is two years younger than she is, and her extra years make her seem as if she were living in a different world—one that the narrator longs to enter. He hopes that if he can manage to develop a relationship with her, Sheila will invite him into the world he imagines she inhabits. The narrator is also very enthused about nature. He loves being out on the water in his canoe, both during the day and at night. He understands the river, including its currents and ecology. He has researched the habits of the wildlife that lives in and around the watery world. He knows why the fish head for the rocky shores and why they hide among the shoreline’s vegetation. He knows what the fish eat and at what times of day and night they do so. Other aspects of nature are also within his comprehension, such as the names of the stars and constellations. He loves to watch the stars travel across the night sky. He is most comfortable when immersed in the natural world. Dealing with girls is beyond his comfort level. He knows Sheila only from a distance—if he knows her at all. What he believes he knows about her he has merely made up inside his head. He has not tested his hypothesis. His attraction to Sheila is based on her physical self, a body the narrator finds beautiful and alluring. When he finally is close enough to her to gain her attention, he has very little to say. Much of what he does say is fabricated information. As the story progresses, it is obvious that the narrator makes the mistake of misunderstanding Sheila. Though he spends hours watching her and assumes that certain of her body positions reflect her various moods, his conclusions may, in fact, have nothing to do with Sheila and everything to do with the thoughts he is experiencing. What is certain is that he does not see the obvious. Sheila is self-absorbed and has little interest in him. She considers him a curiosity. It
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takes a jolt of reality—when he learns that Sheila is leaving the concert with his rival—for the narrator to see Sheila for what she is. This wounds him, but not so much for losing her but rather for the fish he let get away. Once he is aware of Sheila’s flaws, he vows never to allow himself to be blindsided again. Thus, he proves to be smart enough to learn a lesson from his own shortcomings. In the end, he appears stronger and wiser, able to move on with a positive attitude and a willingness to keep fishing, both for another large bass and other girls.
sense that the narrator never had a chance of scoring with Sheila, the narrator did not see this. He sacrificed the fish for the girl. At the end of the story, he loses both the fish and the girl, though the sacrifice extends only to the bass. He learns his lesson and vows he will never make that type of sacrifice again. What is implied is that it was more than just the fish that was sacrificed. The young boy also sacrificed part of his own identity. He concealed his true feelings and allowed the young girl to convince him that something that was a deep part of him (his passion for fishing) was stupid.
Obsession
THEMES Sacrifice The main dilemma in Wetherell’s ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant’’ reflects one of the major themes of this short story, namely, the theme of sacrifice. The narrator is torn between his desire to impress Sheila Mant in order to win her affection and his love of fishing. At the beginning of the story, the narrator can enjoy both of his passions since they do not interfere with one another. He watches Sheila from a distance and entertains fantasies about who she is and how their relationship might develop. When he is on his own, he can either go out on his canoe or stand along the shore and fish without distraction. However, as the story progresses, and the narrator and Sheila are brought together, he discovers that his love of fishing and the potential development of a relationship with Sheila remain at odds. One of them must be sacrificed. Throughout the final part of the story, the narrator attempts to keep both his passions alive. In order to do so, he must be deceptive. Even though he realizes his two passions are not compatible, he puts off making a decision as long as he can. On the one hand, he has possibly snagged the biggest fish he might ever see. On the other, he has likewise snagged the biggest date. Sheila believes fishing is boring and implies that anyone who wastes time fishing is dumb. The narrator has a huge crush on Sheila and naturally does not wish to appear stupid. So a sacrifice is called for. In the end, he very reluctantly sacrifices the fish. As he learns by the conclusion of the story, this sacrifice proves wasteful and ineffective. Despite the fact that he has successfully concealed his true feelings as well as his struggle with the bass, the narrator fails to win Sheila’s heart. Though readers might
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The narrator in this short story has two obsessions: fishing and Sheila Mant. An obsession implies an overwhelming, irrational desire or compulsion. In the narrator’s case, his obsession with Sheila causes him to think excessively about her and also blinds him to the young girl’s shortcomings. As for his obsession with fishing, the narrator has a compulsion to fish, even if this means lying about it. The narrator misjudges his chances of success with Sheila. He does not realize that she is all show—how she looks and who she hangs out with (mostly older boys). Her acceptance of the narrator’s offer to take her to the concert fuels his obsession, leading him to make the decision to choose Sheila over the bass. Had he thought of Sheila in more rational terms, he might have chosen the fish and prevented much of his disappointment. After all, if she truly were interested in him, she would have welcomed him into her life along with his love of nature and fishing. If the narrator had not been so obsessed with Sheila, he might have been more true to himself and not have lied to her.
Deception Various forms of deception appear in Wetherell’s short story. First, the narrator attempts to deceive Sheila by hiding his true identity. A huge part of the narrator’s life is involved with fishing and the natural world. He loves being out in nature and, in particular, is absorbed in the study of fish as well as the sport of fishing. Once Sheila makes a negative statement about the sport, the narrator hides his true nature and pretends to be someone he is not. The second form of deception is the narrator’s attempt to conceal his actions as well as his excitement when he catches the big bass. He
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Do a Web search for the Connecticut River, which runs along the borders of Vermont and New Hampshire. Though never specifically mentioned by name, it could well be the river the narrator fishes in. Create a Web site or a trifold brochure, pretending that you own a fishing camp along the river and want to attract tourists. List some of the best locations for bass fishing along the river, providing photographs of the natural settings and what tourists might expect to see and do while there. Although you do not have to base your information entirely on fact, be consistent and stick to a New England setting. Write caption copy to enhance the photographs you find. You might want to read the author’s essays on the Connecticut River, collected in Vermont River: The Classic Portrait of a Man and His River (1993).
Research the life cycle and environment of bass. In what season are they most plentiful? In what sections of the United States are they located? Are they found in rivers or lakes? How long do they live? How big can they grow? What do they eat? Describe the best way to catch them. What kinds of lures and rods should one use? Provide as much detailed information as you can find. Use a PowerPoint presentation to share your findings with your classmates.
Suggest two or three different endings for Wetherell’s story that result in drastically different results from the narrator’s point of view. Make these endings as dramatically different from one another as possible. Consider ending one comically. Make another one end tragically. A third ending might be more cheerful than the one Wetherell wrote. Read these endings to your class and take a vote on which one is best. Reread the descriptions Wetherell provides of Sheila as the narrator studies her. The narrator watches her in several poses, each of which he feels reflects a different mood. Capture these positions and moods as best you can in sketches of her. Depict various facial expressions that reflect her inner emotions. Study a book about the stars, such as Terence Dickinson’s NightWatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe (2006, 4th ed.), that is suitable for reluctant or younger readers. What might the night sky, which the narrator of this story examined, have looked like during the late summer? Find the prominent constellations as well as single stars he might have viewed and identify them. Create a nighttime map of the skies by drawing the shapes of the constellations and labeling them. Share your map with your classmates to give them an idea of what the narrator saw.
camouflages his moves, lies about why the canoe is moving in unusual patterns, and keeps his emotions under control while simultaneously engaging in one of the biggest battles of his fishing experience. The third form of deception occurs when the narrator attempts to deceive himself. He convinces himself that he has a chance with Sheila though he knows she is two years older, that she receives a lot of attention from college admirers, and probably accepts his
invitation just for the heck of it. He does not tune in to the clues that Sheila provides, which should have told him that they have very little in common.
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A fourth type of deception derives from Sheila. By going home with Eric, Sheila obviously shows that she is not interested in the narrator. She leads him on, making him believe she is truly going on a date with him. If this were a date, she should have returned home with the
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narrator in his canoe. In fact, the trip downriver with the narrator was more of a joke or a novelty. It was something different to do. The narrator had an entirely different conception of the significance of the night, which Sheila helped him to create by not being completely truthful.
Coming of Age This short story is often labeled as a coming-ofage tale. This phrase refers to the theme of learning a lesson that helps the main character become more mature. In a coming-of-age story, the main character is most often a teenager who is on the cusp of becoming an adult. In this story, the narrator learns several lessons that help him to become more mature. The first is about girls. Even though he is very attracted to Sheila physically, the narrator discovers there are more important qualities to look for in a mate. He also learns the importance of being true to oneself and not sacrificing one’s passions in the hopes of trying to impress another person. These are lessons the narrator will carry into adulthood and use to develop his character.
narrator. External conflict can occur between two or more people and also includes struggles that occur between a person and some external force, as in the novel Moby-Dick, in which Captain Ahab fights the great white whale. When conflicts are classified according to type, they are often listed as person versus person, person versus circumstance, person versus society, and person versus self. The purpose of having conflict in a story is not just to make the story more interesting as a result of the actions the protagonist, or central character, is forced to take. Behind conflict lies the power of suspense. In Wetherell’s story, the suspense that is created is that of waiting for the young boy to make a decision. Readers want to know what decision the narrator is going to make as he struggles with his inner conflicts. Is he going to stand up in the canoe and reel the bass in? Or is he going to cut it loose, sacrificing it in hopes of winning Sheila? If his conflict and struggle to arrive at a decision were not present, the story would not only have less action but might even prove to be boring.
Crisis STYLE Conflict and Suspense Good fiction writers know that to hold their readers’ interest they must create conflict and suspense in their stories. These two elements, which are closely linked, are often what keep readers turning the pages to find out what happens next. This is true in most stories, not just those that are overly dramatic or involve physical violence. Some of the best stories are based on subtle conflicts, such as the example offered in Wetherell’s story. Here the narrator’s struggle is internal. He has developed emotions that conflict with each other. He desires both Sheila and the bass, but he fears he will lose Sheila if he makes his passion for the bass known to her. So his love of fishing conflicts with his fear of losing Sheila. Though the reader knows that the narrator is fighting two different forces internally, Sheila is completely unaware that a conflict is occurring. This story demonstrates that not much outward action has to be created in order to have a substantial conflict present. There are two types of conflict: internal and external. Internal conflict occurs inside a person, such as the emotional conflict of Wetherell’s
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In a good piece of writing conflict moves toward a crisis. Crisis is the point that readers have been waiting for, the event that the conflict has set in motion. In ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant,’’ the crisis occurs almost at the very end of the story. As he approaches the dock where he and Sheila must get out of the canoe, the narrator is forced to make a decision. He either has to stand up and pull the bass into the boat, thereby revealing to Sheila that he is a fisherman, or he has to release the bass without her suspecting anything. Ever since the narrator felt the bass tugging on his line, readers have known that he has to make this decision at some point in the story. All the discussion that occurs before the crisis is provided so that readers come to know the narrator better and to empathize with his dilemma. Yet in the back of readers’ minds is the awareness that this dilemma will have to be faced. The only question is when. The point of crisis is that moment. This is where the author answers the question: What will the narrator do? After a crisis is reached, the story usually ends suddenly. Most of the energy of the story is based on moving toward and resolving the crisis. Once the crisis is resolved, there is little left to say.
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A pair of waders sit along a river bed with a fishing rod and reel, ready to be used for fly-fishing (Image copyright Monica Minford, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Connecticut River An avid fisherman and nature lover, Wetherell has written many essays about his adventures and explorations on the Connecticut River. This river has played a prominent role in the history of New England, being the largest river in this area (410 miles long). The river flows along the borders of New Hampshire and Vermont, continues through western Massachusetts and central Connecticut, and ends at the Long Island Sound. A heavy amount of silt often builds up in the river during the winter, creating several sandbars along the river floor and into its tributaries. These sandbars have historically made navigation challenging, resulting in a lack of major cities along its shores. Springfield, Massachusetts, is the largest city on the river’s shoreline today.
pollution of the river’s waters. Large numbers of cut trees from farther north were often floated downriver in the late 1800s. Though this aided transportation for sawmills, it caused dangerous conditions for small boaters and fishermen. By the early 1900s this practice had been banned.
Due to the rising and dropping elevations of its floor, the Connecticut River has been a good site for manufacturing. This has brought business to the area but has also caused major
By the 1960s, as a result of massive runoffs of waste materials and other pollutants from agriculture, industry, and housing, the Connecticut River was given a failing grade by the Environmental Protection Agency when the river’s waters were tested. Great effort was put into cleaning up the river, and between the 1960s and the 1990s the quality of the water rose from Class D (unacceptable amounts of pollution) to Class B (acceptable for swimming, fishing, and other recreational pastimes but not clean enough for drinking water). In 1997, President Bill Clinton signed the American Heritage Rivers initiative. Shortly thereafter the Connecticut River was named one of fourteen American Heritage Rivers. This means that special efforts are being made to preserve the legacy, beauty, and health of this historic river. Today there are
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1960s: Ann-Margret is a Hollywood icon of the early 1960s. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy provides a more stable, sophisticated, grounded role model for women in the same time frame. 1980s: MTV, the television program devoted to pop music, provides images of the latest stars, including the popular singer Madonna, whose style teens want to imitate. Nancy Reagan serves as First Lady and provides a conservative, high-fashion style similar to that of Mrs. Kennedy. Today: More wild than Ann-Margret and as controversial as Madonna, Britney Spears offers a popular role model as an entertainment figure. In her role as First Lady, Michelle Obama opens the White House doors to a new generation. Like Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan, Mrs. Obama stands both as a cultural and fashion model as well as a figure of stability and maturity. 1960s: Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) stirs the nation to consider the
several agencies and programs that monitor the Connecticut River and provide daily or weekly reports on the health of the river. One of these agencies is the Connecticut River Watch Program. Each state along the river’s shores also has a state branch of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that monitors the river’s health, making public announcements about the safety of beaches for swimming and the health of the fish living in the waters.
dangerous side effects of pesticides and other previously ignored environmental issues. 1980s: The U.S. Congress overrides President Reagan’s veto to amend the Clean Water Act by creating stronger laws to prevent toxic pollutants from entering U.S. rivers and bays. Today: Al Gore’s book An Inconvenient Truth (2006) brings the basic facts of global warming to the forefront of public consciousness.
1980s: The Connecticut Department of Public Health advises the public not to eat some of the fish found in the Connecticut River due to high levels of pollutants found in fish tissue. Today: Parts of the lower Connecticut River have been cleaned to the point that they are once again considered safe for swimming, fishing, boating, and other recreational sports.
the dams blocked their way. The Fish and Wildlife Service has overseen the construction of ladders along the sides of the dams to permit the salmon free passage.
Many fish that sports fishermen love to catch live in the Connecticut River. These include shad, bass, trout, carp, catfish, and sea lamprey. For the past several years the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has attempted to lure Atlantic salmon back to the river. Dams built along the river had for generations made the salmon extinct in the Connecticut River; salmon, a migratory fish, could not get back to their spawning grounds upriver because
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1960s: The Connecticut River, the largest in New England, suffers from severe pollution problems and is declared suitable only for transportation of sewage and industrial waste.
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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Although Wetherell’s short story ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant’’ has been included in several short-story collections and literature textbooks, it has not received much critical attention. However, the collection in which the short story was published, The Man Who Loved Levittown, has earned both an award and positive comments by several book reviewers. In January 1986, shortly after Wetherell’s collection The Man Who Loved Levittown was published, Robert Ward, writing in the New
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Rowboat (Image copyright Peter Clark, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
York Times, states that he was not pleased with all of the stories in this collection but nevertheless praises several of them. He writes that many of the stories were ‘‘so strong, so well executed’’ that he understands why the book was awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction. In the end, Ward praises the author, concluding that ‘‘Wetherell is a passionate writer who . . . has a sharp, fresh eye and a complicated view of our dislocations, pains and dreams.’’ Writing for the Hollins Critic, reviewer Thomas E. Kennedy writes that ‘‘no two stories here are alike’’ and then offers a critique of the author’s overall writing skills in which he states that ‘‘Wetherell shows his mastery of verisimilitude alongside his skill with surrealism and metafictional technique.’’ This reviewer also finds that ‘‘Wetherell has a courageous imagination which succeeds in its quest for the wholeness of things—their births, and their deaths.’’
thanks to the strength of the writing. At the end of his review Boyer asks if Wetherell’s writing was good enough to ‘‘be hailed as a second Cheever,’’ a reference to famed American writer John Cheever. Despite praising Wetherell by means of this association, Boyer holds back on his comparison. ‘‘Not yet,’’ he writes, stating that Wetherell ‘‘has some of a good writer’s strengths.’’ Boyer points out that Wetherell shows ‘‘a knack for characterization, an effortless style and considerable imagination.’’
CRITICISM Joyce Hart Hart is a published author and creative writing teacher. In this essay, she explores the levels of the narrator’s yearning in Wetherell’s short story ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant.’’
Allen Boyer, writing for the Los Angeles Times, also states that he understands the judges’ decision in awarding Wetherell’s collection of short stories the Drue Heinz Literature Prize
In Wetherell’s short story ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant,’’ the narrator yearns for two things in the summer of his fourteenth year: fishing and Sheila Mant. According to
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
on their lives, exploring their pains, sacrifices, and celebrations.
Editor Bruce Emra has collected several coming-of-age stories in Coming of Age: Short Stories about Youth and Adolescence (1993). Among the well-known authors included in this collection are Sandra Cisneros, Toni Cade Bambara, Amy Tan, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Shirley Jackson, and Margaret Atwood.
Kaya and the River Girl (2003), by Janet Beeler Shaw, tells the story of the challenges that beset a young Native American girl who is forced to befriend a girl from another tribe. Jealousy keeps them apart until a dramatic event brings them together. This book includes historical details about what life was like along the Columbia River in 1764.
In 1995, Wetherell wrote the novel The Wisest Man in America about a New Hampshire lumberjack who successfully predicts the winners of eleven straight presidential primaries. A news writer discovers and writes an article about this lumberjack’s talent, which makes them both very famous. Most of the story, however, is focused on the reflections of both men as they look back
Another collection of stories, Into the Widening World: International Coming-of-Age Stories (1994), edited by John Loughery, contains tales by some of the best international writers. They include Nadine Gordimer and Ben Okri from Africa; Alice Munro from Canada; Gabriel Garcia Marquez from South America; and Japan’s Yukio Mishima. Brief biographies of each author are also provided, offering introductions to these world-famous writers as well as their stories about the challenges and joys of growing up.
Pulitzer Prize-winning short story author Robert Olen Butler, good writing revolves around the yearning of a main character. In his book From Where You Dream, a collection of lectures about the art of writing fiction, Butler examines this sense of yearning, which he claims is necessary for developing believable characterization. There are various forms of yearning. In popular fiction meant to entertain, the protagonist might yearn for a woman or a man, want power or
money, or desire an adventure in some exotic location. But in literary fiction, which is written on a deeper, more thoughtful level, the protagonist’s desires are ‘‘on the order of: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other.’’ Both levels of yearning is what drives the plot forward. As readers might conclude, it is the narrator’s desire that provides the momentum for the plot in Wetherell’s short story. The question is not
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Wetherell has written a collection of essays about his experiences in Yellowstone National Park in the book Yellowstone Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous Land (2009). The author packed his fishing equipment and spent three weeks in this wilderness, pondering the meaning of his life and the effect of the natural world upon him. One reviewer called this collection a reflection of a coming-of-age story. In this case, however, the so-called adolescent is a man facing middle age. In North of Now: A Celebration of Country and the Soon to Be Gone (2002), Wetherell writes about the beauty of the mountainous western New Hampshire land on which he has lived most of his life. The author explores the simple pleasures he has enjoyed, such as his love of poetry, fishing, and stargazing. He shares his experiences of living a simple life, providing examples and encouragement for others to follow in his path.
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yearns for. Sheila is more of an object for the narrator than a person. DOES THE YOUNG PROTAGONIST MERELY WANT TO CATCH A FISH OR WIN A DATE WITH HIS FEMALE NEIGHBOR OR DOES HE LONG FOR SOMETHING MORE MEANINGFUL?’’
whether the narrator yearns but rather how deeply that yearning is felt. Are the narrator’s desires superficial, making this story one of pure entertainment, or does the narrator yearn for something more substantial? Does the young protagonist merely want to catch a fish or win a date with his female neighbor or does he long for something more meaningful? Wetherell’s short story begins on a simple note. The young protagonist declares his strong attraction to two things: fishing and Sheila Mant. The setting is one of summer warmth, with a lazy river that passes in front of the vacation cottages. Sheila, who lives next door, has a family that is nothing like the narrator’s. The difference enchants the young protagonist. The sounds, sights, and revelry of their late-night parties draw him in—at least as a hidden observer. He longs to be a part of his neighbor’s world. He yearns to gain entrance through the middle child of the family, namely, Sheila. She is three years older than he is, which puts her almost out of reach. But this does not dissuade him. The narrator tells the reader what he knows about Sheila. All of his information is gathered from afar. Most of the details of what he knows he has made up, arriving at conclusions without verifying them. As far as the reader knows, the narrator has never spoken to Sheila. She has hardly looked his way. At the beginning of this story, Sheila is not much more than the narrator’s fantasy. The protagonist knows Sheila only from the external factors of her life. He watches. He observes how she moves. He notices how other men react to her. At this point he is attracted to Sheila based on how she looks, how she carries herself. There is little evidence that the narrator even knows what her voice sounds like. He has no sense of what she thinks or believes. He does not know what she likes or
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Because the narrator barely knows Sheila and because he is young and probably inexperienced in the realm of dating, he reacts to her superficially. He tries to impress her with the beauty of his swim strokes as he pulls himself back and forth across the river. When that does not win her attention, he draws nearer and dives off the raft. This is the most he can muster, for he still does not have enough courage to talk to her. That does not happen until the summer is about to end. In late August, he finally confronts her. To the readers’s surprise—and maybe to his own astonishment—the narrator’s first words are to tell Sheila she is not playing her position correctly in a family softball game. It is obvious from the narrator’s comments that he knows how to play softball. This knowledge encourages him to speak up and offer advice. His knowing the rules and tactics of the game makes him feel at home with himself. So he speaks with authority. But then he tells the first of many lies. He tells Sheila that he understands why she prefers playing at a distance from the base, when, in fact, he does not understand this at all. These actions demonstrate that although he is confident about the ball game, he lacks courage when it comes to Sheila. He wants to win her like a trophy. To do so, he thinks, he must become someone else, so he tells her things he does not believe. Sheila agrees to go on a date with the narrator. Since readers are not privy to Sheila’s thoughts, they do not know why she has agreed to do so. In the course of their traveling down the river to the concert, Sheila provides no sign that she is interested in the narrator. Though the narrator appears unconcerned by her lack of attention, readers can sense it. She does not direct even one question at the narrator to gather information about him. It is easy to conclude that Sheila’s yearnings for the narrator are nil. Sheila is clearly not propelling this story. She is only indirectly involved in the plot. She is merely the object of the narrator’s yearnings. All eyes are on the narrator throughout the rest of the story. He has so much desire welling up inside him that he is about to burst. But how can readers define and classify the nature of his yearning? The first type has just been mentioned: he wants Sheila. This is a boy-wants-girl type of yearning. Though the narrator is fixated on Sheila, she could be almost any of a thousand
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teenage girls that he could desire. Since he knows so little about her, another pretty girl could walk by, show him a little attention, and he might easily drop Sheila for the new girl. The fish, however, is a different story. The narrator knows a lot more about fish than he does about Sheila Mant. He is well aware of the fish’s habitat, drive for survival, and manner of fighting to get free. He has not only observed similar fish but has practiced various ways to catch them. Every time the fish takes a different tack, the narrator counters successfully. He outmaneuvers the fish, knowing when to let the fish run the line and when to reel him in. Though this creates confidence, it would be hard to conclude that the narrator’s yearning to catch the fish goes much deeper than his desire to win Sheila. However, there is a slight difference between them. With the fish the narrator can be himself. There is no deceit involved. The narrator is free to express himself without restriction. This makes the yearning more real and possibly a little deeper. However, there is something else going on in this story.
Sheila but also betrayed a part of himself. That is his deepest yearning in this story: to learn to know himself better.
If Wetherell’s story were only about a young boy trying to catch a fish as well as a date with a young girl, it would be a rather superficial tale. However, the story captures the reader’s attention on a deeper level. Why is that? Why does the narrator lament losing the fish more than he regrets the loss of Sheila? Robert Olen Butler suggests that readers and writers should attempt to capture the deepest level of a character’s yearning. Looking beyond the fish and the seventeen-year-old Sheila, readers might find that the narrator is really searching for himself. One reason he might have been more disappointed about the loss of the fish could be that in his struggle to catch the bass he was discovering more about how he truly felt. Fishing provided a more natural setting for the narrator. The battle with the fish was more real. On the other hand, everything about Sheila was either false or a fantasy. ‘‘You’re a funny kid, you know that?,’’ Sheila states at the end of the story. This appears to offend the narrator more than anything else she has done or said. The narrator finds these words accusatory, as if there were something wrong in his being himself. The mistake that the narrator refers to in the last sentence does not reflect on either the loss of the fish or the loss of his crush on Sheila. Rather, it seems to imply that the mistake he made that night was that he not only sacrificed the fish for
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Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Jeff Zaleski In the following review, Zaleski describes A Century of November as poignant and probing. Wetherell (Morning; Chekhov’s Sister) traces the arc of a father’s loss in this poignant, probing story about a Canadian judge who journeys from Vancouver to the European battlefield where his son died during the waning days of WWI. Charles Marden is a widower quietly absorbed in his life as a rural magistrate, but his foreboding is also revealed immediately: ‘‘He judged men and he grew apples and it was a perilous autumn for both.’’ When he learns that his son, William, has been killed in battle, he immediately decides to visit his grave. Marden is initially denied permission to visit Flanders by the British authorities, but the sudden end of the war changes his situation, and his journey becomes more urgent when he learns that William had impregnated a girl from Belfast, Elaine Reed, who is already in Europe at the battle site. The plot takes several odd, macabre turns once Marden reaches the village where William died, especially when he has to make a deal with a shell-shocked soldier in order to visit the exact death site and learn the particulars of William’s final hours. Wetherell’s prose and character writing are unflinching, and the final meeting between Marden and Reed is gut-wrenching. Though the novel travels a welltrodden route, Wetherell’s take on a parent’s anguish is deeply moving. Source: Jeff Zaleski, Review of A Century of November, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 251, No. 42, October 18, 2004, p. 49.
Jeff Zaleski In the following review, Zaleski describes Morning as ambitious and inventive with its free use of historical material from television. Capturing the high spirits and excitement of television in the early 1950s, when no one was sure yet what might be successful, Wetherell builds a dramatic story on the format and best-remembered personalities of TV’s original Today show, complete with its bespectacled star with his outheld palm as a signoff and his
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Bass fishing is a metaphor for dating. (Image copyright Dewitt, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
chimpanzee sidekick. The delight of this imaginatively told narrative lies in how fully it makes use of the history and technology of the early years of television, and how little it depends upon exploiting familiar personalities. The casting, rapid rise and hectic career of Morning host Alec McGowan comes to an abrupt end in 1954 when he is shot and murdered on the air by his announcer and longtime sidekick from radio days, Chet Standish. That story is now being reconstructed in the winter of 2000 by Chet’s son and Alec’s namesake, Alec Brown, the book’s narrator, who is researching a biography of Alec McGowan and about to meet his father, now aged and dying of cancer, on his release from prison. Cast superficially in the mold of reportorial novels of the ’50s like The Great Man, which purport to dig up the private truth about a recognizable public figure, this ambitious and inventive novel makes free use of its historical material, creating a story with meaning and dramatic weight entirely its own.
Forecast: Wetherell’s work is well known in the northeast; this is his seventh book of fiction (previous novels include The Man Who Loved Levittown; Wherever That Great Heart May Be), and his nonfiction titles include a Smithsonian guide to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. He’s a new author for Pantheon, and their confidence that he’s a rising star is motivating a 50,000 first printing and a seven-city author tour. Expect strong regional sales and, if the push works, national success as well.
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Source: Jeff Zaleski, Review of Morning, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 248, No. 8, February 19, 2001, pp. 67–69.
Jeff Hull In the following review, Hull praises Wetherell’s ability to bring out tone and imagery on a subject like fly fishing. Tired and dejected one evening following a day of unprecedented snobbery by the trout in a favorite stretch of my home river in western
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Montana, I opened W. D. Wetherell’s One River More. I was hoping to read about somebody having a better day than mine, then drift off to sleep, but Wetherell was having none of that. He cradled my cerebral cortex and submerged me in his stories—later, when I wasn’t looking, even reaching down to fiddle with my heartstrings. In a genre crowded with cranks and curmudgeons, Wetherell’s writing rings brilliant like the light of the first 50-degree day in a winterlocked snowscape. If you’ve ever stood in a river—actually stood still and absorbed the surroundings for even the briefest of moments—you will appreciate this book. You’ll appreciate this writer, who clearly understands how words commingle, trickle together, and pour into the depths of our psyche. Turns of Wetherell’s phrases eddy through the work as he writes of trout rising in ‘‘busy little sips, as if someone underwater was sticking up a thumb and stirring the surface in quick clockwise swirls,’’ and ‘‘the black hole carved in the river’’ by a fish’s escape.
Wetherell openly states his feeling that fly fishing has recently ‘‘seen much lost in terms of quietude and contentment, modesty and simplicity, solidarity and fellowship . . . ’’ He rightly bemoans the ‘‘commercialization of a sport that should offer a refreshing antidote to commercialization.’’ And yet, he understands that, however annoying, this is not the central problem in the Big Picture. This, from ‘‘Her Woods Still,’’ is ‘‘What’s changed the most . . . [is] the baggage we all carry now of knowing too much. Too much about what? About the threats the last beautiful places in the world are subject to even in the best of circumstances, when their rareness and isolation are alone enough to make them targets.’’ One River More is, Wetherell claims, his last book of essays about fishing. I for one am going to scream and holler about his decision for this reason: If each new Wetherell essay can influence just one other fly fisher to observe the world with the humble sense of wow the author possesses, their value to our lives approaches the incalculable.
What is One River More about? Well, in the chapter ‘‘Her Woods Still,’’ Wetherell pays elegant tribute to writer Louise Dickinson Rich and her Rangely Lakes in western Maine. In ‘‘Cohorts’’ he speaks of fishing friendships, defining in their essence ‘‘the ability, most of all, to be young together, if only for the space of an afternoon, work like men and women at being boys and girls.’’ A good chunk of the book’s volume is occupied by Wetherell’s introduction to, discovery of, and growing love affair with the upper Connecticut River. Other essays cover fishing private waters and exploring the flowing treasures of Yellowstone Park. But essentially, One River More is a primer on how to act around rivers: how to approach them, how to engage with them, and how to keep them in our lives. Wetherell recounts with horror his arriving at a favorite hole and finding another fisherman already plying the waters: ‘‘I watch—and realize . . . that he has his head tucked in tight toward his shoulder, holding by this pressure, as he continues to cast, a cellular phone. Who’s he calling? ‘‘A beautiful river, a perfect day, a tonic to the sense. All this means nothing to him—for him, it’s just another in the endless series of places where he can be reached.’’
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Source: Jeff Hull, ‘‘On the Bookshelf,’’ in Fly Fisherman, Vol. 30, No. 3, March 1999.
Virginia Quarterly Review In the following review, Wetherell is credited with deepening and broadening his writing range through his sense of history, landscape and character. In his new collection, the author of The Man Who Loved Levittown has deepened and broadened his range. Wetherell’s craft in these nine stories, his use of landscape and character, is more refined and ambitious, his vision emboldened by a deeper sense of history. In the title piece, an old man who once tried to bribe the customs house of Melville reflects on the power of stories. ‘‘In a Maritime Province’’ follows a photographer who must look to his daughter for guidance in grieving for his dead wife. And in a minor masterpiece simply entitled ‘‘The Snow,’’ a young boy trapped in his family’s cabin learns, through gestures both subtle and wrenching, about extremities of love, madness, courage, betrayal, and death. In the hands of a lesser stylist, these tales might turn melodramatic, but Wetherell’s steady hand delivers the simple pleasures of plot and human revelation. Oldfashioned virtues, these, and if Wetherell plays a fiat note here, it is only when he tackles subjects that call for spare, ironic treatment, such as the media and politics. When he stays in the mode of
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modern fable, he is as good as any story writer working. Source: ‘‘Notes On Current Books: Fiction,’’ Review of Wherever That Great Heart May Be, in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 72, No. 4, Autumn 1996.
Thomas E. Kennedy In the following review, Kennedy discusses several of Wetherell’s short story works and admits that though his themes vary, he shows mastery in the surreal and exhibits a creative imagination. W. D. Wetherell’s third book and first shortstory collection, The Man Who Loved Levittown, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for 1985, opens with the title story about a man in desperate battle to preserve the neighborhood in which he has lived his prime. The past, of course, must always give way to the future, and just as his beloved housing tract displaced the Long Island farms and farmers there before it, so too do the sixties and seventies generations replace him and Mr. Levitt’s dream. One has a sense that it is the wistful beauty of our very perishability that Wetherell is celebrating here the sounds and vision of dads and sons playing ball on the lawn on summer evenings, the memory of neighbors without fences eager to be friends: ‘‘There wasn’t anything we wouldn’t do for each other . . . ’’ and ‘‘There wasn’t anything we couldn’t build or fix between us.’’ But no one can fix time; it builds and breaks as unimpeachably as an ocean wave. A similar, if more bitter theme emerges from the book’s second story about an unemployed father who drives his young son to reject the optimism of his grandfather, while in the third story, a bachelor who has long since seen the moment of his greatness flicker does battle on the tennis court with his survivor of a sister over the future of the family name. One of the highlights of the book, Nickel a Throw, begins with a man at a charity bazaar good-naturedly offering himself to be dunked for a nickel a throw; as he tries to drum up business by goading passersby, however, he suddenly discovers his own dark power to home in on the jugular and becomes the center of a spectacle of surreal terror. No two stories here are alike, as Wetherell shows his mastery of verisimilitude alongside his skill with surreality and metafictional technique. The experiments, though, are always sufficiently reined to maintain the concentration of their
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force. Thus, we do not doubt the reality of the group of people driving a whale in a tank through midland America so spectators can touch it for a quarter a feel. And in a tale of high school students SO wrapped up in their term play that one youthful actor, enraged by the script-dictated behavior of another, punches him in the mouth, the questioning of borders between art and life has a vitality far beyond the dusty shelves of literary theory. Like his 1981 novel, Souvenirs (Random House), the collection’s closing piece, ‘‘Spitfire Autumn,’’ again deals with the tension between past, present, and future; this time not in postVietnam America, but in post-WWII England, where the faded miracle of British wartime spirit must step aside on London’s streets for the affluent Germans and their economic miracle. Again, we experience the sad celebration of our vanishing greatness. But as the author recalls on one of his Vermont River essays (Winchester Press, 1984) about having once flown in a plane that kept pace with the setting sun for an hour or more: because the sunset did not fade, it carried ‘‘no regret, no ending, and lost half of its beauty for that reason.’’ A two-time O. Henry prize winner whose stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the national P.E.N. syndicate, Wetherell has a courageous imagination which succeeds in its quest for the wholeness of things—their births, and their deaths. Source: Thomas E. Kennedy , Review of The Man Who Loved Levittown, in Hollins Critic, Vol. 23, No. 1, February 1986, p. 12.
SOURCES ‘‘American Heritage Rivers,’’ in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/rivers/98rivers/ fsconn.html (accessed August 30, 2009). Boyer, Allen, Review of The Man Who Loved Levittown, in Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1986, p. 3. Butler, Robert Olen, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, Grove Press, 2005. Connecticut River Watch Program, http://www.conservect. org/ctrivercoastal/riverwatch/ (accessed August 30, 2009). Hard, Walter R., The Connecticut, 2nd ed., University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. ‘‘Health Consultation: Technical Review of the Connecticut River Fish Tissue Contamination Study,’’ in U.S. Department
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of Health and Human Services, http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ HAC/pha//ConnecticutRiver/CTRiverContamination_HC062806. pdf (accessed August 30, 2009). Kennedy, Thomas E., Review of The Man Who Loved Levittown, in Hollins Critic, Vol. 23, No. 1, February 1986, p. 12. Stoddard, Andrew, ‘‘Connecticut River Case Study,’’ in Municipal Wastewater Treatment, Wiley, 2002, pp. 199–205. Ward, Robert, ‘‘Suburban Cowboy and Others,’’ in New York Times, January 5, 1986, p. 8. Wetherell, W. D., ‘‘The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant,’’ in The Man Who Loved Levittown, Avon Books, 1985, pp. 47–53.
FURTHER READING Bissland, Jim, Long River Winding: Life, Love, and Death along the Connecticut, Berkshire House Publishers, 2003. Bissland explores the cities and towns along the Connecticut River as he boats from the Long Island Sound to the backwoods of New Hampshire. His focus is on the people whose lives are affected by the river as well as the river’s history. Burke, Monte, Sowbelly: The Obsessive Quest for the World-Record Largemouth Bass, Plume, 2006. A fisherman as well as a staff writer for Forbes magazine, Burke recounts a journey he took to find others who have taken up the cause of catching the largest largemouth bass. The record was set in 1932, when a farmer caught a fish weighing twenty-two pounds, four ounces. That record has yet to be broken. In this collection, Burke brings to life the characters who become obsessed with catching the biggest largemouth bass ever. The Connecticut River Boating Guide, Connecticut River Watershed Council, Falcon, 2007. The definitive guide for anyone interested in navigating the Connecticut River, this book
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provides information about the river, from the Canadian border to the Long Island Sound. Gourley, Catherine, Gidgets and Women Warriors: Perceptions of Women in the 1950s and 1960s, Twentyfirst Century Books, 2007. Gourley covers such topics as women in the U.S. Senate, evolving definitions of femininity in the mid-twentieth century, what teens were doing in this time period, and civil protests. Iaconelli, Mike, Fishing on the Edge, Delacorte Press, 2006. Some readers might want to know how a tattooed New Jersey college graduate ever became a prize-winning fisherman. In this book, Iaconelli tells all. His story, which does not follow any of the typical paths, reveals how he has earned more than a million dollars. Iaconelli even won the 2003 CITGO Bassmaster Classic, which is considered the Super Bowl of competitive fishing. Iaconelli not only tells his story but provides tips showing how anyone can become as successful as he is on the fishing tour. Kallen, Stuart, Women in History—Women of the 1960s, Lucent Books, 2003. In this young-adult book, the author provides a review of a turbulent decade in American history. Kallen’s topics include the feminist movement as well as the fight for civil rights. Readers will find information about social and cultural history, belief systems, and legacies that women left behind during this decade. The book is easy to read and offers several illustrations. Touglas, Michael, River Days: Exploring the Connecticut River and Its History from Source to Sea, Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 2001. Touglas successfully follows his boyhood dream of playing out the role of Huck Finn and floating down a river in order to get to know it. The Connecticut River, which has been designated an American Heritage River, becomes the author’s home as he relates his adventures, his fishing tales, as well as the river’s history.
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Day of the Butterfly ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ was included in Alice Munro’s first published collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories, published in 1968. Many of Munro’s early stories, including ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ are set in Ontario, Canada, where she grew up. An earlier version of the story was written in 1953 and published in July 1956 as ‘‘Goodbye Myra’’ in Chatelaine, a women’s magazine. Munro revised the story for publication in 1968 in Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories, changing the ending slightly and transforming the narrative from a story suitable for a popular women’s magazine into a more literary work. To do this, the child narrator changed from a simple first-person narrator to a more introspective narrator, who is more cynical and more adult in considering the events of the story. ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ is also included in the 2004 anthology World Literature: Anthology of Short Stories, Poetry, and Drama, published by McGraw-Hill.
ALICE MUNRO 1968
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Munro was born on July 10, 1931, just outside Wingham, a small town in western Ontario. Her father, Robert Laidlaw, was an unsuccessful silver fox breeder whose business failed completely during the Depression. Her mother, Ann, who had been a teacher, helped her husband sell the pelts from their foxes. The Laidlaw family was
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The publication of Munro’s third collection of short stories, Who Do You Think You Are?, earned Munro a second Governor General’s Literary Award. She won this award for a third time in 1986 for The Progress of Love, which was also awarded the Marian Engel Award. In the years that followed, Munro continued to write short stories, some of which were published in the New Yorker and in the Atlantic Monthly.
Alice Munro (AP Images)
poor, especially after the fox farm failed, and they lived in a poor area just outside town. Munro began writing short stories when she was twelve and continued to write after she left Wingham to attend university. She won a scholarship to attend the University of Western Ontario in 1949 but was forced to leave after two years when the scholarship ended. Rather than return to her home in 1951, she decided to marry fellow student James Munro. During the more than twenty years of their marriage, they had four daughters, one of whom died in infancy. The Munro family lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, for many years, but eventually they moved to Victoria, where they opened a bookstore. During the time in Vancouver, Munro wrote infrequently, but after the move to Victoria, she once again began writing short stories.
Collections of Munro’s stories have been published as Moons of Jupiter (1982), Friend of My Youth (1990), and Open Secrets, which won the W.H. Smith Award for the best book published in the United Kingdom in 1995. Selected Stories and The Love of a Good Woman were both published in 1998, with the second book winning the Giller Prize. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001); Runaway (2004), which also won the Giller Prize; and The View from Castle Rock (2006) continue to show Munro’s love of the short story as a way to explore the lives of girls and her own family’s past life. Too Much Happiness, another short-story collection, was published in 2009. Munro was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction in 2009. This award, which includes a 60,000pound monetary award, acknowledges a lifetime of exceptional writing.
Munro’s first collection of short stories, which includes ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ and other short stories written in the 1950s and 1960s, was published as Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968. This first book won the Governor General’s Literary Award, Canada’s highest literary honor. In 1971, Munro’s only novel, Lives of Girls and Women, was published and was awarded the Canadian Booksellers Association International Book of the Year Award. The following year, Munro left her husband and moved back to Ontario, where she began teaching creative writing classes at the University of Western Ontario. Another collection of short stories, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, was published in 1973. Munro and her husband divorced in 1976, and she married Gerald Fremlin that same year.
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PLOT SUMMARY ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ is told from the perspective of Helen, and begins with Helen’s memories of Myra, a young girl with whom she attended grade school. Though Myra had attended the same school for a couple of years, Helen only remembers the last year, the year they were both in Grade Six. In Helen’s recollections, Myra is responsible for taking her younger brother, Jimmy, to the bathroom. After Jimmy wets his pants one day, Myra and her brother become the focus of school bullies. Jimmy is unable to go to the playground, since other boys will chase him and beat him with tree branches. The playground at school is divided into separate boys and girls sections. Because Myra protects her brother, she cannot enter the playground to play with the girls. Instead, Myra and Jimmy stand together and watch the other children playing. When the teacher, Miss Darling, notices that Myra seems alone and lonely, she asks the
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Although Munro has not recorded ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ she has recorded another short-story collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship (2002), performed by Kymberly Dakin, published by BBCA (480 minutes). Another collection of Munro’s short stories, Too Much Happiness (2009), has been recorded and produced by Random House (600 minutes).
other girls in the class to be nicer to Myra. The girls have no respect for their teacher, who is young, inexperienced, and unsure of her own authority. Soon the girls, led by Gladys, the most popular girl in Grade Six, begin to ridicule Myra and tease her. The girls approach in groups of three or four to tease Myra about her hair or the way she smells. Myra smells of rotten fruit because her parents run a small fruit store, where her father sits chewing garlic all day, while her mother waits on the customers. One day as Helen is walking to school, she sees Myra and Jimmy walking ahead of her. Helen thinks that Myra is walking slowly, hoping that Helen will catch up to her and walk with her. Helen understands this loitering behavior, since she has herself engaged in it when there has been a popular girl walking behind her as she trudged up the hill to the school. Helen decides to walk with Myra and offer her some of her Cracker Jack treats. As they walk, Helen makes an effort to befriend Myra, drawing comparisons between their lives and asking and answering questions about school and their classes. Myra reads and enjoys the same comics in the newspaper as Helen does, which surprises Helen, who urges Myra to keep the prize in the box of Cracker Jack. Myra gratefully accepts. When the two girls touch hands, Helen seems surprised to discover that Myra’s skin feels just like her own. This is also the first place where Helen mentions
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that Myra’s skin is brown. Her race or ethnic origins are never explicitly revealed, but her race or ethnicity might play a role in why she has become the class scapegoat. The two girls exchange information about their birthday months, but as they part, Helen worries that someone in school will learn that she has given Myra the prize from the Cracker Jack box.
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Myra disappears from school soon after this walk. About a month after Myra disappears, Gladys tells everyone that Myra is in the hospital. Myra has leukemia, although Gladys is unable to articulate the actual name of the disease. Gladys has learned of Myra’s illness from her aunt, a nurse at the hospital. Miss Darling has the entire class write a letter to Myra, in which they tell her that they hope she will soon be well. Miss Darling decides that some of the students should go to the hospital and give Myra a birthday party. It is March and Myra’s birthday is in July, but Miss Darling is insistent on an early celebration, in spite of Helen’s objections. The class becomes focused on planning the birthday party and conveniently forgets that they previously did not like Myra. When Miss Darling and Myra’s classmates show up at the hospital, laden with gifts and ready to celebrate her birthday, Myra looks at them as she did when she stood apart from them at school, as an outsider. She is suspicious and insists that her birthday is in July, not March. She is pleased, though, at the attention and opens her gifts, thanking each of her classmates as she does so. The air is one of celebration, although Myra is not as happy as her classmates. The party atmosphere transforms the girls in Myra’s class from bullies to caring classmates, although their air of concern is designed only for the celebration that have spent so much time planning. When visiting hours end and the girls and their teacher file out, Myra calls Helen back into the room. She wants to give Helen one of the gifts she has received and chooses a small grooming case that Helen has admired. The gift is a bond between them, as Myra makes clear, when she tells Helen that after she returns home from the hospital that Helen should come and play with her. For Helen, the toiletries case represents danger. Furthering her friendship with Myra would put Helen’s own social status at risk. Helen hears the sounds of children playing outside as winter turns to spring. These sounds are a reminder that Myra might not live to come home
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for the next change of season. When the nurse returns and shoos Helen from the room, she is relieved to be gone and leave Myra behind.
CHARACTERS Miss Darling Miss Darling is the teacher for Grade Six. Young and inexperienced, she is more concerned about her own image than in dealing with the bullying that occurs in class. She lacks self-confidence and is unsure about what she should do. The older, more experienced teachers ignore the children at recess. They go into the teacher’s lounge and let the children do what children do at recess. Miss Darling, on the other hand, watches the children at play and is described as trying to direct their play or their actions. She is not at ease and is overly earnest about directing the girls in Grade Six, whom she asks to be nicer to Myra. The children easily pick up on Miss Darling’s uncertainty and exploit it. Because she has no understanding of adolescent behavior or of how bullying works, Miss Darling is completely unaware that pushing the girls to be nicer to Myra will have exactly the opposite effect and lead to more cruelty. Although the girls in the class have not paid much attention to Myra in the past, Miss Darling’s interference causes Myra to become an object of ridicule and harassment. Miss Darling’s desire to have a birthday party for Myra at the hospital is done more for herself, to make her feel good as a competent teacher, than it is to benefit Myra.
Gladys Healey Gladys is the leader of the popular girls. She is better dressed than the other girls, due to her father’s ownership of the local dry-goods store. She is also physically more mature than the other girls, which makes her the object of envy. Gladys possesses a forceful personality and so is a natural leader. All of the other girls do as Gladys directs because her manner demands obedience. When Miss Darling asks the girls to be nicer to Myra, Gladys begins to imitate Miss Darling, and soon all of the girls are imitating Miss Darling. The sound that Gladys makes when Miss Darling asks the girls to be nice to Myra is described as a ‘‘coo.’’ A coo is a soft murmur, a sound of contentment, which described how pleased Gladys is when Miss Darling provides the opportunity to challenge her teacher’s authority.
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Helen Helen is the narrator of ‘‘Day of the Butterfly.’’ She lives in the country on a farm, but her father pays extra money so that Helen can attend school in town, where the school and teachers are better. Helen’s mother is described as ambitious and wants her daughter to get a better education. Helen is the only one in the class who carries her sandwiches in a lunch pail. She eats in the cloakroom by herself every day and must wear boots because of the mud on the country road. She is already different than her classmates and so exists barely on the fringe of the popular girls. When the opportunity to speak with Myra presents itself, Helen is unsure what to do because she does not want to be seen speaking with Myra, since a perceived friendship with Myra would put her own popularity at risk. However, Helen also likes the idea that by speaking to Myra, she can appear to be more benevolent, and she cannot resist Myra’s admiration. When she tells Myra she wishes she could be like her, Helen feels quite altruistic and generous in befriending a girl that no one else likes. Although not completely confident about her position in the class hierarchy, Helen is sure about her career plans: she will be an airline hostess. Helen’s memories of Myra suggest that she feels some guilt over her treatment of a young girl who later died.
Jimmy Sayla Jimmy is described as being in Grade One and needing his sister’s help to go to the bathroom. When he is unable to get there in time, he wets himself. The narrator says that Jimmy is often kept inside the school at recess as punishment for breaking rules, although what exactly he does is not stated. Jimmy is described as looking like his sister: hunched over, thin, with long dark hair. He often looks sad, secretive, and tired. His appearance gives nothing away about who he is or his life. He holds onto his knowledge and keeps it close to him.
Myra Sayla Myra is physically like her brother. She appears hunched over, thin, with long dark hair, braided and twisted around her head. Like her brother, Myra also looks sad, secretive, and tired. Her appearance also divulges no information about who she is, how she is feeling, or what is happening in her life. She and her brother are compared to wooden carvings, which display no personality
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or content: they are flat and unresponsive. Myra wears her mother’s dresses to school. They are made over to fit her, but these clothes, along with her appearance, make her stand out as different from her peers. She is forced to be responsible for her little brother, and so is further set apart. Her speech is awkward and her command of English is limited. The teacher corrects Myra’s speech, which suggests that she is an immigrant unfamiliar with English. Myra is shy and unsure when Helen speaks with her as they walk to school. Myra wants to keep the conversation going and obviously searches for commonalities that the two girls might share. She is nervous and somewhat unsure about Helen initially, but soon feels more relaxed. In the final scene in the hospital, the narrator mentions twice that Myra’s skin is brown, which continues the emphasis on Myra as different from the other children. Unlike Helen, Myra has no career plans laid out before her. She thinks she will grow up to help her parents in the store. Children working with their parents to make a success of a new business is a common immigrant experience.
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Exclusion Myra breaks social expectations and traditions in many ways, is excluded from class and recess activities, and becomes a target for ridicule. Myra’s caring for her little brother is responsible for her exclusion from her classmates’ activities. Jimmy is in Grade One, while Myra is Grade Six. He cannot go to the bathroom by himself and so Myra must accompany him. If he has an accident, and it is suggested that he frequently does have accidents, she must take him home, necessitating additional absences from her classmates. Myra must care for her much younger brother, both during class time and also during recess, which requires that she stand on the back porch of the school with him. She cannot join in recess activities with the girls in her class. This is another way in which Myra is isolated from her peers. The very fact that there is a boys’ side and a girls’ side in the playground, with an invisible border that no one crosses, is further evidence of the conformity expected of students, who must adhere to traditions that divide the class.
Miss Darling’s instructions to the class to be nice to Myra have exactly the opposite effect. The children not only begin to make fun of Miss Darling by imitating her words and actions, but they begin to treat Myra more cruelly, with little regard for her feelings. Before Miss Darling interferes, Myra is excluded from play and ignored, which is a different kind of cruelty, but after the teacher interferes in class dynamics, Myra is treated with contempt. Helen describes an escalation of meanness after the teacher gets involved, in which small groups of girls approach Myra to taunt her about her hair or her smell. The girls engage in a kind of mob behavior. None of the girls approach Myra individually to mock her unless they are in groups of three or four. The ridicule of Myra is so intense that Helen feels a sense of danger in just being seen walking and talking with her classmate. When forced to write a letter wishing Myra a quick recovery and return to school, the girls are oblivious to the fact that they are inviting Myra to return to her position as class scapegoat.
Helen tells readers that Myra was likely a student in her small school for at least a couple of years before she became aware of her. This suggests that Myra was not always the class scapegoat and target for abuse, even though her appearance is different from that of her classmates. Myra first comes to her classmate’s attention when she asks her teacher for permission to take her brother to the bathroom. Miss Darling corrects Myra’s use of English, which causes the class to focus their attention on Myra as an outsider. Myra does not look or dress like her classmates. Her skin is brown, and she wears dresses of taffeta and crepe that are too fancy for school and are too large for her. They are women’s dresses that have been cut down, but they fit Myra poorly, further setting her apart from her classmates whose appearances and clothing conform to schoolgirl expectations. Myra also appears to be sad and always tired, with the kind of flat look that suggests a piece of art and not a person. Her appearance and demeanor are not understood by her classmates. As a result, Myra becomes an enigma to her teacher and to the girls in her class. When she cannot be decoded as easily as her classmates, they cast her aside. These facets of her appearance and personality, when added to her obligation for her brother, conspire to make Myra stand apart from her classmates, both literally and symbolically.
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THEMES Cruelty
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Watch the film Mean Girls and write an essay comparing the themes in both the film and in Munro’s story ‘‘Day of the Butterfly.’’ Read one of Roald Dahl’s short stories and compare it to Munro’s story ‘‘Day of the Butterfly.’’ Write an essay in which you compare the two writers’ stories, focusing on the differences and similarities in voice and topic. Consider if there is a difference between a male and female author and whether each author approaches the life of a teenager differently. One source suitable for young adults is Dahl’s short stories Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, published in 1992 by Penguin. Munro uses events and people from her past to create characters and plots in her stories. Choose one of your own memories and use it as the basis for a short story. Like Munro, you should change the factual details to suit your plot and theme. Present your story to the class in an oral report and explain what choices you made in changing facts to fiction and why. There is a difference between writing stories and telling stories. Children are told stories, but Munro writes stories. Try to answer this question: what do you see as the difference between telling stories and writing stories? Research the history of the oral narrative. Look for information about when the oral narrative was replaced by the written
Myra becomes even more excluded when she becomes ill. She is physically set apart from her classmates when she is unable to attend school and is hospitalized. Myra is forced to celebrate her birthday months early because Miss Darling decrees that she must, and because she is about to die. The event is described by Munro as one of gaiety and excitement, but not for the object of the party. Myra sits apart on a hospital bed, dressed in a hospital gown. She is going to die soon, which is of course, the ultimate act of exclusion from her classmates.
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narrative. Then you need to create a poster or PowerPoint presentation, which you will use in your oral presentation of the history of both kinds of narratives, what you think was lost and gained by the transition from spoken stories to written stories, and what you see as the essential differences between these two narrative styles.
Like poetry, prose should create images and pictures in the reader’s mind. Draw or illustrate one of the images that Munro’s story created in your mind as you were reading. You can use photography if you choose. Write an essay that explains how you chose your image and what you think your image adds to your understanding of ‘‘Day of the Butterfly.’’
Munro’s story is a reminder that school bullies have always been a part of childhood experiences. With two or three other classmates, create a group presentation that reports on bullying in schools and what schools are now doing to control or stop the problem. Divide the work by assigning different chores to each member of the group. Good group presentations involve multimedia, and so take the time to prepare a PowerPoint presentation that includes graphs, photos, and statistics. Be sure to prepare handouts for your classmates, which should include a bibliography of your sources.
STYLE Foreshadowing Foreshadowing is a technique that allows the writer to create a darker mood by suggesting an ominous change in events in the future. In a detective story, a writer might use foreshadowing to provide clues to help a reader solve the crime. In ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ Munro uses foreshadowing at the end of the story to suggest that Myra’s future is dark and uncertain. The children playing outside in the last snow of
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Butterfly (Image copyright Plotnikoff, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
winter, as the season transforms into spring, is a reminder that Myra may not be alive for the next snows of winter. Although Myra hopes for a future in which she and Helen are friends, foreshadowing suggests that Myra may not have any kind of future.
Narrator In a short story or novel, the term narrator is used to describe the person who tells the story. Helen is the narrator in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ and she is also the protagonist, the central character. When the narrator is a single person, the story is limited to that person’s point of view. She tells the story and interprets it for the reader, who learns something about the characters in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ and almost nothing about their stories. This is because the other characters’ stories are filtered through the single narrator’s eyes. The firstperson narrator is limited to only the details experienced by or told to her. Helen lacks the omniscient view of a third-person narrator, in which the author serves as the narrator, offering all views. In some cases, authors use multiple narrators, in which several characters tell their
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stories. This gives the reader the opportunity to see the characters from multiple perspectives. Since Munro uses only one narrator, readers are limited in their understanding of characters’ motivations for their actions. However, since Helen is recalling the story from a distance, and presumably as an adult, her first-person narration is also colored by memory, as she recalls the events through the passage of time.
Short Story A short story must, because of its brevity, define characters through their actions. There is no time to develop characters as a result of actions, as there is in the longer novel when an author can establish a clear cause-and-effect action. The short-story author must unite plot, themes, characters, mood, and tone using only a few words in order to create a narrative that reveals the author’s purpose in constructing the story. Since the writer has less time to create meaning, the short story is usually considered a more formal narrative than the novel. This shorter narrative contains a distinct beginning, middle, and end, unlike the novel which has the length to
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permit deviations from this tight structure. In ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ Munro carefully constructs her characters through their actions. This characterization through action is seen in the depiction of the personalities of Helen and Myra. The reader understands that Helen is caught up in her desire to appear benevolent, as the reader learns directly from her thoughts; however, her actions in befriending Myra also reveal that she is a kinder person than Gladys. Myra, on the other hand, is shy and nervous on the girls’ first walk together. Readers do not know what she is thinking, but her frequent glances at the ground and to the side reveal her shyness and uncertainty.
Symbolism Symbolism is the use of one object to represent another object. During the nineteenth century, American writers used symbolism as a way to infuse images of nature as representative of ideas, rather than simply as objects or beings. In late nineteenth-century France, writers used symbolism as a way to represent unique emotional responses, often in very complex ways. Munro uses symbolism in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ to create complexity of meaning. For instance, butterflies symbolize transformation and the ephemeral nature of life. The butterfly symbolizes Myra’s illness and forthcoming death. Touch is also symbolic in the story. Helen and Myra touch hands on two occasions: once when Helen shares her box of Cracker Jack and again at the birthday party in the hospital. Touch symbolizes sameness and danger. Helen realizes when they touch that Myra is exactly like her, but she remains afraid that by touching, the two girls have formed some sort of relationship, a friendship that might endanger or compromise Helen’s own fragile place within the class hierarchy. The gift from the Cracker Jack symbolizes friendship but also risk. Similarly, the gift from Myra to Helen, during which they touch again, is a symbol of friendship, but the possession of it is so dangerous that Helen gives it to her younger brother to destroy.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Canadian Immigrant Life For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canadian immigration mirrored that
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of the United States. Western European immigrants were welcomed in Canada, strict limits on Chinese immigrants were put in place, and by the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, sharply reduced quotas limiting the numbers of Jews and Italians were instituted. Because of the Great Depression of the 1930s, immigration was curtailed; however, as soon as World War II ended, a booming economy increased the need for immigrant labor, and Canada once again welcomed large numbers of immigrants to meet the need for workers. However, not all of the new immigrants were welcomed. For several years after the end of World War II, large numbers of people, who had been living in European Displaced Persons (DP) camps, immigrated to Canada, looking for a better life. In many cases, they faced discrimination. Many Canadians, especially those of Scottish and English origins, blamed the DPs for being the cause of World War II, and thus responsible for the loss of British lives during the war. Although many of the DPs were white Europeans, it was not unusual for the children of DPs to be teased at school. Many of them dressed as they had in their previous homelands, spoke with accents, and had unpronounceable names. It was common for both immigrant parents to work together on farms and in small businesses, which sometimes shifted additional child-care responsibilities from mothers to their older children. To survive as an immigrant, every member of the family had to work together to support the family. By the 1950s, Canada had created an assisted passage program that provided immigrants with two-year loans to help pay for moving to Canada. Repayment of these loans increased the financial burden on DPs, which meant that more members of the family needed to work. The government also signed agreements to admit limited numbers of immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Ceylon. In the mid-1950s, when large numbers of European DP immigrants ceased moving to Canada, local farmers were forced to look elsewhere for immigrant labor. As a result, Caribbean migrant workers poured into the country as cheap farm labor. In Munro’s short story ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ Myra is excluded and victimized because of differences in both behavior and appearance. Her skin is brown and her clothing different from that of other children. Her ethnic background is never revealed, but her family might well have been from India or Pakistan or one of the islands of
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1950s: In 1960, the Canadian government finally allows all tribally affiliated Indians the right to vote in elections, thus removing a long-standing discriminatory practice intended to isolate Indian tribes from participating in Canadian government. Today: A series of changes to the 1951 Indian Act grant additional equality and freedom to Canada’s First Nations, the term by which aboriginal peoples of Canada are now called. It eliminates bans on religious practices. However, an April 2009 court decision finds that sections of the 1951 Indian Act are discriminatory and unconstitutional, resulting in the loss of equal rights for many First Nations people in Canada.
college education or be a licensed nurse. Hostesses who marry or become pregnant must quit their jobs immediately. Today: Flight attendants must be tall enough to reach the overhead bins on airplanes, have height and weight in proportion, and have vision that is correctable with glasses. They must also pass a security background check. Fluency in a foreign language is encouraged. Otherwise, there are few restrictions for new attendants. Many attendants are now male.
1950s: More women choose to work outside the home, but discover that child-care costs are erode their salaries. As a result, older siblings are recruited to watch younger children.
1950s: Airline hostesses face rigid qualifying standards. They must be single, not wear glasses, be 21 to 28 years old, be 5 feet 2 inches to 5 feet 7 inches tall, and weigh 100 to 155 pounds. They must also have some
Today: Many women work outside the home, and child-care costs continue to be an important issue for most working mothers, who struggle to find and pay for good child care.
the Caribbean. Different appearance and behavior led to discrimination—a common problem of new immigrants, who had to learn to become Canadian. In Ontario, where Munro grew up, bias against DP immigrants was quite widespread, as was schoolyard teasing of DP children.
immigrants. Many Canadian schools, churches, and social agencies helped new immigrants learn English or French.
Canadian Multiculturalism With the influx of post-World War II immigrants to Canada, anti-immigrant bias became more common in the country. Some of the new immigrants—those whose appearance was different, who spoke a language other than English or French, or whose ethnic background, religion, or customs were different from their neighbors— were often targeted as foreign, and thus inferior. Since Canada needed immigrants to provide labor for industries and agriculture, there needed to be a way to help appease those people who demanded more restrictive immigration laws, while still meeting the need for more immigrant workers. One possible solution was to try to assimilate new
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In Munro’s story, the teacher, Miss Darling, encourages the children to be nicer to Myra, but they are unwilling to ignore that she is different from her classmates. By the mid- 1960s, when Munro was revising ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ for inclusion in Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories, the Canadian government had begun working on a policy of cultural pluralism, which was intended to acknowledge and preserve multiculturalism as an important element of Canadian life.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW When ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ was published in Munro’s 1968 collection of short stories Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories, the book
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Two young teens, one black and one white, shake hands. (Image copyright Anita Patterson Peppers, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
received a very brief review in the New York Times Book Review. In his review, Martin Levin begins by noting that the ‘‘short story is alive and well in Canada.’’ After describing Munro’s stories ‘‘like fresh winds from the North,’’ Levin explains that Munro’s stories are set in southwestern Ontario, where her stories are created ‘‘in sympathetic vibration with the farmers and townspeople who live there.’’ Levin’s review was probably the shortest that any Munro publication has since earned. Karl Miller offers a more detailed review of Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories in a 2004 article in Changing English. In his essay, ‘‘What’s Difficult, and What Isn’t: Two Books Published in the 1960s,’’ Miller compares Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories with two novels written by other authors and published during the same period of time. In discussing Munro’s short stories, Miller notes that, though not difficult to read, her work is for
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adults. This is because Munro’s stories ‘‘inhabit an Ontario of the mind,’’ in which the subjects and content evoke realism and not fantasy. Miller also claims that Munro’s stories are ‘‘fictions that can be lived as lives are lived.’’ He adds that her stories ‘‘have the power to affect people’s lives,’’ because readers of Munro’s tales care about her characters and find it difficult to forget about them after finishing one of her stories. Munro’s legacy becomes clearer when reading reviews of her later work. In author Jonathan Franzen’s review of Munro’s 2004 short-story collection Runaway for the New York Times, Franzen states, ‘‘Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America.’’ His regret is that she is not as well known in the United States as in Canada, where her books are best sellers. In comparing Munro to Anton Chekhov, Franzen claims that Munro is also able to depict the completeness of a life. She has, according to Franzen, ‘‘always
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had a genius for developing and unpacking moments of epiphany.’’ After noting her growth as a writer and her propensity to return to her own life as a source for stories, Franzen writes that Munro’s stories ‘‘have come to resemble classical tragedies in prose form.’’ This is reflected in her maturity as a writer, which Franzen celebrates in his review. Nearly five years after Franzen’s review, Munro’s talent was recognized by a wider audience when she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction in May 2009. The International Prize is awarded for an entire body of work rather than just one publication. It is awarded every two years and is among the most prestigious awards given for literature. Simon Houpt reports in the Toronto Globe & Mail that in presenting the award, author Jane Smiley, who chaired the three-person judging panel, said that Munro ‘‘ brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.’’ The first review of her book in the New York Times was very brief, scarcely more than a paragraph, but Munro’s fans need never doubt that her subsequent work will receive far more attention than that first collection of short stories.
CRITICISM Sheri Metzger Karmiol Karmiol teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the University Honors Program. In this essay, she discusses the rewriting of memory in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly.’’ An important question to consider in reading Munro’s short story ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ is whether the story is an accurate representation of Helen’s memories. The point is not to question the reality of Myra’s illness, of course, but to question Helen’s memory of her treatment of Myra. Childhood memories are often poorly recalled. Many are deliberately falsified and some are simply incomplete. Childhood memories are revised memories because of our need to protect ourselves and the image we have created of who we are. Helen’s rendering of Myra’s last few months in Grade Six is the memory of an eleven-year-old child, but it is told and filtered
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JUST AS MUNRO REWRITES HER LIFE THROUGH HER SHORT STORIES, HELEN IS REWRITING HER MEMORIES OF MYRA IN THIS NARRATION OF CHILDHOOD BETRAYAL.’’
through the psyche of an adult. Remembering Myra and the events of that spring when she became ill is an act of atonement, in which Helen tries both to justify her actions and to rewrite them more favorably. In telling a story, people often remember the version they told most recently, rather than remembering the actual event. Helen is recalling this story of childhood from a distance, presumably as an adult. Her first-person narration is colored by the haziness of memory as she recalls the events through the prism of time. As a result, there are really two narrations in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly.’’ Munro scholar Robert Thacker suggests that as Helen is narrating the story, she is also creating a dialogue between the eleven-yearold Helen, who experienced these events, and the adult narrating Helen, who as she recalls Myra, rewrites their story. In his essay ‘‘‘Clear Jelly’: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialects,’’ Thacker writes that Helen is ‘‘a remembering narrator’’ who shapes her memories, ‘‘in a somewhat covert manner,’’ as she relates them. As a result, her narration creates ‘‘an impression of immediacy and a detached understanding’’ for the reader. Helen seems to be telling a story that just occurred, but a careful study demonstrates that she is rewriting a story from her distant past. Helen is both narrator and editor of her story. When Helen is given an opportunity to speak with Myra, Helen is initially unsure whether she should do so. Helen does not want to be seen speaking with Myra, since it puts her own fragile grasp on popularity at risk. However, Helen also likes the idea that by speaking to Myra, she can appear to be a more caring individual. Because she is telling the story some time after the events have occurred, Helen has been able to intellectually process this earlier meeting and assess what she discovered in talking with Myra. For instance, as the two girls talk and
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
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The View from Castle Rock, published in 2006, is Munro’s first attempt to write short stories using historical fiction. The stories draw from the author’s own family history and her memories of growing up in western Ontario. Too Much Happiness (2009) is Munro’s most recently published collection of stories. The collection focuses on how men and women adjust to and learn to live with the events of their lives. Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder: and Other Stories, published in 2006, is a collection of linked stories that explores sixty years of a Canadian family’s history. The stories begin in the post-World War II era and are linked by the common experiences of the women in the family. Blubber (1974), by young-adult author Judy Blume, begins in a fifth-grade classroom, when one girl is suddenly cast as the outsider. The book captures the hierarchy of grade-school bullying. Donald R. Gallo edited a collection of short stories called No Easy Answers (1997). The stories in this multicultural collection are about teenagers facing difficult choices in their lives. These young adults are from all kinds of ethnic, racial, and sociological backgrounds. Some of the different cultures depicted in these stories include Korean, Chinese, Hispanic, and African American. Munro is often compared to John Updike, whose posthumous collection of short stories My Father’s Tears and Other Stories (2009) explores the world that he inhabited as he aged. The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (1992), edited by Joyce Carol Oates, is a collection of stories by some of the bestknown American writers. What makes this collection interesting is that the editor has chosen to include a selection of stories that are less familiar to readers.
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learn about one another, including the fact that they both read and enjoy the same newspaper comics, Helen begins to see Myra as a real person, as an individual, and not just as an entity to be ridiculed and teased. When she touches Myra’s hand, Helen is surprised to discover that Myra’s skin feels just like her own, although it is a different color. While the eleven-year-old Helen is worried that someone will see her walking with Myra and think they are friends, the adult Helen has had a chance to analyze her feelings. Helen justifies her earlier treatment of Myra by mentioning that she is not a town girl. Her clothing is different and she eats lunch alone in the cloakroom. In the story, Helen describes that she ‘‘felt a little danger’’ because she is different, but then she adds she ‘‘could not tell exactly what it [the danger] was.’’ The eleven-year-old Helen knows the risk of talking with Myra, but it is the adult Helen who adds that, in retrospect, she was not sure then where the danger lay, only that it was present. In another example of Helen’s adult memory, she describes the Sayla children standing on the school porch at recess, watching the other children playing. Helen describes the shape of their faces and their expressions, which are ‘‘melancholy and discreet.’’ Their eyelids are never raised and ‘‘they had a weary look.’’ These are not the observations of a child. A child would have noticed the clothing the Sayla children wore and that their hair seemed oily, and, while perhaps noticing an oddity about their expressions, a child would not have been able to articulate the specifics of why their expressions were different. The adult Helen is able to do so. The most obvious example of how the adult Helen is able to commingle the child and adult narrative is in her description of Myra and Jimmy as resembling ‘‘children in a medieval painting.’’ They are ‘‘like small figures carved of wood, for worship or magic . . . cryptically uncommunicative.’’ These are not the words of an eleven-yearold. As Thacker points out, ‘‘the language and diction are too refined, the narrator’s understanding of the scene’s ramifications is too acute.’’ In Helen’s description of Myra and Jimmy Sayla, Munro is commingling two narrations—the child Helen and the adult Helen; however, this commingling of the two narrators is so flawless that it is scarcely noticeable. There is no indication of the age of the adult Helen, and, as Thacker observes, Munro never calls
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attention to the fact there are two first-person narrations within the story. Helen’s detached reminiscing about her relationship with Myra—the absence of details about the role that Helen plays in ridiculing her classmate and her betrayal of Myra’s offer of friendship—may be a way to deal with the lingering guilt, and perhaps grief, that she still feels at Myra’s death. In the last two paragraphs of the story, Helen remembers the treachery of her betrayal of Myra. A final view of Myra, whose future will now be in that ‘‘unknown’’ place after death, reveals ‘‘her brown carved face immune to treachery.’’ Helen’s recasting of the story as she rewrites the events accounts for her ‘‘legendary’’ use of Myra’s memory. She is using Myra’s story as a way to rewrite the past. The semi-autobiographical nature of Munro’s stories, in which she rewrites her own past, is not unlike what Helen is doing in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ when she subtly and covertly rewrites her past. In an interview with Geoff Hancock, Munro tells Hancock that her stories often upset the people who live in the small town in which she grew up. They do not remember their pasts in the same way that she does. But that is not unusual; most people recall events very differently than those who were also present. Munro says that people edit their lives as they live them. It is an emotional response, and these memory rewrites are ‘‘the different editions people make of their lives.’’ This is what Helen does in rewriting her memory of Myra. Helen is making a new edition of the past, one in which she bears less blame for betraying Myra and one in which she diminishes her role in ridiculing and bullying her classmate. The last time Helen sees Myra is at the hospital, where the class celebrates her birthday. Helen remembers that as Myra opens her gifts, ‘‘everyone explained their presents to her and there was talking and excitement and a little gaiety, which Myra presided over, though she was not gay.’’ This is a very adult, reflective comment for a child to make, as are the final details of Helen’s memory. As ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ ends, Helen hears the children on the street, ‘‘maybe chasing the last snowballs of the year.’’ The sounds that Helen hears from the street ‘‘made Myra, her triumph and her bounty, and most of all her future in which she had found this place for me, turn shadowy, turn dark.’’ A ten- or eleven-year-old child might be aware of a chill of
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foreboding, but the interconnection of children playing, the end of winter, the rebirth that occurs in spring, and the journey of Myra to the larger hospital in London, Ontario, reveal a complexity of awareness that a child does not possess. However, in recalling these details after many years, Myra’s future is now tinged with foreboding because the grown-up Helen knows that Myra died. She never returned, and thus Helen was never forced to keep her promise to play at her classmate’s house. Helen is able to tell the story of Myra in such a way that she justifies her choices. In her essay ‘‘The Art of Alice Munro: Memory, Identity, and the Aesthetics of Connection,’’ Georgeann Murphy suggests that ‘‘writing can be an act of reconciliation’’ in a Munro short story. As they tell their stories, Munro’s first-person narrators rewrite their lives and are able to reconcile themselves to the choices of their past. As a child, Helen betrays Myra’s offer of friendship because being a part of the group is more important than a single friendship. As Helen tells the story later, she reassesses those earlier decisions and inserts explanations for why she behaved as she did. In ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ the connection between past and present and the change that occurs between the two is important in understanding the complexity of Helen’s narration. Murphy argues that Munro is often concerned with how people change as they grow and how they try to prevent change. According to Murphy, Munro’s ‘‘focus is always on the connection between what went before and what comes after the change.’’ In this case, the child Helen is concerned with preserving her somewhat precarious role in her group of school friends, while the adult Helen is focused on making her actions appear less selfish and self-absorbed. The commingling of child and adult narratives exposes Helen’s purpose. Munro’s use of this kind of double narrative reveals that Helen has come to understand the past more fully and she has rejected part of those memories. Of Munro’s use of this double narrative, Murphy writes that one of the important parts of the narrative ‘‘is the distance between the former (narrated) self and the present (narrating) self: for these retrospective narrators, realizations come only after the fact, if at all.’’ Since Helen cannot change the past, she chooses to rewrite it. Myra died, but Helen can rewrite her own rejection of her classmate, if she revises her memory of what happened.
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Rewriting the past gives the storyteller an opportunity to change the past and make it fit the needs and expectations of the present. Helen begins her narration by telling readers that she did ‘‘not remember when Myra Sayla came to town, though she must have been in our class at school for two or three years.’’ Helen only remembers Myra’s presence that final spring, when the class made Myra a scapegoat and when she became too ill to continue in school. Munro ends ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ with Helen’s memory of Myra sitting in her hospital bed, ‘‘her brown carved face immune to treachery.’’ It is Myra, whose offer of friendship is ‘‘set apart for legendary uses, as she was even in the back porch at school,’’ whose story must be written. Her story belongs to Helen to tell in whatever version of the truth best fits her needs. Just as Munro rewrites her life through her short stories, Helen is rewriting her memories of Myra in this narration of childhood betrayal. Source: Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Donna Seaman In the following review, Seaman reviews Brad Hooper’s book The Fiction of Alice Munro and praises Munro’s ability to write a short story. The short story is the most polymorphous of literary forms. A story can be as concise as a single paragraph or run for tens of pages. Short stories encompass every narrative mode and accommodate the most esoteric of concepts as well as intense emotions. Brad Hooper has long been a passionate and knowledgeable advocate for the short story, hence his first book: The Short Story Readers’ Advisory: A Guide to the Best. Brad eventually decided that the best is exemplified by Alice Munro, the subject of his new book, The Fiction of Alice Munro: An Appreciation (Praeger, $44.95, 9780275991210), his second ‘‘author appreciation’’ following The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist (2005). What does Brad love about the short story? ‘‘I like things that you see in their entirety very quickly,’’ Brad says. ‘‘I think that’s why I’ve always liked the small watercolor over the elaborate oil painting. I also like the technique in a short story. It’s more interesting to me than the technique of a novel, because it’s a stricter technique. You don’t belabor things. A novel can sprawl, it can be flawed, and still work. But in a good short
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story, the writer has to get everything just right. I love the diamond aspect of short stories.’’ Short story collections are also ideal for readers who have little time to read and want to spend those moments with high-quality fiction. ‘‘Alice Munro is the perfect author to recommend for busy people,’’ Brad says, ‘‘because hers are large short stories. they will appeal to readers who think they don’t like the form. They are long and involved and have the feel of a novel. Readers who ordinarily don’t care to read short stories will forget that that’s exactly what they’re reading.’’ So distinctive are Munro’s stories, Brad argues, she ‘‘has developed her own brand of the short story, one of rare amplitude. It’s amazing that this brilliant woman, a bookstore owner and housewife in Ontario, suddenly reinvented the short story. It makes you wonder, Where do great artists come from? She wasn’t taught, beyond the most basic writing courses. This just came to her.’’ As Brad closely read each story in Munro’s 12 collections, which include such celebrated titles as The Love of a Good Woman (1998), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), and Runaway (2004), he was surprised at some of the themes that emerged. Take her attitude toward women. ‘‘It came to me as a shock,’’ Brad says. ‘‘What you see from the very word go is that her adolescent female characters enjoy their father’s life much better than that of their mother. It’s free; it’s fun; they’d much rather go with Daddy. They can’t stand being with Mother, and you can understand why. Mother never likes what they do; she is never understanding of her daughter’s plight. I wondered, Is this because Munro doesn’t really care for women? My guess is if she was at cocktail party, and there was a group of women and a group of men, she’d go over to talk to the men because she finds what they do more interesting.’’ Another facet of Munro’s fiction that will intrigue readers who picture her as a genteel Canadian lady of letters is the role of violence in her work, and her wily use of ‘‘elements straight out of classic murder mysteries.’’ Brad explains, ‘‘Violence is part of life, after all. And this isn’t some sweet little old lady who doesn’t understand life.’’ There is a sense of not only deep engagement throughout Brad’s analysis but also the excitement of discovery. This is the sign of timeless literature, that it sustains and rewards such careful scrutiny.
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Brad and his subject share a love of southern literature, which, like Munro’s work, tends to focus on small-town and farm life. Munro is particularly adept at capturing ‘‘the feeling of isolation in a small town if you are a little different. And her female adolescent characters are different, they’re going to be writers or artists; they are outsiders. They want to see over the next hill; they want more out of life. That’s how I was as a kid in southern Illinois, so I really identified with this aspect of her work.’’ With an eye to readers’ advisory, Brad also notes that Munro has a rich sense of humor and that her stories run the emotional gamut from hilarious to tragic. As for her writing style, ‘‘It’s stunning. It’s the style we should all hope for, one that doesn’t draw attention to itself. But then you come across a beautiful metaphor, and your heart just goes sailing. She picks the most appropriate word, almost like Flaubert, le mot juste. I don’t know if she counts Flaubert as one of her masters, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t love his work, at least Madame Bovary.’’ Munro, who has been cited as Nobel material, ‘‘may have exhausted fiction,’’ muses Brad. ‘‘She may be ready to turn to memoir, and to call it memoir, unlike the confusion between the two in The View from Castle Rock [2006]. But whatever else Munro publishes, she will always stand as a writer who opened the short story to boundless possibilities.’’ Thanks to Munro, the short story remains ‘‘strong and healthy,’’ the ideal vehicle for literary bliss and transcendence in a clock-watching world.
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DRED DRESSES, THE FOREIGN CHILD IN MUNRO’S ‘DAY OF THE BUTTERFLY’ AT THE OUTSET IS ENTIRELY IGNORED, CONFIRMING HER STATUS AS A NON-ENTITY.’’
Clearly there is no way of predicting how and when in an author’s mature writings material from the slagheap of childhood reading may assert itself. Certainly in the case of Alice Munro, works she read as a child would seem to have infiltrated her stories. As her family and friends have noted, reading was an ‘‘addiction’’ to her (Ross 15). And she read widely and eclectically. Emily Bronte¨’s Wuthering Heights, Tennyson’s poetry, Dickens’s Child’s History of England, and L. M. Montgomery’s novels, especially Emily of New Moon, captured her youthful imagination (Ross 14–16). Just as influential, however, were writers of a kind that clever people rarely mention when furbishing the child-prodigy part of their critical reputations: . . . behind all those childhood books I’ve mentioned, I was just reading anything and everything. When people talk about their reading, they tend to mention [only] the respectable books. I mentioned Tennyson, for instance, but at the same time I was reading Gone with the Wind compulsively . . . . I read everything we happened to have in the house, and the books that came into our house all came in by accident. So my reading was just here and there, and all over. I [also] read what was in the Sunday school library.
Darlene Kelly
In his autobiography, A Sort of Life (1971), Graham Greene gives an amusing account of how, years after it was written, he was startled to find in his short story ‘‘Under the Garden’’ an unlikely source: Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin. Quite unconsciously, as he explains, he had reworked into his own murder story that terrifying moment in Potter’s miniature thriller when the hapless Tom Kitten is being ‘‘trounced up by the rats behind the skirting board and the sinister Anna Maria covering him with dough’’ (52).
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Source: Donna Seaman, ‘‘Stories Writ Large,’’ in Booklist, Vol. 104, No. 21, July 1, 2008, p. 13.
In the following essay, Kelly compares the portrayal of social estrangement in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ with Eleanor Estes’s 1944 novel for children The Hundred Dresses.
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Elsewhere she points out that authors ‘‘who have never become very well known’’ because they wrote only ‘‘a few marvellous stories’’ are unfortunately excluded from a writer’s list of literary mentors. ‘‘One tends not to think of them,’’ Munro told one interviewer, ‘‘when you’re on the spot with a question like this’’ (Struthers 11). The reason, then, for omitting such writers is not their unimportance, but memory’s inevitable gaps. Difficult as it can be to remember what we read as adults, it is harder yet to retrieve the name of every book familiar to us in childhood. Yet these stories, though immature, cannot be
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denied; they too leave their mark. The persistent impression made by books read in youth may account for the striking similarity between Alice Munro’s ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ written in 1953, and The Hundred Dresses (1944) by American juvenile writer Eleanor Estes, best known for her award-winning books about the Moffat family. Munro may have deliberately emulated Estes, a good possibility given her habit of staging ‘‘imitations’’ of successful narratives in her head, sometimes committing these works of dual authorship to paper (Ross 20, 22). She defends this early activity as a kind of apprenticeship: ‘‘There’s nothing wrong with writing imitations. It’s the only way, I think, to learn’’ (Ross 22). Whether a writer is or is not aware of copying others, Munro considers the practice to be greatly beneficial: I’m not very often aware of influences, but I’m sure they’re happening all the time. . . . I’m probably using things that other people have used first without even realizing I’m doing it. I think many of us do that. Or we pick up a tone that seems appropriate to a certain kind of material, and we try out that tone. Or perhaps we’re given courage to go on using a kind of approach or material when otherwise we might worry that too much had been done of this. (Struthers 17)
Munro’s admission that in the early stages of her career she modelled her work on that of others makes her use of The Hundred Dresses entirely plausible. Or perhaps she wove strands from Estes’s compelling tale into her story all unconsciously, much as Graham Greene without realizing transposed elements of Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin into his short story. In any case, if Munro had not read Estes’s minor classic before writing ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ then it is by an extraordinary coincidence that two stories written less than a decade apart should be almost mirror images of each other. During the early 1940s, when the young Alice Munro was reading all manner of books, Estes’s novels were a staple in North American libraries. Because Estes is not a writer of the same rank, say as C. S. Lewis or Frances Hodgson Burnett, a few words should be said about her place in children’s literature. In 1943, she won the Newbery Honor label for Rufus M and, in 1952, the Newbery Medal for Ginger Pye, two awards which established her reputation as one of America’s finest children’s writers. Her books about the fatherless Moffat children were a perennial favourite with
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young readers, but adults were quick to see the greater sophistication of The Hundred Dresses, a sombre account of how children of mainly AngloSaxon descent so persecute a Polish classmate that her family has to move away. In a survey of children’s books written between 1920 and 1950, Ruth Hill Viguers notes that ‘‘Among the few fine stories of a child who is ‘different,’ one stands out for its subtlety, its good writing and its perfect understanding of childhood. Eleanor Estes, in her The Hundred Dresses (1944), has accomplished what only an artist in the portrayal of children can do’’ (551). Critics writing in another survey of children’s literature make a case for the book’s uniqueness, saying that ‘‘Eleanor Estes’s The Hundred Dresses (1944) has some claim to be the first story to deal with prejudice, [one which] is all the more distinguished by its down-beat ending’’ (Children’s Literature 250). Estes can hardly be credited with having written the first story to deal with prejudice among children—Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘‘The Doll House’’ (1922), for example, both preceded The Hundred Dresses—but her sombre theme was indeed uncommon in literature written expressly for children at that time. Estes’s controversial subject no doubt piqued the interest of Munro, whose stories often explore the dark side of human motivation. She might also have been inclined to expose the evil of racism by her own dislike of it, a dislike made clear by her remarks on the bias of a juvenile encyclopedia called The Book of Knowledge, which she had read uncritically as a child: ‘‘These books have glaring faults—they’re quite racist—and I would never give them to children to read’’ (Ross 14). But Estes’s skilful treatment of her subject in The Hundred Dresses could alone have inspired Munro’s respectful imitation of it in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly.’’ Mastering fictional techniques which had worked well for others was very important to Munro in her days as a fledgling writer. Her first stories, ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ among them, she herself compared to ‘‘paintings that are said to be ‘in the school of,’ [or] ‘after the manner’’’ of another artist (Struthers 23). Just how closely Munro emulated the ‘‘manner’’ or art of Estes in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ can be inferred from its compelling resemblance to The Hundred Dresses. This paper documents the main parallels between the two works. Both Munro and Estes convey the foreign girl’s suffering from a
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classmate’s perspective. The two stories begin the same way: the girl through whose eyes we see events (a central consciousness in Estes, a first-person narrator in Munro) first describes the victim as a person who, before being harassed, was thought beneath everyone’s notice, a subtle form of discrimination; then, noting those details which set the unfortunate child apart, this same observer makes clear to us, if not to herself, just why it was a young foreigner who was treated so cruelly. Estes’s memorable character types will be shown to inhabit Munro’s story as well, notably the immigrant friends and relations of the tiny pariah who worsen her social status, and also the young bullies who like a pendulum swing from abusing their strange classmate to doting on her. In Munro as in Estes, teachers accidentally initiate the youngster’s misery and later preside over the group’s act of collective restitution. The most remarkable similarity, however, is the shocking recognition by both Munro’s narrator and Estes’s observer that they are the victim’s alter ego. The Hundred Dresses opens with deceptive simplicity: ‘‘Today, Monday, Wanda Petronski was not in her seat. But nobody, not even Peggy and Madeline, the girls who started all the fun, noticed her absence’’ (1). The ‘‘fun’’ turns out to be the ritual mockery of Wanda for having once claimed to have one hundred dresses in a closet at home, despite her obvious poverty. This taunting is called the ‘‘hundred dresses game’’ and also ‘‘having fun with Wanda’’ by Madeline, or Maddie, the girl who witnesses the events. Before the game ever started, no one had even noticed Wanda; outside of those moments when she is being persecuted, the children continue to ignore her; and when she stops coming to school altogether, no one remarks upon her absence for several days. In her understated way, Estes has captured society’s attitude to the people it marginalizes. Neglect eventually gives way to persecution when Maddie’s friend Peggy sets out to expose Wanda as a liar. Peggy daily cross-examines her in a ‘‘mock polite’’ voice (17), ostensibly to establish the truth of the mattter: ‘‘Why did [Wanda] want to lie? And she wasn’t just an ordinary person, else why would she have a name like that?’’ (16–17). The last line points to Wanda’s ethnicity as the real irritant. Most of the children in the class do not have an unusual name like ‘‘Petronski,’’ but rather ‘‘names [that were] easy to say, like Thomas, Smith, or Allen’’ (10). It comes as no surprise later that in a letter to the teacher Wanda’s father
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should cite discrimination as the reason that he and his family are moving away: ‘‘Dear teacher: My Wanda will not come to your school any more. Jake also. Now we move away to big city. No more holler Polack. No more ask why funny name. Plenty of funny names in the big city’’ (47). Mr. Petronski’s broken English recalls details given earlier in the story that set Wanda herself apart. She too has trouble with English, as is shown by her painful failure to read aloud when called upon to do so and by her classmates’ impatience with her on these occasions (36). She makes herself noticeable by wearing the same worn, if clean, blue dress every day. Then there is the greasy sheen of her forehead. Maddie, herself a poor girl who wears other people’s cast-off clothing, is very thankful that at least her own ‘‘forehead didn’t shine the way Wanda’s round one did. What did she use on it? Sapolio? That’s what all the girls wanted to know’’ (17). In part, Wanda is reviled by others simply because of her greasy look, a stigma that Alice Munro’s childvictim in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ bears as well. Wanda is also derided for living in a strange, run-down neighbourhood, a place made worse by its nearness to the house of another immigrant, an unemployed Swede who is known as ‘‘old man Svenson.’’ Svenson’s dilapidated house and property show the effects of his being out of a job. Maddie has heard people speak of him at best as an ‘‘‘old good-for-nothing,’’’ at worst as someone who once shot a man (54). Yet these harsh judgements are based on nothing more substantial than poor Mr. Svenson’s foreignness—he mumbles unintelligibly when addressed—and his offputting appearance, with his ‘‘drooping mustache and tangled hair, his hound loping behind him, and the long streams of tobacco juice [which] he expertly shot from between his scattered yellow teeth’’ (59). The book’s illustrations reinforce this benign reading of Mr. Svenson’s character. The soft outlines of Louis Slobodkin’s two sketches of him—seated innocuously on his porch in one and looking startled at the questions put to him by Peggy and Maddie in another—predispose us to see Mr. Svenson as a harmless man who has been badly treated by his American neighbours, and to regard Wanda the same way. Like the young Polish victim in The Hundred Dresses, the foreign child in Munro’s ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ at the outset is entirely ignored, confirming her status as a non-entity. The narrator Helen recalls barely noticing the
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girl whom she would later torment: ‘‘I do not remember when Myra Sayla came to town, though she must have been in our class at school for two or three years.’’ Prior to harassing her, the schoolchildren ‘‘had not paid much attention to Myra;’’ and when Myra stops coming to school, Helen cannot even say whether it was ‘‘the day . . . or the week after’’ another incident that Myra vanished, inconsequential as she was. At first glance, the group’s cruelty to Myra seems arbitrary, but Helen’s careful noting of all the things that set Myra apart makes its own statement about why she is hounded, the same technique found in The Hundred Dresses. Even the minor details used to establish Myra’s strangeness mimic those of Estes. Like Wanda, for example, Myra has trouble with English, being unable to spell and, when she speaks, sounding as if she were ‘‘wetting her lips with her tongue.’’ Her clothes are also as ill-fitting as those of her counterpart in The Hundred Dresses. Wanda always wore the same blue dress ‘‘that looked like a piece of the sky in summer’’ but that ‘‘didn’t hang right,’’ two details which are fused together in the reference to Myra’s ‘‘glimmer[ing] sadly in sky-blue taffeta, in dusty turquoise crepe, a grown woman’s dress made over, weighted by a big bow at the V of the neck and folding empty over [her] narrow chest.’’ In short, she looks ridiculous. Just as Wanda’s social status suffers because of her proximity to the suspect Mr. Svenson, so too Myra’s unfortunate connections make her lose caste in the eyes of her ruthless young critics. Deliberate mention is made of the fact that her aunt is a nun, for example, a reference that might seem innocent except that, in Munro’s world, people’s religious affiliation is so often a lightning rod, making them the object of discrimination. Also, the unappetizing sight of Myra’s father, a Svenson-like character who sits idly in his store all day chewing garlic, ‘‘with his shirt open over his swelling stomach and tufts of black hair showing around his belly button,’’ hardly enhances her social position. Significantly, the children find the daughter’s own appearance as repellent as the father’s. One compelling detail in Estes’s work which becomes even more arresting when duplicated by Munro is the greasy look which stigmatizes both foreign girls. Myra’s turban of ‘‘oily’’ hair recalls Wanda’s forehead which looks as if she had rubbed Sapolio on it,
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. . . NOW A GAME DEVELOPED; IT STARTED WITH SAYING, ‘LET’S BE NICE TO MYRA!’ THEN WE WOULD WALK UP TO HER IN FORMAL GROUPS OF THREE OR FOUR AND AT A SIGNAL, SAY TOGETHER, ‘HEL-LO MYRA. HELLO MY-RA!’ AND FOLLOW UP WITH SOMETHING LIKE, ‘WHAT DO YOU WASH YOUR HAIR IN, MYRA, IT’S SO NICE AND SHINY, MYRA.’ ‘OH SHE WASHES IT IN CODLIVER OIL, DON’T YOU MYRA, SHE WASHES IT IN CODLIVER OIL, CAN’T YOU SMELL IT?’’’
in each case perhaps an oblique reference to their nationality, since many ethnic groups use creams and pomades to make skin supple and hair lustrous. This sign of obvious difference inspires Helen and her classmates to devise a ‘‘game,’’ as they call it, a euphemism that also appears in The Hundred Dresses: The songs and chants of childhood, as Iona and Peter Opie famously demonstrated in such books as The Singing Game (1985), The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), and Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969) are a universal part of growing up. As both Estes and Munro show, so is taunting. What gives special interest to each author’s depiction of schoolyard bullying is her emphasis on ritual. The teacher in both works, for example, like a shaman leads the group from guilt to atonement. In The Hundred Dresses, Miss Mason, in other respects a decent person, is the first to discriminate against Wanda by relegating her to a corner of the room ‘‘where rough boys who did not make good marks on their report cards sat,’’ presumably because Wanda like the boys had mud on her shoes—in her case picked up from a long trek to school along country roads. The teacher no doubt simply wanted to keep the floor clean, but her segregation of Wanda still sets an unfortunate precedent. Similarly, in ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ Myra’s trials are also begun by her teacher. When Myra asks permission to take her little brother home because he has ‘‘wet himself,’’ Miss Darling forces her to put her request more euphemistically, making her
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ridiculous before the class. From that moment on Myra and her brother stand alone at recess on the school’s back porch. In their isolation, they are strikingly like Wanda, who, while other children congregate in the playground, remains in her solitary place ‘‘by the ivy-covered brick wall of the school building.’’ Perceiving the misery of Myra and her brother, Miss Darling tries to scold the children into treating them better, a ploy that backfires with the invention of the taunting game. In the end, each girl finds asylum from the torture of school, Wanda in a larger city and Myra in a cancer ward. The process of atonement in The Hundred Dresses begins when the teacher announces that Wanda has won an art contest with one hundred sketches of beautiful dresses, drawings which substantiate her once preposterous claim. This proclamation is followed by the news contained in Mr. Petronski’s letter. Upon reading this document Miss Mason first adjusts her glasses, then removes and wipes them, a sign of clearer moral vision and perhaps even of regret for her part in Wanda’s suffering. She is now fitted for the task of inspiring a similar change of heart in her students. Gently she tells them that their hurtful comments were probably made ‘‘in thoughtlessness,’’ but that they must examine their conscience all the same. Maddie and Peggy visit Wanda’s house, hoping that she might still be there and that they might congratulate her; on finding it vacant, they send her a friendly letter praising her drawings. Wanda sends them a gracious (if unidiomatic) reply which the teacher reads aloud to the whole class. The children are now delighted to hear from the celebrated artist whom before they had mistreated. At the time of the class Christmas party, the ballet student Cecile, whose lovely red dress months earlier had provoked Wanda’s boast, performs the ‘‘Passing of Autumn’’ for her classmates, a dance which becomes their favourite. This detail makes its point unobtrusively: the vile behaviour of the previous autumn is now a thing of the past for the children, who here undergo a ritual purgation. In ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ Munro enlarges upon Estes’s idea of the teacher-guided ritual, giving it several complex twists. Miss Darling’s attempted defence of Myra and her brother makes them into living fetishes, or ‘‘small figures carved of wood, for worship or magic with faces smooth and aged.’’ Myra is later said to be ‘‘set apart for legendary uses,’’ but Miss Darling is
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incapable of understanding the scapegoating and victim worship that this term implies, far less her own role in expediting them. Like Miss Mason in The Hundred Dresses, she too is bespectacled, although her glasses are ‘‘fragile’’ and their rims ‘‘thin,’’ two epithets which also describe her vision. Without realizing it she provokes the children into taunting Myra; with like incomprehension she inspires their collective atonement by organizing a fake birthday party for Myra in March in case she dies before her actual birthday in July. The idea of the party greatly appeals to the young bullies for whom Myra now becomes oddly enviable. Although she does not dazzle her classmates with a hundred beautiful drawings, Myra exudes all the same ‘‘the excitement of sickness and hospitals,’’ within which context she is ‘‘impressively set free of all the rules and conditions of [her classmates’] lives.’’ The girls plan the party as if it were a ‘‘cause’’ and decide that their gifts should exceed the twenty-five cent limit imposed by Miss Darling. In a striking phrase, they are said to discuss Myra ‘‘as if she were something [they] owned.’’ The earlier comparison of Myra to a small figure carved of wood now acquires a new, chilling significance: a human being must become an object, this time of worship, before the group can absolve itself. The real awakening in each story, however, is not experienced by the group at all; rather, this improved moral vision is attributed solely to the girl from whose perspective the story is told, and then only when she comes to see herself as the victim’s alter ego. Maddie’s recognition of her kinship to Wanda begins on a bright October day when everyone seems more brightly arrayed than usual and even ‘‘Wanda looked pretty.’’ She sees that Wanda’s claim on this occasion to have a hundred dresses is based on a simple desire to be like all the other girls who at that moment are admiring Cecile’s red dress. With a piece of broken glass Maddie flashes a rainbow of the October colours onto nearby houses, trees, and telephone poles, a perfect symbol for herself as a reflector or mirror image of the bullied girl. Maddie always feels ill at ease when others harass Wanda, but her one attempt to stop Peggy from doing so ends abruptly when she perceives how much a target like Wanda she herself is: Suddenly she paused and shuddered. She pictured herself in the school yard, a new target for Peggy and the girls. Peggy might ask her where she got the dress she had on, and Maddie would
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have to say that it was one of Peggy’s old ones that Maddie’s mother had tried to disguise with new trimmings so that no one in Room 13 would recognize it. (35)
In Wanda’s predicament, Maddie sees an image of her own. The very names ‘‘Wanda’’ and ‘‘Maddie’’—their capital letters an inversion of each other, and the rest a trochaic assembly of like-sounding vowels and consonants—underline this identity. In the final analysis, Maddie’s sense of kinship with Wanda impels her to make amends. Restitution takes the form of fantasies in which Maddie rescues her other self from various perils and, more concretely, of the friendly letter that she and Peggy write. Yet as the last paragraph of the novel makes clear, Maddie remains troubled by the memory of the persecuted girl: . . . she blinked away the tears that came every time she thought of Wanda standing alone in that sunny spot in the school yard close to the wall, looking stolidly over at the group of laughing girls after she had walked off, after she had said, ‘‘Sure, a hundred of them—all lined up. . . . ’’
In ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ the narrator retraces the journey to self-awareness made by Estes’s Maddie. With adult hindsight, Helen presents at the story’s end all the clues of her kinship with Myra, recalling uneasily, just as Maddie had done with Wanda, how her ostracized double used to stand alone against the school. Although not foreign like Myra, Helen has other liabilities. She lives outside the city limits, for example, which is presumably why her boots are encrusted with mud, a stigma in Estes’s fictional world as well. Just as Maddie fears becoming the next Wanda, so too does Helen sense that her poverty will make her as inviting a target for bullying as Myra: I was the only one in the class who carried a lunch pail and ate peanut-butter sandwiches in the high, bare, mustard-coloured cloakroom, the only one who had to wear rubber boots in the spring, when the roads were heavy with mud. I felt a little danger, on account of this; but I could not tell exactly what it was.
As a child Helen cannot entirely decipher her kinship with Myra, but she clearly senses it, as we see in the passage just quoted. This awareness of a common bond is reinforced by Helen’s learning that Myra reads the same comics and popular fiction that she herself does. That Helen finally grasps what Maddie had plainly stated in The Hundred Dresses—that in her resemblance to the victim she herself might become the object
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of the next schoolyard game—is evident from her reaction when, in giving Myra the tin butterfly from her cracker jack box, she grazes Myra’s hand: ‘‘I flushed but Myra did not. I realized the pledge as our fingers touched; I was panicky, but all right. I thought, I can come early and walk with her other mornings. I can go and talk to her at recess. Why not? Why not?’’ (106). She is relieved that Myra does not wear the butterfly and that she vanishes shortly afterwards into the hospital. Helen and her classmates write Myra a letter (just as Peggy and Maddie write to Wanda) and give her lavish presents. Helen refers to these gifts as ‘‘guilt-tinged offerings’’ (110), and she resolves to get rid of the one that Myra gives her. Like Maddie, Helen cannot escape the ‘‘treachery of [her] own heart’’ (110). The story ends exactly like The Hundred Dresses, with the sometime persecutor haunted by the image of the victim standing solitarily against the school: Did Myra ever say goodbye? Not likely. She sat in her high bed, her delicate brown neck, rising out of a hospital gown too big for her, her brown carved face immune to treachery, her offering perhaps already forgotten, prepared to be set apart for legendary uses, as she was even in the back porch at school.
In the first published version of ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ which appeared in Chatelaine (July 1965) under the title ‘‘Good-by Myra,’’ the story had ended far more lamely: ‘‘At the door I had to pause once more and look back at her sitting in the high hospital bed. I thought that soon I would be outside. So I called back quickly, treacherously, almost gaily, ‘Good-by!’’’ (58). In keeping with her early practice of imitating works she admired, Munro improved this conclusion by emulating Eleanor Estes’s dramatic return to the time of past injury, an effective reminder in both works that the memory of cruel acts is not easily annulled. To see The Hundred Dresses as the source of Munro’s ‘‘Day of the Butterfly’’ heightens our appreciation of both texts, since each one casts a helpful light on the other. Such a study also illuminates the process by which texts are made of other texts. Finally, a comparison of the two works proves John Rowe Townsend’s point that the boundaries between children’s literature and adult fiction are shifting and elusive. Many books written for a mature audience—such as Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe—are often appropriated by youngsters, whereas children’s works such as the Alice books and
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Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings can be popular with adults. No writer in any genre has a monopoly on the truth; and the truth buried deep in a child’s heart, as Eleanor Estes and Alice Munro so movingly show, only the skill of a genuine storyteller is needed to reveal. Source: Darlene Kelly, ‘‘Alice Munro’s ‘Day of the Butterfly’: An American Source,’’ in Ariel, Vol. 29, No. 2, April 1998, pp. 115–28.
Mark Nunes In the following excerpt, Nunes describes how Alice Munro defied the margins of ‘‘Postmodernism’’ and raised challenges of overflow and the denial of totalizing narrative. One of the inherent difficulties in approaching the postmodern is the attempt to establish or comprehend a terrain that challenges the notion of stable and comprehensive systems. One might conceivably argue that postmodernism doesn’t exist, to the extent that the ‘‘ism’’ implies a determined, determinable movement, approach, or heading. Rather, the postmodern addresses, in Derrida’s term, the ‘‘other heading,’’ an aporetic movement of ‘‘post’’-ing beyond totalizing systems of determination, definition, closure, and certainty. Yet ‘‘Postmodernism’’ clearly does exist. Our readerly expectations suggest that ‘‘Postmodern literature’’ signifies intrusion and disruption, fragments without wholes, digressive excess, and various other affronts to narrative convention: in short, a definite/defined style to which we could compare various authors and determine their degree of fit. Occasionally, one finds, however, an author like Alice Munro, who defies these margins of ‘‘Postmodernism’’ while raising the same challenges of adetermination, overflow, and the denial of totalizing narrative. Her writing, she has noted, captures the ‘‘funny jumps’’ of living: bumps that unsettle the narrative frame. But rather than showing a narrative unravel, Munro often focuses on what holds a story together. Her writing calls attention to itself not to underscore disruption or narrative excess, but to note the narrative strategies—the conditions and contingencies—that allow the pieces to come together.
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appropriates textile crafts, and specifically patchwork ‘‘piecing,’’ as a thematic reminder of her own narrative technique. In doing so, she places herself in a complex tradition that pairs women’s writing with knitting, stitching, and quilting. As Elaine Showalter notes, for the past 20 years, several women authors have used quilting and ‘‘piecing’’ as an image of a feminist postmodern: an intertextuality that emphasizes fragmentation and narrative proliferation (Sister’s 161–62). As a metaphor for narrative, quilting/piecing destabilizes notions of unity, coherence, and balance; it becomes a source of disruption for patriarchal narrative structure. I will argue, however, that while Munro’s stories call attention to narrative fragments and multiple tellings, her narrative structure does not reflect a disruptive/eruptive postmodernism. Instead, one equally finds in her use of ‘‘piecing’’ traces of another tradition in women’s writing in which quilting functioned as an icon for the recuperation of fragmented traditions: the coming together of disparate elements into a ‘‘heated’’ whole (Showalter, ‘‘Piecing?’’ 225–27). In this usage, piecing functions not as a feminine disruption, but as a female ‘‘peacing’’ (Hedges 350). For Munro, however, ‘‘putting pieces together’’ never suggests a pre-existent ‘‘whole’’ toward which the narrative strains. Instead, this postmodern piecing/‘‘peacing’’ functions as a conditional, contingent arrangement and the basis for ‘‘metastable’’ ontologies.
Munro’s use of textile crafts provides an occasion for examining this alternate version of a postmodern narrative. The short story collection Friend of My Youth provides a wide array of references, both actual and metaphorical, to seams, embroideries, and appliques. She
Ildiko Carrington describes Munro’s narrative as a strategy of ‘‘controlling the uncontrollable’’; she notes that making sense is always a matter of control, yet this control is always suspect, temporary, and ultimately a sign of disruptive forces beyond narrative ability (12–15). One can see this process at work in Friend of My Youth, but the emphasis on a strategy of ‘‘piecing’’ foregrounds a constructive process that precludes either a return to wholeness or a perennial condition of disruption. Instead, Munro’s emphasis on contingencies derails the notion of master narratives by showing the means by which any given arrangement of facts results in the emergence of meaning. In Carrington’s view, this suspect narrative control is an attempt ‘‘to get at what is really there,’’ making the narrator an approximation of a transcendent ‘‘arranger’’ (97). Piecing, however, seems to imply a different ontology, one in which ideal arrangements (narrative truth) simply do not exist. At the same time, piecing emphasizes the productive nature of narration, not simply its disruptive effects. Contingent
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arrangements deny a ‘‘really there’’ prior to narration, while at the same time affirming the process by which meaning comes into being. Piecing, then, provides Munro with a metaphor for her own narrative process of sampling, appropriation, arrangement, and reuse. In effect, Munro does not place herself at the end of (or post) a literary tradition of women troping off of textile crafts, but instead draws from across this tradition. Her Almeda Roth, for example, declares in ‘‘Meneseteung’’ that she only turned to writing because ‘‘[her] fingers . . . were always too clumsy for crochetwork’’; her strategy is no different from many other mid-nineteenth century authors who used the image of needlework to ‘‘camouflage’’ their writing, allowing them to pick up the pen without appearing to leave their ‘‘proper sphere’’ (Hedges 342). But Munro also draws on the tradition of ‘‘New Woman’’ novels, in which textile crafts serve to establish the domestic and the artistic as antithetical modes of production (Hedges 345–46). By drawing from this entire tradition and mixing these images, Munro explores an aesthetic of contingent arrangements in which narratives show their conditions and contexts. In this regard, she is unique in her appropriation of patchwork piecing, and in her version of a postmodern narrative based upon this aesthetic. Although her constructive, contingent narrative approaches the ‘‘both/and’’ aesthetic of a feminist postmodern, she does not engage in an overt rupture of male/monoglossic narrative (DuPlessis 278– 79). Her approach to the postmodern, however, is only conservative in the sense that she conserves a great deal of a tradition in order to put it into play, piecing together her place within this usage. At times, she has presented herself in the image of the female author who wrote when the children were at school or when her family slept, writing short stories because it was all her household tasks would allow (‘‘Art’’ 234–36). But she is equally quick to note the ontological challenge at the base of her attraction to short fiction: ‘‘I have all these disconnected realities in my life, and I see them in other people’s lives. That was one of the problems—why I couldn’t write novels, I never saw things hanging together any too well’’ (‘‘Art’’ 257). The stories in Friend of My Youth, while focusing on these ‘‘disconnected realities,’’ also show how individual narratives do hang
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together: how the stitches hold, so to speak. Munro’s postmodern piecing calls attention to this ontology of contingency in which ‘‘absolute relatives’’ provide the foundation for all narration. To some degree, this reading attempts to place an ‘‘and’’ between two critical approaches to Munro: the first labeling her a teller of wellcrafted tales (‘‘Our Chekhov,’’ declares Cynthia Ozick), the second claiming her as a writer of constantly shifting and destabilizing narratives. When W. R. Martin, for example, uses the image of ‘‘hanging pictures together’’ to describe the ‘‘grouping and patterns . . . [that] are of a piece with Munro’s general method and style . . . contrasts and paradoxes, interwoven with similarities and parallels,’’ the emphasis seems to rest too easily on the balance of a harmonious paradox (33). Gerald Noonan, who claims that facts and events ‘‘are not to be reconciled’’ in her writing, describes these ‘‘alternate but irreconcilable milieus’’ in terms of modernist irony (170). But Munro herself has noted that Friend of My Youth signals a marked increase in her interest in ‘‘disconnected Realities:’’ the ways in which one goes about ‘‘changing [one’s] perceptions of what is possible, of what has happened—not just what can happen but what really has happened’’ (‘‘Art’’ 256–57). These alternate perceptions do not necessarily harmonize with one another. Critics who have taken a postmodernist—and, for the most part, feminist—approach to this feature in her writing have emphasized the destabilizing nature of these ‘‘disconnected realities.’’ Coral Ann Howells notes the ways in which her stories pull apart at the seams: ‘‘There is always something in addition which disarranges any fictional structure, however carefully it is created’’ (87). For Katherine Mayberry, these disjunctions serve as moments of ‘‘narrative failure’’ in Munro’s fiction: instabilities that disrupt narration (532). This account of a postmodernist Munro, however, leans too heavily on destabilization, implying a tonality, that I find at very most secondary in Friend of My Youth. Munro’s postmodern(ism), particularly as it expresses itself through the image of ‘‘piecing,’’ calls attention to both the contingent arrangement and the stabilizing effect of any narrative, any point of view, any reality. Munro’s self-conscious and selfreferential use of ‘‘piecing,’’ I would argue, presents a postmodern narrative that explores the stable and the contingent aspects of
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constructing an ontology without assuming the possibility of narrative wholeness or unity. . . . Source: Mark Nunes, ‘‘Postmodern ‘Piecing’: Alice Munro’s Contingent Ontologies,’’ in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 1, Winter 1997, pp. 11–27.
Paul W. Rogalus In the following review, Rogalus explains the reasons for the difficulty in critiquing and interpreting Munro’s work. Ildiko´ de Papp Carrington begins her book on the work of Canadian short story writer Alice Munro by asserting that hers is the most comprehensive study on ‘‘the full span’’ of Munro’s published work to date. The book-length studies on Munro by W. R. Martin and E. D. Blodgett are incomplete, according to Carrington, because they omit Munro’s most recent and most obscure unpublished stories. Carrington then uses her own vague agenda to trip through the Munro canon at random, completely ignoring such essential Munro classics as ‘‘Red Dress—1946,’’ ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ and ‘‘The Found Boat.’’ Unlike Martin and Blodgett, Carrington chooses not to deal with Munro’s stories in chronological order or group them according to the collections in which they were published. After a rambling introductory chapter, Carrington divides Munro’s work into four categories, according to her major thematic patterns, all loosely involving characters whose sense of control is somehow threatened. The first thematic category is defined by uncontrollability demonstrated through the eruption of external violence, either deliberate or accidental, which ‘‘suddenly bursts forth through the seemly surface of everyday behavior.’’ Carrington’s second grouping of stories is a bit more closely linked through Munro’s use of similar metaphors to associate sexuality with death. The third section, and by far the longest of Carrington’s study, concerns stories about ‘‘ambivalent’’ characters struggling for power, primarily the power to control sexual encounters, love affairs, and marriages. And Carrington’s final category deals with the Munro stories about relationships between parents and daughters, stories which primarily focus on the daughter’s failure to achieve emotional distance from her obsessive relationship with her parent, usually her mother.
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studied in detail and when the logic behind the ordering of the stories dealt with is most apparent. The chapter on the mother-daughter relationships is particularly revealing, and Carrington blends in useful insights from several different Munro interviews to stress the autobiographical nature of these stories. The difficulty in writing criticism and interpretation on Munro’s work, aside from the sheer volume and wide range of Munro’s unique stories, is her tendency to write paradoxical, objective, Chekhov-like stories that avoid making moral judgments or obvious, packaged intellectual statements. Munro’s stories, as Carrington notes, give the reader ‘‘intense, but not connected, moments of experience.’’ A critical work on Munro, however, must unearth some sort of intellectual significance, and it must connect the moments of experience communicated in the stories. Carrington’s points concerning the significance of Munro’s stories are not always clear or complete, and the Munrovian moments of experience with which Carrington deals are too often left unconnected, taken out of context, and aimless. Source: Paul W. Rogalus, Review of Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro, in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 1990, p. 250.
SOURCES ‘‘Access to Child Care for Low Income Working Families,’’ in Child Care and Early Education Research Connections, http://www.childcareresearch.org/SendPdf? resourceId=180 (accessed July 28, 2009). Arnaud, Aurelie, ‘‘Government of Canada to Amend Indian Act,’’ in Feminist Alliance for International Action, http://www.fafia-afai.org/en/government_of_canada_to_ amend_indian_act (accessed July 28, 2009). Brown, Wayne, ‘‘Leonard Marchand: The First Status Indian Elected to Canada’s Parliament,’’ in Elections Canada, http://www.elections.ca/eca/eim/article_search/ article.asp?id=97&lang=e&frmPageSize=5&text only =false (accessed July 28, 2009). ‘‘The Cold War and Economic Boom & Bust: 1950–1960,’’ in University of Calgary, http://www.ucalgary.ca/applied_ history/tutor/canada1946/chapter2.html (accessed July 28, 2009).
Carrington’s observations are clearest and most effective, particularly in the latter two sections of the book, when individual stories are
Daziron, Heliane, ˆ ‘‘The Pattern of Exclusion in Alice Munro’s ‘Day of the Butterfly,’’’ in Journal of the Short Story in English, Vol. 5, Autumn 1985, pp. 9–21.
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‘‘Flight Attendants,’’ in Bureau of Labor Statistics, http:// www.bls.gov/oco/ocos171.htm (accessed July 28, 2009). Franzen, Jonathan, ‘‘Alice’s Wonderland,’’ in New York Times Book Review, November 14, 2004, pp. 1–4. Hancock, Geoff, ‘‘An Interview with Alice Munro,’’ in Canadian Fiction Magazine, Vol. 43, 1982, pp. 75–114. Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 11th ed., Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009, pp. 235–36, 361, 511–12, 540. Houpt, Simon, ‘‘Munro ‘Amazed’ to Win Man Booker International,’’ in Globe and Mail, May 27, 2009, p. A1. ‘‘The Immigrant’s Dream,’’ in The Canada Site, http:// www.goldiproductions.com/thecanadasite/places/houses6_ goldi.html (accessed July 28, 2009). Levin, Martin, ‘‘New & Novel,’’ in New York Times Book Review, September 23, 1973, p. 48. Miller, Karl, ‘‘What’s Difficult, and What Isn’t: Two Books Published in the 1960s,’’ in Changing English, Vol. 11, No. 2, October 2004, pp. 183–88. ‘‘Multiculturalism in Canada,’’ in Mount Allison University, http://www.mta.ca/about_canada/multi/index.htm #table (accessed July 28, 2009). Munro, Alice, ‘‘Day of the Butterfly,’’ in Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories, McGraw-Hill, 1973, pp. 100–110; originally published in Toronto by Ryerson Press, 1968. Murphy, Georgeann, ‘‘The Art of Alice Munro: Memory, Identity, and the Aesthetics of Connection,’’ in Canadian Women Writing Fiction, edited by Mickey Pearlman, University Press of Mississippi, 1993, pp. 12–27. Thacker, Robert, ‘‘‘Clear Jelly’: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialects,’’ in Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts, edited by Louis MacKendrick, ECW Press, 1983, pp. 37–60. Toper, Harold, ‘‘Immigrant Labor since 1950,’’ in Multicultural Canada, http://www.multiculturalcanada.ca/ Encyclopedia/A-Z/l1/6 (accessed July 28, 2009). Valdes, Marcela, ‘‘Some Stories Have to Be Told by Me: A Literary History of Alice Munro,’’ in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 82, No. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 82–90. Walker, Nancy, A., ed., ‘‘The Married Woman Goes Back to Work,’’ in Women’s Magazines, 1940–1960, Palgrave McMillan, 1998, pp. 87–93; originally published in Women’s Home Companion, October 1956, p. 42. ———, ‘‘Women in Flight,’’ in Women’s Magazines, 1940–1960, Palgrave McMillan, 1998, pp. 86–87; originally published in Mademoiselle, December 1962, p. 125.
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FURTHER READING ‘‘Appreciations of Alice Munro,’’ in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 82, No. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 91–107. This articles contains a series of brief examinations of Munro’s work provided by several writers and many of Munro’s friends. Baskerville, Peter, Ontario: Image, Identity, and Power, Oxford University Press, 2002. Baskerville has included an estimated 150 reproductions of photographs, drawings, and paintings in this illustrated history of the Canadian province where Munro grew up. Ontario provides the setting for almost all of Munro’s early stories. Dahms, Fred, Beautiful Ontario Towns, Lorimer, 2001. In this small book, Dahms provides photographs and histories, as well as individual stories of the people who live in ten small Ontario towns, not unlike the one where Munro grew up. Day, Richard J. F., Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity, University of Toronto Press, 2000. In this book, the author examines Canada’s history of racial and ethnic diversity and explores whether multiculturalism is working to erase long-standing tensions between the many different groups of people who live in Canada. Hammill, Faye, Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada, 1760–2000, Rodopi, 2003. Hammill focuses on six Canadian women authors and examines their social lives and the influences on their work. Hammill also discusses the purely practical problems of reading, writing, and getting published in an era when books to read and the implements of writing were not readily available. Munro, Sheila, Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro, Douglas Gibson Books, 2001. This biography of Munro is also a memoir written by her oldest daughter. As a memoir the book is fast, easy reading, with lots of photos and personal information about Munro’s family and her work. Pearlman, Mickey, Canadian Women Writing Fiction, University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Pearlman has assembled a collection of critical essays about contemporary Canadian women writers. The essays cover such topics as memory, family, and identity. Rasporich, Beverly J., Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro, University of Alberta Press, 1990. In this book, Rasporich argues that Munro’s gender influences her work, which turns her
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writing into a feminist protest about the lives of girls and women.
with her writing. Thacker does not delve very deeply into Munro’s personal life.
Thacker, Robert, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography, Douglas Gibson Books, 2005. This biography of Munro’s life focuses on her work and the critical reception she has received
Thacker, Robert, ed., The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro, ECW Press, 1999. This book is a collection of eleven essays about Alice Munro that focus on several of her short stories.
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Federigo’s Falcon GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO 1353
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In the late 1340s, after the Black Death had decimated Florence, Italy, Giovanni Boccaccio began writing a collection of short stories called the Decameron, a title that means ‘‘ten days.’’ The stories are introduced by a narrator who describes how these tales were told by seven young women and three young men who had fled the plague and were staying in a villa in the countryside. According to Boccaccio’s introduction to the work, the ‘‘ten days’’ of the title refers to the ten days during which the young men and women told their stories. The story ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon,’’ also known as ‘‘The Falcon,’’ ‘‘The Ninth Story of the Fifth Day of the Decameron,’’ ‘‘The Tale of the Falcon,’’ as well as several other translated titles, is the ninth story told on the fifth day. The story concerns Federigo’s love for Giovanna. Federigo squanders his fortune, while Giovanna, who is married to another man, ignores his advances. As the years pass, Giovanna’s husband dies and her son grows ill. Federigo, now impoverished, owns nothing save his beloved pet falcon, a bird Giovanna’s sick child covets. Believing that her son’s spirits would improve and he would become well if only he could have Federigo’s falcon, Giovanna visits the poor Federigo, who still loves her. Embarrassed that he has nothing to offer Giovanna, Federigo prepares his falcon as a feast for Giovanna. In the end, Federigo’s gesture moves Giovanna to care for him. A tale of love and grief, ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ is one of the more
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family resided in Florence, where Boccaccino arranged for Boccaccio to be educated under Giovanni di Domenico Mazzuoli da Strada. Boccaccio was taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric—three subjects collectively known as the trivium. He also learned Latin and arithmetic. In the late 1320s, Boccaccio traveled with his father to Naples and lived there from 1327 to 1341. During this time, while he likely learned his father’s business, Boccaccio also became associated with the royal Angevin court in Naples. (King Robert of Anjou, who was related to the French royal family, ruled Naples from 1309 to 1343.) Having pursued a career as a merchant, Boccaccio sought to leave his father’s profession, but his father insisted that Boccaccio take up the study of canon law instead. For the next several years, Boccaccio pursued his legal studies but also began writing at the same time, completing such works as the long poem La Caccia di Diana (Diana’s Hunt), which scholars estimate was completed in 1334, and the work considered to be the first Italian novel, Il Filocolo (The Love Afflicted), completed in 1335 or 1336.
Giovanni Boccaccio (The Library of Congress)
Giovanni Boccaccio was born either in June or July 1313 in the region of Tuscany in Italy. The city of his birth is disputed but thought to be either Certaldo or Florence. Boccaccio was the illegitimate son of the merchant Boccaccio di Chellino (also called Boccaccino) and an unknown woman. Boccaccino adopted the boy not long after his birth. In 1319 Boccaccio’s father married Margherita dei Mardoli. The
In 1341, Boccaccio returned to Florence. In addition to the political and economic conflicts troubling Florence during the 1340s, the city was ravaged by the plague in 1348. (The plague is a bacterial disease that manifests itself in the body through infection of the lymph nodes, as in the bubonic plague; the lungs, as in the pneumonic plague; or the blood, as in the septicemic plague. The plague that affected Florence, also referred to as the Black Death, was believed to be a combination of two or three of these forms.) During the year 1348, Boccaccio lost his father and stepmother to the disease. He was left to care for a younger stepbrother. In the years immediately following the plague year, from 1349 to 1353, Boccaccio composed the Decameron. According to Cormac O´ Cuilleana´in’s introduction to the modern English translation of the Decameron published by Wordsworth in 2004, many of the stories in the collection were circulating around Florence while Boccaccio was still completing the work as a whole. After Boccaccio completed the manuscript, inexpensive copies were made and distributed among merchants. As Florence began to rebuild itself, Boccaccio worked in the political arena and was sent on diplomatic missions to France, Rome, and northern Italy by the Florentine government. Boccaccio died in the town of Certaldo, Italy, on December 21, 1375.
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chaste tales in the Decameron and features characters who overcome challenges and find happiness with one another. It is believed that the stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron were in circulation before the final version of the work was completed in 1353. The earliest English translation of the work was published in 1886 by John Payne. ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ is available in a 2004 publication of Decameron by Wordsworth. In addition, ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ is also available in a smaller collection of Boccaccio’s short stories, Federigo’s Falcon and Other Tales, published by Fredonia Books in 2003.
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PLOT SUMMARY Bocaccio’s ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ is a story told within the larger framework of the Decameron. ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ is the ninth story told on the fifth day. It is offered by Fiammetta, the young woman elected queen for the day.
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Fiammetta opens the story by urging the women in the group not to discriminate among potential suitors regardless of ‘‘chance or fortune.’’ Fiammetta then tells of a young man, a gentleman named Federigo, a member of the wealthy and respected Alberighi family. As Fiammetta’s narration continues, she reveals that Federigo loves the rich and beautiful Monna Giovanna. Despite the fact that Giovanna is already married, in order to win her heart Federigo holds feasts and tournaments in her honor and sends her expensive gifts. In spite of the lavishness of his offerings, however, the lady is unmoved by Federigo’s displays of affection. Federigo loses the entirety of his wealth in pursuit of Giovanna. He retains only a small farm, where he takes up residence, and his prized falcon. Meanwhile, Giovanna’s husband eventually becomes sick and dies, leaving his wealth to his son and, in the event of his son’s death, to Giovanna. The widow Giovanna, Fiammetta informs the reader, moves to the country; her estate is near Federigo’s now impoverished farm. Giovanna’s son spends much of his time wandering the countryside and comes to know Federigo and his falcon. The young boy loves Federigo’s falcon and wishes it to be his. The child becomes very ill. Giovanna scarcely leaves his side and promises him anything his heart desires, hoping this will enable him to recover. The boy tells his mother that if she can procure Federigo’s falcon for him, he believes his sickness will be cured. Giovanna resolves to ask Federigo for his falcon, knowing it is all he has left in the world but believing she must try and save her son. The next morning, Giovanna sets off, certain that Federigo will be pleased to see her. Federigo hurries to greet her. Giovanna appeals to his former feelings for her, telling her onetime suitor that she has come to make amends for anything he might have suffered in pursuit of her by offering to dine with him. Federigo, humbled and happy to receive her, promises her a meal. Once alone, Federigo despairs that he has nothing to offer Giovanna. Moved by the love he still feels for Giovanna, Federigo is
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Decameron Nights is a 1953 film based on Boccaccio’s short-story collection the Decameron. Directed by Hugo Fregonese, the film includes three of the stories from Boccaccio’s collection, as well as some treatment of the frame narrative style technique used in the novel. The film was produced by the Spanish film production company Cesareo Gonzales Produciones Cinematograficas and was distributed in the United States by RKO Radio Pictures. Boccaccio’s Decameron is available in audio format, narrated by Frederick Davidson. The cassette version was published by Blackstone Audio in 2000, the MP3 version in 2006, and the CD in 2009.
convinced he must offer her something in order to demonstrate his honor and respect for the lady. Having no money, refusing to beg for goods, and knowing none of his poor neighbors have anything they can lend him, Federigo realizes he has but one thing with which to make a meal: his falcon. After cleaning and roasting the bird and setting the table, Federigo offers the meal to Giovanna. After dining on Federigo’s falcon, Giovanna reveals to Federigo her reason for visiting him. Giovanna begins by acknowledging Federigo’s former pursuit of her. She describes a mother’s love for her child. After expressing her understanding of Federigo’s situation—that he has lost his fortune and now has nothing left except his falcon—Giovanna goes on to explain how ill her son is, and how much he loves Federigo’s falcon. Claiming to make her request not on the grounds of Federigo’s love for her but only based on her understanding of his kind and gentle nature, Giovanna tells Federigo that if she does not return home with Federigo’s falcon, she fears her son will die. Speechless, Federigo begins to weep. Federigo tells Giovanna how, out of respect and love for her, he made a feast for her of the only thing
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he had, his falcon. Giovanna first scolds him for having killed such a rare bird for the base purpose of appeasing a woman’s appetite. At the same time, Giovanna inwardly marks the nobility of Federigo’s actions and understands that despite his poverty Federigo has remained a true gentleman. She returns home to her son after thanking him. Shortly thereafter, Giovanna’s son dies. After a period of time has passed, Giovanna’s family encourages her to marry again, as ‘‘she was very rich, and yet but young.’’ Giovanna tells her family that she does not mind living without a husband and that she is content. However, if they insist she marry, she will have no one except Federigo. Initially Giovanna’s family members protest that Federigo is but a poor beggar, but Giovanna defends him, acknowledging his lack of wealth but praising him as a gentleman. Eventually, Giovanna’s family consents to the match, and Giovanna showers her wealth upon her new husband. The couple, as the story concludes, ‘‘lived and loved in equal joy and happiness.’’
CHARACTERS Federigo Alberighi Federigo is the son of Signor Fillippo Alberighi (Fillippo Alberighi does not appear in the story. He is mentioned only to draw attention to the prestigious reputation of the Alberighi family.) Federigo falls in love with the lady Giovanna. Despite Giovanna’s continued ambivalence toward Federigo’s advances, Federigo continues to spend his fortune extravagantly. In Giovanna’s honor, Federigo hosts banquets, feasts, jousting tournaments, and other grand events. He sends her all manner of gifts, sparing no expense in the process. Eventually, he has spent everything he has and is forced to live on a small farm in the country, with only one reminder of his former wealth—his rare and prized falcon. The narrator observes that Federigo bears Giovanna no ill will for being the cause of his poverty; rather, his love for her grows more intense. When Giovanna visits Federigo at his home, he receives her like a gentleman, exchanging polite greetings and refusing to admit—despite Giovanna’s offer to make amends for her past behavior—that she has ever caused him any harm. Upon hearing that Giovanna has offered to grace him with her company for dinner, Federigo behaves in his usual fashion and is
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prepared to give up all he has for his love. Clearly in a state of panic, Federigo is described as running around the house (after he has conducted Giovanna, and the gentlewoman accompanying her, into the garden), desperate to find something to prepare for dinner. Spying his falcon and realizing he has nothing else, Federigo admits that his noble bird will make an appropriate meal for a noble lady. After dinner, upon hearing that Giovanna wanted the bird for her ill son, Federigo feels intense grief and comments on how cruel Fortune has been to him. He explains his actions and receives Giovanna’s reprimand. When Giovanna and Federigo are finally wed, the narrator observes that having loved Giovanna for so long, and having given everything to her, enables Federigo to be a better husband than he would otherwise have been.
Fiammetta Fiammetta is the narrator of ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon.’’ Elected by her peers as the queen of the fifth day of storytelling, Fiammetta selects the theme, the introduction to the fifth day informs the reader, of ‘‘lovers who have won happiness after grief or misfortune.’’ Fiammetta introduces the tale, cautioning the other young women in the group to not be rash or careless in the selection of their suitors, and to take into account the worthiness of the suitor rather than simply the suitor’s fortune. Fiammetta takes no part in the story herself.
Monna Giovanna Giovanna is the noblewoman with whom Federigo is in love. (The word monna, short for ‘‘madonna,’’ is Italian for the title of ‘‘lady,’’ a title used in Boccaccio’s day.) She is described as the most beautiful woman in all of Florence. Despite her beauty and her other reputed virtues, such as her honesty, Giovanna ignores Federigo and all the ostentatious displays of his affection. No matter how lavish the banquet given in her honor or how expensive the gift, Giovanna does not acknowledge Federigo in any way, even though Federigo is, like Giovanna, from a wealthy and respected family. Once his fortune is lost, Federigo abandons the city to live on a small farm with his falcon. Meanwhile, Giovanna’s husband dies and her son grows gravely ill. Giovanna remains by her son’s side during his illness, offering him whatever she can to comfort him and telling him that, if he desires anything at all, she will do everything she can to bring it to him. The boy then
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tells her of his wish to have Federigo’s falcon for his own. Giovanna’s thoughts reveal some torment upon hearing the request of her dying son. She understands that Federigo gave up his fortune for her, and that all he had left was his prized falcon. Although she considers the fact that Federigo may no longer wish to go on living if his falcon were taken from him, Giovanna feels compelled to ask him for the bird. Confident that Federigo will give her his falcon if she asks for it, Giovanna promises her son to retrieve the animal. While Giovanna’s earlier indifference to Federigo’s attentions, combined with her disregard for his feelings about his falcon, demonstrate her to be an arrogant woman, Giovanna nevertheless approaches Federigo with the polite respectfulness that is expected of a woman of her stature. She does not immediately tell Federigo why she has come but states her desire to make amends for her previous treatment of him, and to offer him her company for dinner. Her delay in making her request has disastrous results: she eats the falcon she had intended to retrieve for her son. After an initial outburst, in which Giovanna chastises Federigo for sacrificing the noble animal for any woman, she reveals that she is touched by his gesture. While she finds contentment living alone, when pressured by her family to remarry, Giovanna claims she will only have Federigo as her husband. He has finally won her heart with a grand gesture of his love.
she is unable to bring him what he desires, the boy dies. The narrator observes that his death results either from ‘‘grieving over the fact that he could not have Federigo’s falcon or from the extremity of his disease.’’
Giovanna’s son Giovanna’s son, whose name is not mentioned in ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon,’’ is described as having a great interest in hawks and a familiarity with Federigo and his falcon. According to the narrator, the boy delights in watching Federigo’s falcon, but seeing how much Federigo loves his falcon, the boy makes no attempt to try and claim it as his own. Through this statement, the boy’s sense of arrogant entitlement is revealed, although it is somewhat modified by his respect for Federigo’s feelings. The narrator seems to imply that if the boy had not noticed how much Federigo loved his falcon, he would have somehow procured it for himself simply because he desired it. Once he becomes ill and is told by his mother that she will get him anything he wants if it will ease his suffering, the boy requests that Giovanna obtain Federigo’s falcon for himself. The boy tells his mother that his illness will perhaps be alleviated if only he can have Federigo’s falcon. Later, when Giovanna reveals that
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THEMES Courtly Love In medieval tradition, the notion of courtly love was a chaste and idealized version of love in which individuals who desired one another demonstrated their affection through noble deeds and self-sacrifice. Courtly love was believed to be ennobling, yet at the same time it was most often expressed between individuals not married to one another and usually married to someone else. The interaction between Giovanna and Federigo is characterized, to some extent, by the conventions of courtly love. Federigo pursues Giovanna, though she is married to another. As she is the pursued object, Giovanna’s actions exemplify the traditions of courtly love in the sense that she remains aloof. In the typical courtly love scenario, however, the woman desired would give the man pursuing her a series of tasks to accomplish. His achievements were intended to be demonstrative of his love. Typically this type of relationship would also remain secret, due to its often adulterous nature and given the fact that the secrecy intensified the passion felt between the two people involved. In ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ the narrator gives no indication that Giovanna is a willing participant in the ‘‘relationship’’ with Federigo. She sets him no tasks to prove his passion. Yet Federigo still makes lavish displays of his love. In fact, he sacrifices nearly everything he has out of love for Giovanna, who, the narrator informs the reader, ‘‘made no reckoning of whatsoever he did for her sake, or the least respect of his own person.’’ Giovanna’s response goes beyond being aloof. She is not simply cold to Federigo; she ignores him completely, giving no indication that she is aware of what he has done for her or that she owes him any sort of respect. While Boccaccio initially sets up ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ as a tale of courtly love, Giovanna’s utter nonresponsiveness and Federigo’s talent for overt, rather than covert, displays of honor and love undercut the courtly love tradition. Upon Giovanna’s being moved by her son’s illness to approach Federigo regarding his falcon,
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Boccaccio was a poet as well as a short-story writer and composed short love sonnets collected in his Rime (date of composition unknown), as well as longer, epic poems similarly focused on love and courtly ideals. The Japanese poet Chugan Engetsu lived from 1300 to 1375, precisely the same time period during which Boccaccio lived. Examine Chugan Engetsu’s poetry, available in
English in Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, published by Stanford University Press in 1993. Using electronic and print resources, research Engetsu’s life. Prepare a report on Engetsu’s life and poetry in which you discuss the way events in his life may or may not have influenced his poetry. Federigo’s falcon plays a significant role in Boccaccio’s short story and has been viewed as a symbol of Federigo’s courtly values, his former wealth, his status as a nobleman, and his pride. Research the history of falconry (the sport of hunting with falcons) in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Create a report or presentation in which you examine issues such as the use of falcons among the nobility, the types of birds used, and the type of prey they captured. Cite examples of literary works from this time period in which falconry plays a prominent role. Mary Jane Beaufrand’s young-adult novel Primavera, published by Little, Brown for Young Readers in 2009, takes place in the late fourteenth century in the Florence of the Italian Renaissance. It concerns the struggles for power between two prominent and wealthy families. Create a book group in which you discuss such items as the characters, plot, style, and themes of the novel, as well as the way the novel relates to the issues Boccaccio treats in ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon,’’ or to what you have learned about Boccaccio’s life. Create a group presentation you will make to your class, deciding which topics you will discuss and what form the presentation will take.
the story takes a further turn from the courtly love tradition. Giovanna is now a widow rather than the unattainable woman married to another man. Giovanna’s thoughts, as she considers how best to obtain Federigo’s falcon for her dying son, show an understanding of Federigo that has
previously been absent in the story. Giovanna is aware of what Federigo has sacrificed, of how highly he regards her, of how much Federigo’s falcon means to him. The narrator informs us that it is only out of love for her son that, after having considered all these factors, she still seeks
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In addition to narrating ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon,’’ Fiammetta serves as the narrator for nine other stories in the Decameron. These include the fifth tale of days one, two, seven, and nine; the sixth tale of days three, six, and ten; the first tale of day four; and the eighth tale of day eight. Select two other tales told by Fiammetta, in addition to ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon,’’ and compare the stories. Write an essay in which you discuss Fiammetta as a storyteller and character. Cite examples from the stories you chose to support your assertions. Note that a reading of the introduction to the Decameron may provide further aid in your analysis.
Boccaccio’s ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ was written in the immediate aftermath of the plague in Florence. In addition, the plot of the story is propelled by illness; the narrator informs the reader that Giovanna’s husband grows sick and dies. The same fate befalls her child. The narrator omits any reference to medical intervention being sought for the dying characters. Research the state of medicine in the mid-1300s in Europe. Create a written report, a PowerPoint presentation, or a Web page in which you discuss your findings.
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to ask Federigo for his falcon. Federigo responds to Giovanna the way he always has, namely, by offering her everything he has. After Giovanna learns that Federigo has presented her with his falcon as a meal, she begins to admire the way his nobility has withstood the trials he has endured. By the story’s end, the courtly love tradition, which typically ends in tragedy should the lovers attempt to consummate their relationship, has been transmuted into a love story with an apparently happy ending, that of the marriage of Federigo and Giovanna.
falcon. Federigo is too proud to admit to Giovanna that he has nothing to offer her. He, like Giovanna, is complicit in the deaths of the boy and his falcon due to his pride.
Pride As members of the wealthy class of gentlemen and women, both Giovanna and Federigo pride themselves on the sense of nobility that they feel they are entitled to and honor-bound to express. Yet their mutual sense of pride in their nobility is the cause of so much grief in ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon.’’ Giovanna expresses pride in her noble status through her sense of propriety. As a married woman, she feels it is not proper to acknowledge Federigo’s attentions at all, yet her aloofness further fuels Federigo’s passion rather than puts him off. A few kind words from Giovanna, politely but firmly refusing his affection, may have prevented Federigo from sacrificing his entire fortune for her sake. Her sense of propriety causes further damage when, upon approaching Federigo regarding his falcon, Giovanna does not forthrightly tell him why she has come. She offers to make amends to him for her earlier inattention by presenting herself as a dinner partner. Had Giovanna, who claims to be so moved by love and concern for her dying son, immediately begged for Federigo’s falcon—an action that would have been commensurate with her desperation to save her child—Federigo likely would have parted with the bird and possibly the son’s life—and definitely the falcon’s life—would have been spared. Similarly, Federigo’s pride in his status as a gentleman precipitates the tragedies that occur in the story. Living as he does ‘‘wholly by the dictates of courtly love,’’ as observed by Marga Cottino-Jones in the 1982 study Order from Chaos: Social and Aesthetic Harmonies in Boccaccio’s ‘‘Decameron,’’ Federigo gives up all his wealth in pursuit of an unattainable woman. His adherence to the ideals of courtly love is such that he views his self-sacrifice as a display of honor and devotion to Giovanna. He takes this devotion to the extreme when he serves Giovanna his
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STYLE Frame Narrative Boccaccio’s Decameron, of which ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ is a part, is written as a frame narrative. In a frame narrative a story, or a series of stories, is embedded within a larger structure. This framing structure is itself a narrative designed to introduce or set the stage for the other story or stories. Each one of the embedded works is regarded as a story within a story. In Boccaccio’s Decameron, the framing narrative is the story of the seven young women and three young men who escape the plague in Florence by secluding themselves in a villa in the countryside. This structure provides the author with a convenient, cohesive way to link otherwise unrelated short stories. Critics studying the work as a whole examine each of the narrating characters, seeking continuity in the storytelling styles of each individual. In ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon,’’ narrated by the character of Fiammetta, the narrator briefly describes the story she is about to tell and advises the other women in her company about the lessons to be learned from the tale, thereby reminding the reader of the larger framework of the Decameron. However, the individual short stories in the collection also function as complete narratives in their own right.
Vernacular Language ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ and the other stories in the Decameron are written in vernacular Italian (the common, spoken Italian language) rather than in Latin (the language of serious and scholarly literary and philosophical works written in Boccaccio’s time). Being written in Italian enabled Boccaccio’s stories to be copied and distributed quickly since the copyists did not need to know Latin in order to reproduce the manuscript. The accessibility in terms of language, combined with the resulting ease and efficiency with which the texts could be copied, gave the Decameron a reputation for being popular and entertaining reading. The common, informal language served Boccaccio’s aims in terms of theme as well. Many of the stories in the Decameron are focused on love and romance, and a number of
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Falcon (Image copyright Photobunny, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
them have been described as more sensual than others. ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon,’’ which focuses on courtly love as opposed to physical attraction, is less erotic than some of the other stories in the collection.
In the years immediately preceding the arrival of the plague in Florence in 1348, the city suffered economically from the failure of three major banking houses within a span of four years (1343–1346). The nearby Po River Valley was struck by flash floods in 1345, and the city experienced widespread famine in 1346. Late in 1347, the plague reached Italy and spread along trade routes from port to port, from Catania in Sicily to Genoa, Pisa, and Venice. The plague reached Florence in 1348. Unbeknownst to fourteenthcentury Italians, the disease was spread by the
bite of fleas carried by rats, which ran rampant aboard ships and in port cities. The bacterial disease infects the lymph nodes of contaminated individuals and is known as the bubonic plague at this stage. It is characterized by black swellings, or buboes, in the victim’s armpits and groin area. When the infection spreads to the lungs, the disease is termed pneumonic plague, which is particularly contagious since it may be spread by contact between humans and not just by contact with fleas. (If the infection spreads to the blood (septicemic plague), it is always fatal, but this version of the disease is the rarest.) The disease usually kills its victim within days. However, some individuals were known to have survived the bubonic plague. Harry Hearder, in his 2001 study Italy: A Short History, observes that the city of Florence was ‘‘perhaps worse hit than any other Italian city.’’ The plague, and the smaller-scale disasters that preceded it, all contributed to the stagnation in the artistic and economic achievements Florence and much of
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Plague and Its Aftermath in Florence
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1350s: Italy is a region comprised of citystates and republics, each ruled by its own system of government. Some areas are ruled by elected councils of citizens from different socioeconomic classes, while others are ruled by royalty. Today: The disparate Italian states began a process of unification in the nineteenth century, fighting wars (against the French and the Austrians) to maintain the status of a unified kingdom, and becoming a republic in the 1940s. Italy is now governed by a prime minister (currently Silvio Berlusconi). While the prime minister is the head of government, the official, ceremonial head of state is the president of the Italian Republic (currently Giorgio Napolitano). 1350s: Boccaccio is regarded as a popular writer who innovates the language, structure, and form of fiction in Italy, creating a prose style in vernacular Italian and crafting short stories, such as those in the Decameron, that are accessible and appealing to a wide audience. Boccaccio is also the author of what is commonly regarded as the first modern psychological novel, L’Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (The Elegy of the Lady Fiammetta). Today: Italian authors continue to innovate in the realm of Italian fiction, experimenting with form and narrative structure and taking
the rest of Italy had been making in the earlier part of the fourteenth century. Boccaccio survived the plague and wrote about it in the introduction to the Decameron. Likewise, the poet Petrarch, Boccaccio’s friend and literary peer, lived through the horrors of the plague. Yet, as Hearder observes, few notable figures in the literary or visual arts arose until the fifteenth century. In addition, the economic prosperity enjoyed by citizens in the region of Tuscany, already jeopardized just prior to the plague, was further damaged by the challenges the cities
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on contemporary themes. Popular authors of Italian fiction include Vincenzo Consolo, Gesualdo Bufalino, and Anna Maria Ortese.
1350s: Italy is still recovering from a plague that decimated the region in the previous decade. It is estimated that the bubonic and pneumonic plagues killed somewhere between one-third to one-half of the populations in various regions of Italy. Today: According to the World Health Organization, the plague still persists, mainly in Africa in such regions as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Algeria. It can be treated with antibiotics if diagnosed early.
1350s: The philosophy of humanism—a social philosophy that looks to classical Greek and Roman philosophers and their views on ethics and morality and focuses on the individual and personal expression—is growing increasingly prevalent. Early Renaissance humanists include Boccaccio and the poet Petrarch. Today: Organizations such as the Humanist Institute, the American Humanist Association, and the International Humanist and Ethical Union attest to the avid current interest in an organized approach to secular (nonreligious) morality, ethics, and social philosophy.
faced in rebuilding after the epidemic. True economic revival was not experienced in Florence, or on a widespread scale in Italy, until the fifteenth century.
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Florence in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance Boccaccio is often seen as a transitional figure who exemplifies qualities of two different time periods, the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance periods. The late Middle Ages, or the later medieval period, is typically viewed as the
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late fourteenth century. The Renaissance period is often regarded as the early fifteenth century, a time in which economic recovery following the disasters (including the plague, floods, famine, and banking crises) begins to transform Italian cities, and art and culture begins to flourish once again. Some of the philosophical and cultural viewpoints associated with the Renaissance could already be seen during the later years of the 1300s, and especially in the work of Boccaccio. Boccaccio’s transitional status reflects the nature of the city of Florence, where he lived and worked for much of his life. It is important to note that Italy during this time period was not a nation unto itself. Rather, different regions were ruled as independent citystates or republics. Some cities were ruled by elected councils, others by powerful families, and still others by the foreign powers that had conquered the city or region. For example, Florence had been governed by citizens—guilds (organizations of skilled workers) comprised of middle-class bankers, merchants, and artisans— as well as by members of the nobility. By contrast, Naples was ruled by a king, Robert of Anjou, who was related to the French royal family. The Florentine government was more inclusive than the governing bodies in other cities or regions of Italy, including as it did members of the growing middle class, which was wealthy, but not of the noble class. However, struggles for power between the middle class and the nobles frequently troubled the Florentine government. According to Judith Powers Serafini-Sauli, author of the 1982 study Giovanni Boccaccio, the prominence of this wealthy middle class gave rise to a large population literate in Italian. Boccaccio chose to write his Decameron in Italian rather than Latin, making his literature available to a broader base of readers. He has been viewed as forward-thinking for this and for his proposal in his Decameron to view narrative storytelling as both entertaining and instructive. At the same time, Boccaccio embraced the conventions of his time. His settings and themes are those of medieval literature, feudal societies and courtly love. Boccaccio also is a product of post-plague Florence, and stories such as ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ envision a future in which wealth and nobility may be viewed as separate yet equally respectable. Federigo, who has lost his fortune, is able to shed his status as an embarrassment to the noble world when he is finally embraced by Giovanna. Boccaccio, often regarded as an early humanist,
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encourages a view of people as individuals rather than as members of a class, who are able to participate in the restructuring of Italian society in the aftermath of the plague. Humanism respected the teachings of classical Greek and Roman writers and consequently was viewed as a secular rather than a religious philosophy.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW Much of the criticism of Boccaccio’s ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ is made within the context of the larger work, the Decameron, which contains the short story. It has been observed by critics such as David Wallace in his 1991 study Giovanni Boccaccio: ‘‘Decameron,’’ that the stories in the Decameron were so popular that they were copied and distributed even before the collection as a whole was completed. As was noted earlier, Cormac O´ Cuilleana´in makes the same observation in his 2004 Introduction to the Decameron. Wallace goes on to discuss the many translations made of the text soon after Boccaccio’s death in 1375. Wallace also analyzes the original style and form of the Decameron, maintaining that ‘‘Boccaccio achieves a new kind of literary language, a prose that escapes the formative constraints of its Latin models and yet draws from them sufficient subtlety, rhythmic variety and complexity to map out new areas of human experience.’’ Similarly, Judith Powers SerafiniSauli, in her 1982 study of Boccaccio in Giovanni Boccaccio, regards the language Boccaccio uses in the Decameron as a ‘‘most extraordinary phenomenon’’ for its time. She explains that Boccaccio, who had previously experimented with writing in vernacular Italian, ‘‘refines the use of dialect and popular language’’ in the Decameron. Marga Cottino-Jones, in her 1982 study Order from Chaos: Social and Aesthetic Harmonies in Boccaccio’s ‘‘Decameron,’’ praises Boccaccio’s innovations in narration, exploring the complexities in his use of narrators and his skill in storytelling within the shorter narrative form employed in the Decameron. In analyzing ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ in particular, critics have taken a variety of approaches, some analyzing the elements of courtly love within the story, others focusing on the way Boccaccio emphasizes the basic humanity—the intrinsic goodness—of the characters in the story. Cottino-Jones demonstrates the ways in
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which Boccaccio, through the comments of his narrator Fiammetta, draws attention to Federigo’s nobility and chivalry and relates these qualities to Florentine tradition. Giovanna, Cottino-Jones argues, is associated with the wealthy bourgeois tradition, and in the union of Federigo and Giovanna the worlds of aristocratic ideals and bourgeois wealth are reconciled. Serafini-Sauli likewise observes the association of Federigo with the courtly ideal of love, and further comments that ‘‘the dignity, courtesy, and sensitivity’’ that both Giovanna and Federigo display ‘‘are a constant element in Boccaccio’s human comedy.’’ Taking another approach, Stavros Deligiorgis, in his 1975 study Narrative Intellection in the ‘‘Decameron,’’ asserts that Giovanna, once Federigo’s idealized notion of a woman, becomes humanized through her consideration of Federigo’s sacrifice. Federigo, on the other hand, had the chance to elevate himself, to behave outside the realm of the courtly ideal by admitting his poverty. Deligiorgis contends that not only did Federigo have the opportunity to preserve his falcon, but he could also ‘‘have saved the child, and been a little god for a fraction of a second.’’ Boccaccio thus depicts humanity honestly as both virtuous and flawed.
CRITICISM Catherine Dominic Dominic is a novelist and a freelance writer and editor. In this essay, she explores the similarities between Monna Giovanna in ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ and the female falcon Federigo owns, arguing that despite their idealized status and the illusion of autonomy that surrounds them, both figures are subject to the desires of the story’s male characters. In ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon,’’ Boccaccio presents the reader with a woman, the lady Giovanna, who appears to exercise a sense of agency in her own life. A married woman, Giovanna ignores the apparently unwanted affections of Federigo, despite the fact that within the conventions of courtly love, which were socially accepted in her day, it would not have been outside the realm of possibility for her to allow herself a flirtation with Federigo. Yet she does not acknowledge Federigo, or the grand demonstrations of his affection, in any fashion. Despite the illusion of personal power and independence—and against her better judgment—Giovanna does her son’s bidding and
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IN ‘FEDERIGO’S FALCON,’ THE FALCON FUNCTIONS AS A PARALLEL FOR GIOVANNA. LIKE THE BIRD, GIOVANNA IS PERMITTED THE ILLUSION OF POWER, BUT HER ACTIONS, LIKE THOSE OF THE FALCON, ARE DETERMINED BY THE WISHES OF THE MALE FIGURES IN THE STORY.’’
follows her brothers’ wishes for her to remarry despite her protestations that she is content to be alone. Giovanna revolts against the authority of her brothers by choosing someone they do not approve of, namely, Federigo. Likewise, Federigo’s falcon is allowed to hunt, only she hunts for food for Federigo. She is considered tamed, a possession. In ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon,’’ the falcon functions as a parallel for Giovanna. Like the bird, Giovanna is permitted the illusion of power, but her actions, like those of the falcon, are determined by the wishes of the male figures in the story. Giovanna’s son, Federigo, and Giovanna’s brothers dictate female action—and the fates of the females—in this story. When Fiammetta, the narrator of the story, initially introduces the tale, she suggests the power women have over their suitors, telling the other women in her party to be generous with their kindness, even though they might be bound by virtue to remain guarded. Fiammetta advises the women to bestow their favor on men who are worthy, whether or not they have been blessed by good fortune. The tale, Fiammetta suggests, is a cautionary one, in which the women are admonished to use the power of their affection wisely, for a worthy man may approach them, even though he lacks wealth. Such prefatory remarks exaggerate the power that women possessed during this time period. As Fiammetta’s tale will show, women may have the power to choose a mate, but they do not have the power to choose to be alone. Following this opening, Giovanna is introduced as the love interest of Federigo. Significantly, Giovanna is brought to the reader’s attention only within the context of Federigo’s interest in her. The confines within which Giovanna operates
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (The Elegy of the Lady Fiammetta), completed in 1343 and often regarded as the first psychological novel, is written from the female protagonist’s point of view. It is available in a modern English translation by Mariangela Causa-Steindler and Thomas Mauch, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1990. The epic poem Teseida della Nozze d’Emilia (Theseid of the Nuptials of Emilia), written by Boccaccio around 1340, is concerned with knights, battles, courtly ideals, and romance. The work is believed to have been a source of Chaucer’s ‘‘Knight’s Tale,’’ one of the Canterbury Tales (written between 1387 and 1400). Boccaccio’s poem is available in a translation by Vincenzo Traversa in the ‘‘Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures’’ series, Vol. 116, published by Peter Lang in 2002.
friend, and fellow humanist. His poetry is translated by David Young and collected in the volume The Poetry of Petrarch, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2005. Petrarch’s sonnets in particular are regarded as among the finest ever written and influenced the work of such later writers as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare.
Women of the Renaissance, published in 2004 and written by Melissa Thomson and Ruth Dean, is part of the ‘‘Women in History’’ series published by Lucent Books. In this volume, which is targeted at a youngadult audience, the authors explore the role of women during the Renaissance in such areas as art, politics, and religion. The work also briefly discusses a number of historically significant women.
During the first half of the fourteenth century, a Muslim lawyer from Morocco traveled throughout the Muslim world and recorded his experiences. The Travels of Ibn Battuta: In the Near East, Asia and Africa, 1325–1354 is a modern English translation by Samuel Lee of Ibn Battuta’s work. Lee’s translation was published by Dover in 2004. For students of Boccaccio’s writing, the work offers a glimpse of the world outside fourteenth-century Tuscany.
Vitorre Branca’s biography of Boccaccio, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, published by New York University Press in 1976, is one of the few available comprehensive critical biographies of Boccaccio. This translation by Richard Monges of Branca’s Italian edition is edited by Dennis J. McCauliffe. The poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374) was Boccaccio’s contemporary,
are thus revealed. Her existence is circumscribed by her relation to men. However, Giovanna opts not to respond to at least one of the men in her life. The reader is told nothing of Giovanna’s relationship with her husband, but Giovanna’s tacit dismissal of Federigo is exceedingly clear. He loses his fortune for her sake, yet she spares him no attention or affection. As some scholars have suggested, this refusal to acknowledge Federigo is a sign of the power Giovanna possesses. F. Regina Psaki, in Approaches to Teaching Boccaccio’s ‘‘Decameron,’’
observes a trend in Boccaccio’s Decameron by women who ‘‘manage to liberate themselves from unwanted attentions through reproof, ruse, or outright refusal.’’ ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ is listed as an instance of a recurrence of this theme. Yet this is Giovanna’s only source of control over her own life, namely, the right to refuse the unwanted advances of a man.
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As the story progresses, the narrator offers the reader a glimpse of Giovanna’s thoughts. Giovanna has been spending every hour by the
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bedside of her gravely ill son. The boy has befriended Federigo and his falcon. Earlier in the story it is revealed that he wants to possess the bird, but upon seeing ‘‘how choicely Federigo esteemed her,’’ he opts not to attempt to acquire Federigo’s falcon. Yet his understanding and respect for Federigo vanishes with his good health. As his mother begs for some way to comfort him, the boy asks her to procure Federigo’s falcon for him. He knows what he is asking; he has already acknowledged that Federigo’s feelings for the bird had previously subdued his desire to obtain the falcon. Giovanna is now put in an extremely difficult position by her son. She agonizes over the request, knowing how Federigo has ‘‘lovingly kept [his falcon], not suffering it ever to be out of his sight.’’ She is also aware of the intensity of Federigo’s feelings for her. Giovanna acknowledges that Federigo may no longer wish to go on living without his falcon. She questions how devoid of understanding and concern she would seem ‘‘to rob a gentleman of his felicity, having no other joy or comfort left him.’’ These reflections represent the depth of Giovanna’s sympathy for Federigo, her extreme reluctance to ask him to make such a sacrifice. Yet ask him she does. Giovanna puts her son’s wishes above her own better judgment. She knows it is wrong to ask Federigo for his falcon. In addition, it stretches the imagination to think that Giovanna could have actually believed that Federigo’s falcon would improve her son’s spirits enough to cure him—if indeed he was actually deathly ill. Even in the Middle Ages, it seems unlikely that Giovanna, or anyone else except a child, could have thought that cheering the boy up would have saved his life (despite the assertions of the boy himself that the improvement in his spirits Federigo’s falcon would have provided him would indeed cause his illness to dissipate). Apparently Giovanna’s intention was to procure Federigo’s falcon to bring her son a little joy before he died. She implicitly states that Federigo might actually die without his falcon. Her son has little hope with or without the bird. This moral decision is at the heart of the story. Giovanna’s thoughts reveal her sense that taking the bird from Federigo is morally wrong. In the end, she ignores her reservations and does as her son wishes. She is moved by love for her son; she wishes to make him happy. The cost, however, is great, and Giovanna realizes this. In the end, however, her actions are performed in the service of her son. Like Federigo’s falcon, Giovanna is
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sent by a man in order to retrieve something to sustain the man. Federigo’s falcon, the narrator informs the reader, is used by the impoverished Federigo for sustenance. The bird hunts, and brings back her prey for Federigo’s dinner and supper. It is his companion and provider, and yet Federigo willingly kills her and feeds her to Giovanna. The bird is used by Federigo, sacrificed for his own aims. Both Giovanna and the falcon are sent to do the bidding of the story’s male characters, with the falcon paying the ultimate price in the service of her master. Giovanna is only mildly upset at what Federigo has done. She scolds him for sacrificing the noble bird for a woman’s meal. Yet she also thinks to herself that Federigo has acted in a noble manner in wishing to provide an elegant meal for her. Giovanna’s feelings for Federigo soften. Giovanna’s brothers soon press her to remarry, stating that she is both young and wealthy. (Apparently youth and riches should not be wasted on a woman, who might enjoy such things on her own.) The narrator reveals Giovanna’s thoughts on the matter, observing that Giovanna ‘‘was well contented to remain a widow.’’ Yet the brothers repeatedly insist that she take a husband. In reply, Giovanna tells them that she has no wish to marry, that living without a husband suits her. However, since they insist, she will consent—but only to Federigo as the choice for her spouse. Once again Giovanna’s own desire—to remain unmarried—is thwarted by the wishes of the men in her life. Once again her only power is over whom she accepts or rejects; she has no say in whether or not she wants to accept anyone at all. Giovanna’s own existence is reflected in the life of Federigo’s falcon. Both are acted upon rather than permitted to act in accordance with their own instincts. In Giovanna’s marriage to Federigo it is possible to foresee an existence for Giovanna that will continue to mirror that of Federigo’s falcon: as Federigo’s wife, it is possible that she will be an agent of her husband’s wishes rather than an agent of her own desires. Significantly, Giovanna devours, however unwittingly, Federigo’s falcon. She thus literally and figuratively destroys the symbol of female captivity at Federigo’s hands. Through this action Boccaccio may be suggesting that by choosing Federigo, Giovanna creates for herself the possibility of a fate other than the traditional
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female role as possession and pawn of men. By exercising what little power she possesses, Giovanna perhaps helps shape a new fate for herself. Source: Catherine Dominic, Critical Essay on ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Marco Cerocchi In the following excerpt, Cerocchi examines Boccaccio’s attitude regarding music’s new role in society and everyday life, as depicted in his writing. Giovanni Boccaccio’s time-honored work Decameron provides the primary literary account (Testi 228) of the drastically altered attitude regarding the role and influence of music, which occurred in response to the Ars Nova movement. Originated by the French composer Philippe de Vitry, its impact on Italian musical compositions of the fourteenth century was quite substantial, although largely confined to the secular works of the time. Decried as inappropriate for use in sacred compositions, its binary tempo segmentation was nonetheless appealing and was quickly incorporated into many profane works; resulting in a dramatic increase in the genre’s popularity. As the influence of the Catholic Church and the Empire waned, music began to assume new roles within society and became very much a part of everyday life. Throughout his narration of the ten days that constitute the Decameron, Boccaccio depicts this new attitude regarding music, an art form which had previously fallen largely within the domains of the church and the cultural elite (Gallo 78–79). A comparison between this collection of short stories and the writings of the great medieval author Dante Alighieri serves to underscore the dramatic cultural reorientation with regard to music, which had taken place since the latter’s demise. The fourteenth century was a time of fundamental change. Once dominated by a transcendental conception of the world and a belief in the absolute superiority of the sacred over the profane, society as a whole began to question this viewpoint. This wide scale secularization was the culmination of historical and political events, which served to destabilize the balance that had previously existed within the international community. Operating on social and cultural aspects of life, this process led to the formation of a profound distinction between divine revelation and human understanding, between Church and State, and between religion and science.
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The arts, literature in particular, manifested this ideological shift more rapidly and to a greater degree than did the other aspects of everyday life. If religion had inspired the majority of thirteenth-century authors’ works, both in Latin and vernacular, then it was secular inspiration to prevail throughout this new era. A few short decades after Dante had so eloquently summarized the transcendental ideals of the Middle Ages in his Divine Comedy, Giovanni Boccaccio penned his highly celebrated Decameron, a collection of short stories based upon human themes and, therefore, explicitly in antithesis with the former work. Through his narrative, Boccaccio offers the reader, not only a glimpse into the mindset of his time, but also an idea of music’s new conception and its role in society. During the fourteenth century, the production of profane musical works became larger and more noteworthy than that of their sacred counterparts. The transplantation of the Holy See from its former stead in Rome, to the town of Avignon, France, undoubtedly contributed to this trend. It was likely that the church’s vocal opposition to the counterpoint technique, which features the simultaneous performance of two or more melodic lines and was in fashion at the time, did much to further its progress. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, French culture had begun to exert a significant influence over Italy; the papacy’s relocation only served to strengthen ties between the two countries. This cultural exchange allowed for contamination of the Italian musical style, and it is around this time that we can begin to observe the first hints of the French movement of Ars Nova within Italian works. Within his treatise entitled Ars Nova (‘‘The New Art,’’ 1320), Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361), one of the great intellectuals of his time and a friend of Petrarch, laid the groundwork for this new practice. By making use of binary tempo segmentation within his own compositions, de Vitry’s ideas were in opposition with medieval norms. Previously, only time segmentations in three units, intended to represent the Holy Trinity, were considered ‘‘perfect’’ by the Holy See and, therefore, permitted for use in liturgical chants. Targeted arguments were made in opposition to the type of multiple voice polyphony that characterized Ars Nova. It was alleged that such an elaborated style would distract parishioners
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from, rather than focus them on, the religious rituals that were being performed. Under this musical scheme, different and independent melodic lines are sung simultaneously, and it was thought that such a confluence of sounds would affect the comprehension of the words being sung, and consequently, the meaning of the sacred scriptures. Because of the staunch resistance offered the Papal Curia in the form of this argument, the use of such polyphony was disallowed in the sacred works of the time, effectively confining its application to secular songs. The latter benefited greatly as a result, allowing the popularity of such profane music to overshadow that of sacred compositions during the fourteenth century. Evidence, both direct and indirect, of the Ars Nova movement’s influence on Italian culture, can be found in the vernacular literary works of the time, specifically the ‘‘poesia per musica’’ and contemporary and subsequent novelistic productions. The former is essentially a hybrid genre, inspired by the principles of de Vitri’s movement. It includes such new poetical forms as madrigali, cacce and ballate, all of which were originally conceived for the purpose of setting their texts to music. From a stylistic perspective, the Italian Ars Nova is distinguished from its French roots by the increased sense of freedom evidenced in the melodic extension and in the more highly stressed rhythmic patterns of the musical settings. It is important to note, however, that the musical components of such hybrid works were not intended to directly illustrate the literary images or semantic meanings contained within the poetry (a function which would later be ascribed to the madrigals of the sixteenth century). Here, music provided an appropriate frame in which the text could unfold. . . .
in the Decameron and not attached to the world of the supernatural. The tale of Federigo degli Alberighi follows that of Nastagio, but in the story of Federigo Boccaccio stays in this world, the recognizable world of cause and effect, and of social and economic limits. In this idealized but by no means ideal world the beloved lady, Monna Giovanna, has not only a name, but a personality and complexity that neither woman had in the previous story. The fact that we do know her name implies that she is more than a mere adventitious adornment in an indifferent allegory. She is an active agent in the novella, constantly seeking to define herself in the face of patriarchal pressure to submit to men’s desire to shape and define her for themselves. Monna Giovanna does not become an active agent because Boccaccio as prose writer is ‘‘enlightened’’ enough to conceive of her as such, but rather she achieves this stature in the tale as a result of an inner dynamic of modern narrative, a series of demands for complexity of character and plot that constitutes a major departure from the Latin prose tradition of exempla. Her stature is achieved through implicitly contrasting and comparing the personalities, desires, and values of Monna Giovanna and Federigo. As an active agent Monna Giovanna achieves a stature and substance that neither Nastagio’s beloved nor the wretched woman of Guido can achieve, as they are no more than symbolic presences who are acted upon.
Source: Marco Cerocchi, ‘‘Boccaccio’s Decameron as a Primary Literary Source for the Musical Movement of Ars Nova in Italy,’’ in Italica, Vol. 84, No. 4, Winter 2007, pp. 679–91.
Ray Fleming In the following excerpt, Fleming claims that Federigo sacrifices his resources for a woman because of the complexities of his colonization of the feminine. The fantastic world of Nastagio’s tale is a mixture of the realistic and the supernatural, and that mixture is not the normal world of the Decameron. Boccaccio is attached to this world
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Federigo, who sacrifices his resources, including his prize falcon, for Monna Giovanna, may initially seem to be, much like Nastagio, romancing the stone, the cold, hard, resisting woman in the text, but in the end Boccaccio shows him to be not just another lusty male who, like Nastagio and Guido, is unable to control his hormones, but a more complex figure of a man in view of his particular colonization of the feminine, his cultivation of characteristics more often associated with women, from his emotional volatility and sensitivity to the point of public tears and a self-sacrificing generosity. One need not be an essentialist or even accept the idea that these notions define women any more than they do men to recognize that Federigo is a more complex and interesting character than Nastagio precisely because of his more extensive colonization of the feminine. It is because of his own complexity as a character that he pursues his own narrative complement as a character, that is to say, that he pursues Monna Giovanna, a more complex figure
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can indicate fundamental vulnerability, insecurity, and fear. BOCCACCIO, WHO KNEW THE COMMEDIA WELL ENOUGH TO INAUGURATE A SERIES OF PUBLIC LECTURES ON IT SHORTLY BEFORE HIS OWN DEATH, MAY ALSO BE SUGGESTING A LINK BETWEEN THE OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE BEHAVIOR OF NASTAGIO AND FEDERIGO AND THE FIGURE OF THE SUICIDE FOR ‘LOVE,’ GUIDO DEGLI ANASTAGI.’’
of a woman, a figure of substance who can not be defined, as were the unfortunate women of the previous tale, as merely an object of masculine desire. It should be noted that unlike Nastagio, who compels his beloved to yield to his desire, Federigo does not resort to implicit threats of violence to obtain Monna Giovanna. When Nastagio encounters resistance from the ‘‘crudel donna’’ his thoughts turn to suicide; when Federigo’s attentions are rejected by Monna Giovanna he sadly accepts her decision. If Federigo is a passive hero it is also true that his passivity opens up a space for Monna Giovanna to make decisions and be heard. The passive hero is a contradiction in terms within the masculine economy. The single-minded and tenacious pursuit of the woman conjures up a ‘‘virile’’ image of the pursuer that is at odds with the passive male who steps aside and ‘‘grants’’ woman what is already hers by right, an opportunity to speak, in her own voice, with her own concerns, and to be taken seriously. The image of the aggressive male whose assertion of energy and ego gives no opportunity for feminine character to evolve is also an image of repression. The aggressiveness of the male character represses the woman’s identity in the text, but this very same assertiveness masks an arrested development of the male’s character, revealing him to be himself a repressed character. The tangible indices of this repression are the discourse of the character, what he hides in language, and his conduct, i.e., whom he violates through his behavior. In the case of Nastagio, his thoughts, words, and deeds show him to be both immature (his initial reaction to his being rejected can only be termed childish) and manipulative, qualities that
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The ability to respect finally the woman who resists by acceding to her wishes or preferences rather than relentlessly pursuing his own desires indicates that Federigo’s passion for Monna Giovanna is a noble passion that is characterized by its capacity to restrain his own ego. The new value system implicit in Federigo’s capacity to place the woman’s wishes above his own is totally opposed to the masculine priorities of a system of values depicted at the beginning of the story, a system that prizes that aggressive assertion of the male character in the competitive forms of jousts and tournaments. Traditionally, persistence in pursuit of the desired woman, regardless of the woman’s preferences, is normally associated with the concept of masculinity itself. The ‘‘grant,’’ to use then Millett’s terminology, that Federigo makes to Monna Giovanna within this chivalrous tale is, in reality, no less than the recognition that genuine love, as opposed to unbridled passion, entails a responsibility to the beloved, the responsibility to respect her possible rejection of the widely accepted rationale of Dante’s Francesca: ‘‘Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona.’’ From the point of view of traditional male critics, the ultimate proof of Federigo’s generosity and nobility in the story is the economic sacrifice of his falcon; from a feminist point of view, the ultimate proof of his generosity and nobility of spirit is his decision to respect and accept Monna Giovanna’s rejection of his attentions. Such a feminist perspective ensures Federigo a stature he could not have within the masculine economy in which an economic motive, his poverty, could be advanced as solely or primarily the explanation for abandoning his amorous pursuit. Whereas feminine resistance had spurred Nastagio and Guido to thoughts of hatred and violence, Monna Giovanna’s rejection of Federigo will only elicit from him total rejection of the suggestions that she has been cruel to him or mistreated him in any way: ‘‘Madonna, niun danno mi ricorda mai aver ricevuto per voi, ma tanto di bene, che, se io mai alcuna cosa valsi, per lo vostro valore e per l’amore che portato v’ho avvenne’’ (370). Whereas Nastagio’s woman was described as ‘‘cruda e dura e salvatica,’’ Monna Giovanna is described as ‘‘non meno onesta che bella.’’ We could say that without Nastagio it would be difficult to even imagine his beloved, but we
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know from the beginning of the next tale that the adjectives used to describe Monna Giovanna refer to a complex network of qualities—‘‘leggiadra’’, ‘‘onesta’’, and ‘‘gentil’’—that she herself will define throughout the action of the narrative. Nastagio’s lady, on the other hand, was known only in terms of her object relationship, as a symbolic means of exchange that ultimately served to define the relationship of men to other men in the story. The qualities that are merely attributed to Monna Giovanna at the beginning of the story are later substantively defined by her actions and by her decisions, actions and decisions that arise from a thorough analysis of what are her own priorities and limited options within a specific moral, social, or economic context. It is instructive to note that in contradistinction to Monna Giovanna, Federigo is more than a little frivolous and superficial, however ‘‘noble’’ he may be: ‘‘accio` che egli l’amor di lei acquistar potesse, giostrava, armeggiava, faceva feste e donava, e il suo senza alcun ritegno spendeva . . . spendendo adunque Federigo oltre a ogni suo potere molto e niente acquistando, sı´ come di leggiere adiviene, le ricchezze mancarono e esso rimase povero’’ (368). Federigo is presented by Boccaccio as ‘‘in opera d’arme e in cortesia pregiato sopra ogni altro donzel di Toscana’’, and thus one might interpret his extreme generosity as a concrete sign of his ‘‘valor’’ and ‘‘courtesy.’’ But this conspicuous display and consumption of wealth are shown to be excessive, i.e., lacking in appropriate measure, lacking in temperance, and temperance is the cardinal virtue, the cherished ideal of Boccaccio’s new commercial society emerging from the late Middle Ages. Federigo, then, represents a basic and unresolved tension at the very core of this newly emerging capitalist society, a tension between the chivalrous ideals of high mindedness and generosity on the one hand, and the bourgeois consecration of the values of shrewd calculation and moderation on the other. Federigo, the economically imprudent but chivalrous man, lacks the temperance and maturity of Monna Giovanna. He, not she, is the creature of sentiment and emotion, and often makes of himself a victim of fortune. Monna Giovanna, in contrast, is well-acquainted with misfortune, but she never allows herself to become merely its victim. It is important to recognize that she bears the disproportionate burden of sorrow and pain in this story as a result of the deaths of her husband and son, but it is Federigo who
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begins to weep when he cannot present her with the falcon she has just eaten. Monna Giovanna does indeed grieve near the end of the novella, after the death of her son, but she never demonstrates the emotional volatility of a Federigo. Her strength, constancy, and intelligence have not served to make her a favorite Boccaccian character among traditional Boccaccio scholars. Traditional Italian criticism has, when it has focused upon female characters of the Decameron, given more enthusiastic attention to such figures as the patient Griselda who suffers without complaint the abuses of her husband, or the beautiful, voluptuous Alatiel who immediately arouses the sexual passions of men. Some contemporary Italian critics such as Zatti and Muscetta see Monna Giovanna as cold, distant, and sexually frustrated. It would appear then that we still have not freed ourselves from the masculine prejudice that associates the resisting woman with the classical bitch figure in Western literature. Critics continue to call the ninth story of the fifth day the novella of Federigo degli Alberighi, but it is Monna Giovanna who dominates this narrative in virtue of the well-considered choices she makes. She decides to be a faithful wife and to ignore Federigo. She decides to ask Federigo for his falcon only after carefully determining that her maternal responsibilities were more important to her than her pride. Monna Giovanna, after a period of sober reflection, chooses the impoverished Federigo to be her husband, though she would prefer to remain a widow, and articulates the reason for the choice of Federigo to her brothers after they term her ‘‘sciocca’’ for choosing him. Her rationale, ‘‘io voglio avanti uomo che abbia bisogno di ricchezza, che ricchezza che abbia bisogno d’uomo’’, is her own translation of the wisdom that Cicero in the De officiis attributes to Themistocles: ‘‘‘Ego vero’ inquit, ‘malo virum, qui pecunia egeat, quam pecuniam, quae viro’’’ (86). This woman who appropriates Cicero to her own circumstances reveals that the dismissive patriarchal reproach, ‘‘sciocca,’’ is, in reality, an index to male defensiveness in the presence of a woman who sets the limits to which she will allow even her brothers to influence her choice: ‘‘per certo io non ne prendero` mai alcun altro, se io non ho Federigo degli Alberighi.’’ The question that Cicero raises in the passage from the De officiis is whether or not we should consider a person’s character or a person’s socio-economic status as more
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important in deciding which person to assist. Cicero reaches this conclusion: ‘‘Quamobrem melius apud bonos quam apud fortunatos beneficium collocari puto’’ (85). [I therefore conclude that kindness to the good is a better investment than kindness to those already favored by fortune.] The portrait then that Boccaccio gives us is of a woman who reasons in a sophisticated and analytic manner from the beginning to the end of this tale. What should strike us as incongruous here were we not culturally conditioned by the all but automatic association of authority with the name or the voice of the father and of his sons is not just the fact that a woman who consistently reasons in such an analytic manner can be termed ‘‘sciocca,’’ but also the fact that she, precisely because of her gender, should be compelled to reply. Monna Giovanna lacks both the power and the authority to reject out of hand, as does Guido Cavalcanti in Decameron, VI, 9, the taunting discourse of his fellow Florentines. Guido’s refusal to respond directly to their taunting challenge throws that discourse back upon itself and reduces his would-be interlocutors to an embarrassed silence when the illegitimate and defective nature of that discourse is revealed. Because patriarchal society gives males power and authority over her, Monna Giovanna does not have such an option, i.e., the rejection of her brothers’ defective judgment of her and challenge to her, but in the very act of responding to them she uncovers the essential irrationality of the power and authority that maledominated society has exercised over women. Given the Ciceronian subtlety of Monna Giovanna’s reply, a reflective character that contrasts with Federigo’s earlier near-hysterical state, the masculine indictment of her as ‘‘sciocca’’ is also revealed as ideologically obscene.
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the self-congratulatory and authoritative male voice’s critical assumption of full presence. Booth assumes the legitimacy and universality of the male perspective in this tale and reads it as simply a ‘‘comic’’ tale. He explains that ‘‘since it is primarily Federigo’s story, to see it through Monna’s eyes would require a great deal of manipulation and extension’’ (12). Given the subtle complexity with which Boccaccio endows Monna Giovanna and so many of the other women characters in the Decameron it would appear to require far more mental agility to be able to ignore that complexity as a character and to insist that she does not warrant our critical attention. Booth’s assertion constitutes an attempt to ignore and thereby deny woman as the dangerous supplement whose presence in the text undermines the text and challenges the notion of an autonomous male self that is not marked by her difference.
In spite of all this, Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, asserts apodictically, ‘‘there is never any question of our becoming side-tracked into deep psychological or sentimental involvement with her [Monna Giovanna] as a person’’ (12). Given this judgment of her essential marginality it is not surprising that in the same essay Booth will refer to her as simply ‘‘Monna,’’ as if she had no name, but only a title that by itself confirms male ownership. Booth’s casual assignment of Monna Giovanna to the margins of the text is typical of traditional criticism, and the manner of her dismissal employs the typically male, to borrow a phrase from Frank Lentricchia, ‘‘rhetoric of authority’’: ‘‘there is never any question.’’ But, in fact, there is a question, a question about
The sense of a real world, as opposed to the fantastic world of the previous tale, is communicated, in part, by the economic context. We do not know whether Federigo is as rich as Nastagio who inherits two fortunes, or if he spends more to impress his lady, but we do know that wealth has definite, as opposed to more vague limits in Nastagio’s case, because the former becomes destitute in accordance with a fundamental economic law: to spend without measure and, simultaneously, to earn or acquire nothing signifies eventual ruin and poverty. Dante in his Commedia equates the extreme form of this tendency to deplete one’s material assets with suicide. Boccaccio, who knew the Commedia well enough to inaugurate a series of public lectures on it shortly before his own death, may also be suggesting a link between the obsessive-compulsive behavior of Nastagio and Federigo and the figure of the suicide for ‘‘love,’’ Guido degli Anastagi. Monna Giovanna observes that Federigo’s falcon, ‘‘il mantien nel mondo,’’ and thus the sacrifice of his falcon can be interpreted as a kind of economic suicide. If, then, at the end of the story, Monna Giovanna chooses to have a man who needs wealth rather than to have wealth that needs a man, she is merely reasserting her preference for control, her need to be in a position to have choices and to exercise some influence over the decisions that affect her life. Within the context of mercantile Florence she defines Federigo, much as Nastagio had defined his unnamed lady, for Monna Giovanna makes it possible to reread Federigo’s economic irresponsibility as another kind of sign, a signifier with a new signified, as his previous
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sacrifices can no longer be qualified as merely ‘‘useless’’ or ‘‘futile’’ after she decides to marry him. Her decision now invests his previous actions with a meaning they do not have until she decides that his previous conduct need not disqualify him; indeed, they may recommend him for the managerial position, husband, she has in mind. Such calculations remind us of just how fully she has understood the Cicero of De officiis, for Cicero arrives at his decision to cast his lot with the good man in need rather than with the more powerful as a result of his psychological analysis of the characters involved. Cicero judges that the man of character rather than the more powerful and fortunate man makes a more loyal and devoted ally: ‘‘At vero ille tenuis, cum, quicquid factum sit, se spectatum, non fortunam putat, non modo illi, qui est meritus, sed etiam illis, a quibus expectat (eget enim multis) gratum se videri studet: neque vero verbis auget suum munus, si quo forte fungitur, sed etiam extenuat’’ (85). [On the other hand, the poor man believes that what you do for him is done out of regard for his character and not for his condition. He therefore tries to show that he is thankful not only to the person who has been kind to him in the past, but also to those for whom he will need help in the future. If then he later gives aid to you he will do so without pretensions.]
both irrational and excessive. Passion that is both irrational and excessive has often been associated with woman, and has been regarded as an index of her moral and intellectual inferiority; and as Dante shows us in Inferno V, such passion leads to damnation. If Nastagio and Federigo have colonized this realm of defective desire, a realm that Dante overwhelmingly associates with women (Helen, Dido, Cleopatra, Francesca, etc.), then they have done so with this crucial difference: their colonization of the sphere of what has been largely regarded as feminine passion transforms that excess into a virtue! If we know anything at all about Monna Giovanna’s desires or Nastagio’s woman’s desires within this masculine economy we know only that these desires are qualified by that same economy that equates the fulfillment of the male’s desire with a universal happy ending. A revisionary and feminist reading of these stories reveals that only some, not all lived happily ever after.
Monna Giovanna’s formulation of her responses to her predicament as rich young widow has nothing to do with love: this is the type of merger-acquisition formulation that one might encounter on Wall Street! As a woman exercising choice within a masculine economy, that is to say, as a woman with limited options within such a patriarchal society, she makes us aware of how Boccaccio’s apparently happy ending in matrimony, ‘‘in letizia con lei, miglior massaio fatto, termino` gli anni suoi’’, is a reaffirmation of male priorities and dominance, as we know that Federigo’s consuming desire for her is satisfied and his economic situation enhanced. Giuseppe Mazzotta tells us that ‘‘The whole of the Decameron is, in a sense, a quest for order and unity achieved somewhat ambiguously through marriage’’ (55). In the context of the Nastagio and Federigo tales marriage becomes the proof of the male protagonist’s power to obtain the object of his passionate desire. As the ideal goal of the narrative marriage also serves to legitimize masculine desire, even when that desire is shown to be
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Source: Ray Fleming, ‘‘Happy Endings? Resisting Women and the Economy of Love in Day Five of Boccaccio’s Decameron, ’’ in Italica, Vol. 70, No. 1, Spring 1993, pp. 30–45.
Cormac O´ Cuilleana´in
In the following excerpt, O´ Cuilleana´in analyzes Boccaccio’s frequent use of animals as necessary ingredients in his plots. The artistic integrity of the Decameron, its brilliant texture of realistic detail, and the beauty and eloquence of its rhetorical passages, have inevitably prompted systematic readings in search of the book’s deeper moral coherence, historical significance, and ideological commitment. Such investigations have started from various assumptions and arrived at a variety of conclusions. But all explorations of the work in a context of spiritual, historical, and cultural values, in spite of the illumination they bring to certain themes and facets, have been held back from a complete and satisfactory discovery of the text by the very nature of Boccaccio’s creative imagination, which, being eclectic and volatile, does not achieve its final integration through a systematic arrangement of ideas and material. The limitations of a search for objective meanings in the Decameron are more obvious in the less discriminating attempts at synthesis, but they are quite as disabling in the finest examples of this approach.
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THE UNFORTUNATE FALCON IS BOTH SYMBOL AND CATALYST OF THIS CONTRADICTORY PROCESS; BOCCACCIO, THE NARRATIVE ALCHEMIST, IS EATING HIS CAKE AND HAVING IT.’’
The tantalizing problem of the unity of Boccaccio’s masterpiece is manifested, on one level, by its containment of exuberant variety within a strict and stylized framework. Several critics have seized on one term of this duality, the literal level of organization—the frame-story whose ten characters speak the hundred tales—and made this the springboard for an outright allegorical explanation of the book. Angelo Lipari, Joan Ferrante, and Salvatore Galletti differ widely in their skills and their conclusions, but their three essays are simplistic and unconvincing, given the scale and complexity of Boccaccio’s narrative realism. Much more subtle and broadly based is Vittore Branca’s interpretation of the Decameron as essentially a moral progression from evil to good, ‘un ideale itinerario che va dalla riprensione aspra e amara dei vizi dei grandi (I giornata) allo splendido e architettato elogio della magnanimita` e della virtu` (X giornata)’. Indeed, for Branca, this underlying pattern is the source of the unity of the book. Yet in spite of its qualification and persuasive thematic exposition, Branca’s formulation steamrollers the moral ambiguities of Ciappelletto and Griselda in the first and last stories, categorizes the book’s development by imputed intentions rather than by artistic results, and fails to do justice to the centrifugal multiformity, moral as well as stylistic, of its contents. Very different from Branca’s is the Christian moralist reading provided by Robert Hollander in Boccaccio’s Two Venuses (New York, 1977). He generally steers clear of the Decameron, allowing it to remain ‘enigmatic’ and ‘richly difficult to fathom’, but his dissection of the other vernacular works is, to say the least, perverse. On quite the other side of the ideological divide, two able advocates of Boccaccio the liberator of the flesh, Guido di Pino (La polemica del Boccaccio (Florence, 1953)) and Aldo Scaglione (Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1963))
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also fall somewhat into the same fallacy of building objective arguments on the subjective foundation of Boccaccio’s rhetorical dialogue and narrative situations. Even the worthwhile attempt by R. Hastings (Nature and Reason in the ‘Decameron’ (Manchester, 1975)) to collate and synthesize Boccaccio’s stated beliefs serves mainly to show what a contradictory, unreasonable, and utterly irreducible artist lies behind the Decameron. The foregoing remarks are not intended to invalidate the many useful arguments and discoveries of those scholars who have worked to define the meaning of the Decameron, but merely to suggest that this approach does not satisfactorily engage the central problem of the book as an imaginative entity. Ultimately, perhaps, the analyses of pattern, combination, and metaphor by Guido Almansi in The Writer as Liar (London, 1975), and the continuing emphasis on form and invention by critics as diverse as Enrico de’ Negri, Giovanni Getto, and Cesare Segre, may bring us closer than the moral synthesizers to the mainspring of Boccaccio’s creative imagination, and thus closer to the real principle of artistic unity in the work. And to illustrate and support this belief, I offer the following contribution on the animal world in the Decameron, as a convenient sample of what the reader may find in analysing other aspects of its structure, thought, and imagery. Boccaccio often introduces animals as necessary ingredients in the plot, as symbols and images rich in traditional associations, or as the occasion for a display of metaphorical wit which consumes itself before our eyes to leave no lasting trace. But there are also instances where a study of man and beast may throw some refracted light on the Decameron’s principal subject: the life of man in society. For he uses a variety of animal images to match the variety of human nature, or to illustrate the progression of a human adventure. As Boccaccio is by no means a scholastic or systematic writer, he does not represent the animal world in the light of the bestiaries or of received scientific knowledge, nor does he explore exhaustively the symbolic possibilities of his chosen beasts. Not being a great observer of the natural world, he will not sustain the kind of attention bestowed by M. F. M. Meiklejohn on ‘The Birds of Dante,’ nor will the beasts of the Decameron lead us to Boccaccio the man as the slavering dogs led Caro1ine Spurgeon to
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Shakespeare. Rather, we shall be led into the internal exigencies of the Decameron’s imaginative universe, which is weighed down very little by the outside reality whose forms it so brilliantly reproduces. The beasts who contribute to the Decameron stay within a restricted mimetic range: there are no mythological or theological hybrids as in Dante, no talking beasts as in the Novellino, no animal protagonists as in the Fioretti di San Francesco. On the literal level, Boccaccio’s scope is modest, and he generally relies on familiar creatures: horses, dogs, cats, pigs, donkeys, sheep and goats, doves and falcons. What he makes of these unexceptional resources is the subject of the present article. Our guide to the complexities and contradictions of traditional animal symbolism will be Beryl Rowland’s fascinating and entertaining survey, Animals with Human Faces (London, 1974), which admirably summarizes the available repertoire from which Boccaccio selects and combines his own characteristic effects. As we have seen, animals in the Decameron generally appear as symbols, elements of decoration, images, props, or triggers to the plot. A prime example of the first of these interrelated categories is the falcon, that rather Ghibelline bird standing for aristocratic nobility (in the Novellino, XC, the Emperor Federigo has his favourite falcon put to death because it killed a young eagle, symbol of the empire). In the Decameron, falcons grace the courts of two sultans; and the promotion of Torello from merchant to nobleman is largely symbolized by his hunting with falcons in Italy and training Saladin’s falcons at the court in Alexandria (II. 9. 44; X. 9. 7, 50). But the most significant falcon, on whose roasting turns one of the Decameron’s finest stories, belongs to Federigo degli Alberighi (V. 9). This man bears an imperial name and an aristocratic love for Monna Giovanna; having squandered all his riches in pursuit of her affection, he is obliged to roast and eat his last remaining fowl, the beloved falcon, when she comes to dine with him in his poverty. The falcon symbolizes his noble passion, which she accepts by unwittingly eating the bird. Indeed, this incorporation of the love-symbol is also a happier version of those tragic Communion-scenes in the Decameron’s fourth day (IV. I. 48–58; IV. 9. 22—themselves reminiscent of the Vita Nuova) where the lady is caused by a jealous husband or father to feast on her lover’s heart. Federigo’s final sacrifice of the falcon to his lady
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is carried out with prodigious refinement; according to Le´vi-Strauss, it is a constant of many cultures that roasting denotes aristocratic liberality, as opposed to the plebeian economy associated with boiling. But one marvellous dimension of Boccaccio’s art is his ability to combine a grand poetic impulse with the most meticulous calculation, and the economic outcome of roasting the falcon is that Monna Giovanna’s little son dies of grief because he cannot have the bird, thus leaving her sole heiress, under the terms of her late husband’s will, to a large fortune which she then bestows on Federigo by marrying him. So his reckless prodigality both confirms his status as the perfect lover and paradoxically leads him to financial security as a well-endowed husband. The unfortunate falcon is both symbol and catalyst of this contradictory process; Boccaccio, the narrative alchemist, is eating his cake and having it. Source: Cormac O´ Cuilleana´in, ‘‘Man and Beast in the Decameron,’’ in Modern Language Review, Vol. 75, No. 1, January 1980, pp. 86–93.
B. J. Layman In the following excerpt, Layman summarizes ‘‘Federigo’s Falcon’’ and its endless symmetries. . . . Fiammetta before telling our tale advises (‘‘con lieto viso,’’ of course) the other young women that it will serve to remind them to be the donatrici of their guerdons and not to trust Fortune, who, ‘‘come s’avviene,’’ has no discretion or moderation. Russo calls her moral ‘‘un po’ equivoca’’ and turns aside from it as perfunctorily as from the happy ending. Equivocal it certainly is, especially in light of the preceding story of Nastagio degli Onesti and the seriocomic hardness of the line there taken regarding all ladies who deny love to their lovers. Is Giovanna blameworthy for her uncompromising onesta` or praiseworthy for becoming at last a proper donatrice? The question is indeed too simplistic to be really relevant to the story, Boccaccio’s art having freed itself, in Pirandello’s words, from ‘‘the cold traits of intellectualistic exemplarism.’’ But thematically Fiammetta is sounding a note worth being heard. Boccaccio’s story and his characters take on life at that moment when Fortune is met by the latter’s human volition. Federigo and his lady, beginning as creatures solely of role—actors rather than acters—come alive under the sudden strain imposed by ironic, chance event. Crisis forces them to draw into awareness the roles
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FEDERIGO AND MONNA GIOVANNA ARE FOR HIM NOT MERE LITERATURE: THEY EMBODY A PART OF HIS PEOPLE’S AFFECTIVE, IMAGINATIVE, AND EVEN MORAL HISTORY—SOMETHING WHICH BOCCACCIO WOULD GLADLY PRESERVE FOR POSTERITY, WITH ALL THE STYLISTIC DIGNIFICATION AT HIS COMMAND.’’
they have silently and as it were mindlessly consented to play, and they take a hand in their lives. The mechanical yields place to the voluntary. I refer of course to Monna Giovanna’s dilemma caused by her sick son’s request for the falcon, and to Federigo’s caused by her unannounced arrival as dinner guest. They deserve our study in their interconnectedness, and also within the context of a disegno whose richness I have only barely suggested, a medley of strong attachments and longings, of hesitations and yieldings, all shot through with an irony dazzling and poignant. The reticent figliuolo, although his characterization is only a cameo, fully shares in the refinement of his mother and her lover. ‘‘Istranamente’’ taken with longing for the falcon but aware of how dear the noble bird is to its master, he suppresses his longing and reveals it only after the mother offers, ‘‘spesse volte,’’ to try to obtain for him whatever may relieve his illness. His reticence would have been still greater if he had known what wordless turmoil his secret would breed in her. Her eagerness deserts her, and deeply perplexed (‘‘impacciata’’) she is unable for a protracted while to make any response. The life that Boccaccio is able to confer upon her inner conflict is the surest mark of his deep feeling for the ambiente of courtly romance. That abiding congeniality alone can account for the special mastery and security of his prose at this point. By forthrightly saying enough yet not one syllable more than enough he combines the utmost clarity with the utmost implication. She, the son and Federigo are strangely united by the complementarity of their extreme attachments: the child’s for the hawk (‘‘si forte invaghito’’), hers for the child (‘‘. . . e lui amava quanto piu´ si poteva’’), and Federigo’s for her (‘‘amando piu´
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che mai’’). She senses the harsh irony of this intreccio and is daunted. How can she, who never gave anything (not even ‘‘una sola guatatura’’) to the lover who gave everything for her, everything save his splendid hawk—how can she now demand that last vestige of his sacrificed status? How can she be ‘‘sı´ sconoscente’’? A child near death, and a devoted mother unable to accede to his request for fear of being ‘‘sı´ sconoscente’’! Miraculously Boccaccio can negotiate this moment without the slightest trace of satire. Her attachment like the other two is an absolute and at last she must yield to it. Russo well observes that her decision to go in person to Federigo suggests a touching resolve to let his sacrifice be at least compensated by the sacrifice of her ritegno and by willingness to make ‘‘un esperimento della sua onesta`.’’ Here, however, I think we arrive at a consummate subtlety of Boccaccio’s disegno. I have already suggested that by surrendering her allotted role she adds a living third dimension to her hitherto merely silhouetted character, and that she thereby adds willed action to the construct of chance- and role-dictated events. But if this were ‘‘the whole story,’’ there would be no story. All that follows hinges upon her instinctive decision to veil from Federigo for as long as possible the truth of her strong and urgent action. A fearful symmetry of the story resides in the way that her dilemma, issuing in the resolve to go and ask for the falcon, is mirrored by Federigo’s, issuing in the resolve to bestow the bird unasked. And she alone is responsible for his learning too late that the ‘‘picciol don’’—proffered ‘‘in altra maniera’’— was the very thing she had come for. Gentle lover that he is, it could not have occurred to him in his grief to berate any agent except Fortune for their calamity. But Fortune has achieved its coup by leaguing itself with her nature as well as with his own. Her postponement is first and foremost decorous. She cannot blurt out the true reason for her visit, especially in light of this visit’s unprecedented acknowledgment of her awareness that Federigo exists. Beyond mere decorum, however, her delay reflects a delicate balance of fine feeling for Federigo and even finer feeling for herself. The heresy of paraphrase looms painfully at this point, and the critic must despair of capturing without heavy-handedness Boccaccio’s ‘‘inclusive and
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delicate complexity [of attitude, as] distinguished from contradiction, conflict and uncertainty.’’ Russo is surely right in detecting a note of the scherzoso in the greeting Giovanna addresses to the non-plussed and marvelling Federigo. Having taken a morning walk ‘‘per modo di diporto,’’ carefully chaperoned by ‘‘un’altra donna,’’ she bathes her coming in charm and quiet mirth. In the troubled silence following her child’s request she had determined at great emotional cost to enter the stream of event as a purposeful agent. Yet she accomplishes her resolve by staging a scene, ‘‘making an appearance,’’ of the utmost seeming purposelessness. Time is at the back of this anxious mother, yet she stages herself for her lover in the graceful postures that might be those of the Fiammetta who tells the story—that is to say, as the inhabitant of a fictive realm where nothing can ever actually happen. For meeting the challenge of time and change she has elected the curious (but psychologically very intelligible) strategy of pretending hubristically that they do not exist. And in so doing she invites nemesis. With winsome unseriousness (‘‘con una donnesca piacevolezza’’) she declares she has come to make amends for what Federigo has suffered through loving her ‘‘more than was needful’’ (‘‘piu´ che stato non ti sarebbe bisogno’’). By way of restoring the losses he incurred, she will allow him to serve her and her companion a meal. His reply is as impeccably gallant as any she may seem to have cued him to, but contrastingly heartfelt as well. No losses can he recall ever having experienced through her, only ‘‘tanto di bene’’; and all the worth that has ever blessed his life he owes to her. With unstrained hyperbole he goes on to vow that her ‘‘liberale venuta’’ is such recompense as leaves him only regretful that he does not have another fortune to spend for her. Their interchange is composed entirely of shifting references, material and immaterial, to kinds of getting and spending, profit and loss, wealth and poverty. All in a tiny scenario that disguises what her coming has cost her and what it will cost him. The dinner, conceived as the gracious and quasi-fictive token of her liberality, will become the all too actual token of his. And thus the success of her well-meant disguise will be proved by the catastrophe it precipitates. The atrocious irony of Federigo’s predicament afflicts his thoughts the moment he is
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alone. In his prosperity he was destitute because of his lady’s withheld salutation: now in his destitution he receives it and knows no way to respond. Fiercely and for the first time he repents his former extravagance, but solely because he cannot now do proper honor to his lady. He rushes about like a man out of his senses, cursing his fortune, searching for the money or pegno he knows he will not find; and as his time runs out, he beholds the buon falcone on its perch, weighs it in his hand and finds it plump—at last, food worthy of such a lady. So ends the long, immensely artful sentence that has itself enacted Federigo’s spastic gestures of anguish and indecision, then his catapulting descent upon the poor fated and fateful bird, ‘‘degna vivanda di cotal donna.’’ Ruing his past prodigality, he has proceeded to reenact and perfect it, wringing the neck of his last solace, sole relic of his chivalry. Again all of Boccaccio’s grammatical expertise goes into a sentence that binds into a single breathless action the slaying, plucking and roasting of the bird, the preparing of the table with whitest linens, and the hastening ‘‘con lieto viso’’ to tell the lady that dinner is served. Federigo’s impetuosity (the natural complement of Giovanna’s leisureliness) is made to evince a kind of frenetic choreography, like some scene from an old silent film, both funny and frightening. ‘‘Mangiarono il buon falcone.’’ After the meal and some more pleasant conversation it at last ‘‘appears time’’ to the lady to tell why she has come, ‘‘principalmente.’’ With our knowledge that time has already played its cruel joke upon this would-be mistress of perfect timing, we hear her ‘‘benignamente’’ begin her elaborate apology and appeal. Her words, for all their rhetorically practised roundaboutness, ring with sincerity and truth; and with something like pained esthetic satisfaction we follow their inevitable course to ‘‘. . . e questo dono e` il falcon tuo.’’ Three times, as in some ballad, has this emblem of fate been paradoxically united with a critical moment of human freedom, decision or choice: the child’s first, then Federigo’s, and now Giovanna’s. Boccaccio has brought his eloquent disegno to a seeming point of ne plus ultra; sheer genius will be required to carry it further without allowing mere sensationalism and sentimentality, as alleged by Auerbach, to drown out the human resonance of his crowded ironies.
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Federigo, having heard her, can only weep, wordlessly. His grief, however, is boldly conceived by Boccaccio, and bears no trace of mawkishness. He weeps not for the child or the falcon, but because he cannot serve his lady. She has appealed too late to an ultimate cortesia or generosity that he displayed too soon. And Giovanna’s reaction to ‘‘qual pianto’’ is conceived no less authentically and unsentimentally. All her initial dread of being found ‘‘si sconoscente’’ returns, ‘‘e quasi fu per dire che nol volesse.’’ The essence of her character is heard in that quasi: the admirable proprieties that govern her conduct are as strong, almost, as her maternal attachments. When Federigo does speak, it is to complain of Fortune, who ever since it pleased God that he should place his love in his lady (‘‘poscia che a Dio piacque che io in voi ponessi il mio amore’’) has afflicted him, but never as at this moment. His words suggest the baffling and indissoluble links between providence, choice and chance that have made up the story—a disegno vastly removed in its existential solidity from the tidiness of Fiammetta’s prefatory hint that Fortune is vanquished the moment a lady steps in with a mind of her own. And then, after explaining to Giovanna the full extent of his misfortune (poignantly refraining from any reference to hers and her child’s), he casts before her his testimony, the feathers, beak and claws. Proof of Fortune, his great gesture is one that Fortune could never have made. Its power to shock and move us as it does derives, I believe, from Boccaccio’s success in conferring upon the bird something very like what Auerbach has taught us to call Dante’s ‘‘figural realism.’’ With its chivalrous glamor, the bird figures for us all that Federigo’s love has driven him to renounce; and by the same token, all that has fired the imagination and longing of the aristocratic child. The weather not right for hunting, the ‘‘good’’ bird perches ‘‘nelle sua saletta . . . sopra la stanga,’’ in readiness for its last appointed service. Its presence stretches unbroken across the story, and with a physicality that paradoxically becomes most intense when the bird has ceased to exist. Reduced to feathers, beak and claws, it reifies the shattered noble intentions of Federigo and Giovanna; and even more eloquently it seems a correlative of the doomed child, whose only being has been defined for us through his overwhelming attachment.
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In this story of endless symmetries, Federigo’s earlier elation at having found ‘‘degna vivanda di cotal donna’’ receives its awaited reversal in Giovanna’s reproach, ‘‘il biasimo` d’aver per dar mangiare ad una femina ucciso un tal falcone.’’ We feel that her assessment is a multiple one, wonderfully right for her, and for us. Certainly Russo correctly hears her including ‘‘un sottile dispregio per se stessa.’’ Before sadly departing, however, her perception turns into simple acknowledgment of ‘‘la grandezza dello animo suo’’ that no misfortune could destroy. We may enlarge her perception with our own that adversity in the story has elicited a sequence of brave gestures, hers as well as his, whose ‘‘grandezza’’ is not diminished by an everattendant irony that makes them lead only to greater adversity. The rest is aftermath—but of a kind that I am anxious to defend and praise. The first indication of its mode occurs when Boccaccio, relating the child’s death, surprises us with an either-or. In the circumscribed world of the story, where pattern has been omnipresent, we are prepared to hear that the child’s death results from his mother’s empty-handed return—and that is indeed offered us as a possibility. Boccaccio, however, is not sure; and in his absence of sureness the world he has imagined for us becomes less circumscribed. This is not to say that his narrative authority diminishes; just the reverse is true. Consider the following sentence, noting particularly the bold hypotaxis: ‘‘La quale, poi che piena de lagrime e d’amaritudine fu stata alquanto, essendo rimasa ricchissima e ancora giovane, piu´ volte fu da’ fratelli costretta a rimaritarsi.’’ A grief-torn mother who at the same time is young and very rich, and who has prudent brothers—this is a changed, wholly untragic mimesis, but who is to say that it is more or less authoritative than the other? The truth of a world where ladies who lose husbands and children still have lives to lead, brothers to be heard, riches to be prudently disposed of, does not destroy but instead enhances the terrible beauty of a world in which chance, role, and volition could coalesce to make a mother sit and dine upon a splendid surrogate of the child she came to save. Boccaccio allows one last gratifying irony to slip in, but it too has been transposed from a somber key: the brothers upbraid Giovanna as a ‘‘sciocca’’ for wishing to take as husband a man ‘‘che non ha cosa del mondo.’’ She expeditiously
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sets them right. Federigo, finding himself in possession of his beloved and her wealth, ceases to be improvident and ends his years in happiness with her. A concocted and story-bookish ending, perhaps; but also lit with that light of common day that Boccaccio’s immediately preceding paragraphs have enabled us to accept. The poetic justice of which Federigo and Giovanna are the beneficiaries necessarily deprives them of their former roles and thus of their poetry. I can appreciate but not share the feelings of those who find this regrettable. If my analysis has had its intended effect, it will have shown that the story cannot be talked of merely in terms of its lyrical inspiration or seen as a static, Petrarchan meditazione dolorosa. Boccaccio’s is more the imagination of drama, and the eloquence of his story is the eloquence of a complex, expanding design. The admirer of this tale may take satisfaction in the almost certain fact that Boccaccio himself took a special pride in it. Of all the tales, this is the only one in which he is at pains to comment on its alleged provenance, assigning it to a venerable (and non-fictive, only lately deceased) Florentine, Coppo di Borghese Domenichi, whose authority Boccaccio twice cited in his Comento on Dante’s Commedia. His memory seems to enshrine for Boccaccio the spiritual history of his people, as did Cacciaguida’s for Dante. And Canto XVI of the Paradiso may in fact have been in Boccaccio’s mind, since the noble Alberighi clan had long vanished from Florence, their fame surviving only in Cacciaguida’s elegiac reference. We may think then of Dante’s reverential request to hear from his ancestor how great Florence once was, ‘‘e chi eran le genti / tra esso degne di piu` alti scanni’’ (XVI, 26–7); and of Cacciaguida’s reply ‘‘con voce piu´ dolce e soave, / ma non con questa moderna favella’’ (32–33). Coppo too delighted to tell of ‘‘alti Fiorentini, / onde e` la fama nel tempo nascosa’’ (86–87), and he did so ‘‘meglio e con piu´ ordine e con maggior memoria e ornato parlare che altro uom seppe fare.’’ His worth, however, is carefully dissociated from any ‘‘nobilta` di sangue’’; and his discourse, for all its dignity and shapeliness, is subcelestially content to address itself simply to ‘‘suoi vicini e . . . altri.’’ Boccaccio’s pregnant words about Coppo afford us stirring insight into how he regarded this story and himself as its maker. Federigo and Monna Giovanna are for him not mere literature: they embody a part of his people’s affective,
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imaginative, and even moral history—something which Boccaccio would gladly preserve for posterity, with all the stylistic dignification at his command. His praise of Coppo’s ordonnance, exactitude and verbal elegance speaks for itself; as does his implicit belief in the total compatibility of ‘‘parola ornata’’ and ‘‘parlare onesto’’ (cf. Inferno II, 67 and 113), one of the more beautiful legacies of antique and medieval rhetorical theory. Finally, with great tact but without false modesty, he lets it be known that he has crafted, ‘‘meglio . . . che altro uom seppe fare,’’ a thing of delight, a ‘‘bella cosa’’—and not for some chosen few but for all of us, ‘‘vicini e altri.’’ Source: B. J. Layman, ‘‘Eloquence of Pattern in Boccaccio,’’ in Italica, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1969, pp. 3–16.
SOURCES ‘‘About the American Humanist Association,’’ in American Humanist Association, http://www.americanhumanist. org/Who_We_Are/About_the_AHA (accessed August 30, 2009). ‘‘About the International Humanist and Ethical Union,’’ in International Humanist and Ethical Union, http:// www.iheu.org/about (accessed August 30, 2009). Ania, Gillian, and Ann Hallamore Caesar, eds., Introduction to Trends in Contemporary Italian Narrative, 1980–2007, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, pp. 1–6. Boccaccio, Giovanni, Introduction to ‘‘The Fifth Day,’’ in Tales from the Decameron, translated by Richard Aldington, Garden City Publishing, 1930, p. 262. ———, ‘‘The Tale of Federigo’s Falcon,’’ in The Falcon, and Other Tales, 1924, reprint edition, Fredonia Books, 2003, pp. 5–20. Branden, Nathaniel, ‘‘The Evolution of Romantic Love,’’ in The Psychology of Romantic Love: Romantic Love in an Anti-Romantic Age, Penguin, 1980, pp. 1–46. Cottino-Jones, Marga, ‘‘Individual and Society in Search of Order: Days I–V,’’ in Order from Chaos: Social and Aesthetic Harmonies in Boccaccio’s ‘‘Decameron,’’ University Press of America, 1982, pp. 39–102. ‘‘Country Profile: Italy,’’ in British Broadcasting News (BBC), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/country_profiles/1065345. stm (accessed August 30, 2009). ‘‘Defining Humanism at the Humanist Institute,’’ in The Humanist Institute, http://www.humanistinstitute.org/ ourhumanism.html (accessed August 30, 2009). Deligiorgis, Stavros, ‘‘Fiammetta’s Reign: Love Stories That End Well after Various Difficulties,’’ in Narrative Intellection in the ‘‘Decameron,’’ University of Iowa Press, 1975, pp. 107– 30.
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‘‘Fiammetta’s Stories,’’ in Brown University’s Decameron, http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/ narrators/fiammetta_s.shtml (accessed August 29, 2009).
authors examine the continuity of artistic development throughout this period instead of viewing the ages as two clearly distinct eras. The authors also discuss the historic, social, and political context within which the art of this period was created.
Hastings, R., ‘‘Middle Ages or Renaissance,’’ in Nature and Reason in the ‘‘Decameron,’’ Manchester University Press, 1975, pp. 1–2. Hearder, Harry, ‘‘The High Middle Ages’’ and ‘‘The Renaissance,’’ in Italy: A Short History, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 66–95, 96–125. Najemy, John M., ‘‘The Fourteenth-Century Dialogue of Power,’’ in A History of Florence, 1200–1575, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 124–55. ———, ed., ‘‘Introduction: Italy and the Renaissance,’’ in Italy in the Age of the Renaissance: 1300–1550, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 1–17. O´ Cuilleana´in, Cormac, Introduction to Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, Wordsworth, 2004, pp. xi-lxxi. ‘‘Plague,’’ in World Health Organization, http://www. who.int/csr/disease/plague/en/index.html (accessed August 30, 2009). Psaki, F. Regina, ‘‘Women in the Decameron,’’ in Approaches to Teaching Boccaccio’s ‘‘Decameron,’’ edited by James H. McGregor, Modern Language Association of America, 2000, pp. 79–86. Serafini-Sauli, Judith Powers, ‘‘An Age of Upheaval,’’ and ‘‘The Decameron,’’ in Giovanni Boccaccio, Twayne World Authors series, Twayne Publishers, 1982, pp. 1–6, 58–95. Wallace, David, ‘‘The Making of the Decameron,’’ and ‘‘Fifth Day: Romance, Class Difference, Social Negotiation,’’ in Giovanni Boccaccio: ‘‘Decameron,’’ Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 1–12, 61–67.
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Franklin, Margaret, Boccaccio’s Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society, Ashgate Publishing, 2006. Franklin analyzes Boccaccio’s nonfiction work De Claris Mulieribus (On Famous Women), a collection of 106 essays on the lives of notable women of the past. Franklin studies Boccaccio’s treatment of the women and explores the social uses for which Boccaccio’s text was employed in Renaissance Italy. Grant, Edward, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Grant investigates the scientific discoveries and thinking of the Middle Ages, discussing the factors that contributed to the development of new ideas during this time. Grant also demonstrates the way these scientific explorations contributed to what is often called the ‘‘scientific revolution,’’ which began in the midsixteenth century. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, University of Chicago Press, 1987. Klapisch-Zuber explores the daily lives of Italian citizens of all classes during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing in particular on Tuscans. The author uses a variety of documents of the time—including tax records, public documents, private letters, and contemporary writings—in order to describe the social standing of women during this period.
Davies, Glyn, and Kirstin Kennedy, Medieval and Renaissance Art: People and Possessions, V & A Publishing, 2009. In this comprehensive study of the artistic endeavors of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the
Nauert, Charles G., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Nauert offers a detailed and highly regarded introduction to the philosophy of humanism as it developed during the Renaissance. The author fleshes out the influence of the classical thinking of the ancient Greeks and Romans on Renaissance humanism.
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The First Year of My Life MURIEL SPARK 1975
Muriel Spark’s short story ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ is one of the her better-known works. Spark was a prolific author who wrote predominantly novels and short stories. First published in the New Yorker on June 2, 1975, ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ is narrated from the point of view of an omniscient infant in its first year of life. This device actually echoes that of Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy, which is often acknowledged as a groundbreaking narrative work that influenced the form of the modern novel. Where Sterne’s novel begins with the eponymous narrator discussing his conception, Spark’s story begins with the unnamed narrator’s discussion of the day of her birth. In ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ this narrative device is employed as a means of exploring the horrors of war, specifically those experienced during World War I. The story plays on the unwitting wit and wisdom of children. Filled with irony and allusions to both the historic and literary events and figures of the day, Spark’s story portrays a world so bleak even a baby (the narrator) is unable to smile. ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ initially appeared in book form in Spark’s 1982 collection Bang-Bang—You’re Dead and Other Stories. It is more recently available in the 2001 edition of All the Stories of Muriel Spark.
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of the war. From 1946 to 1947, she was an editorial assistant for Argentor, a jewelry trade art magazine. It was around this time that Spark began writing poetry and literary criticism. She was general secretary of the Poetry Society from 1947 to 1949 and served as editor of Poetry Review during that same period. Next, from 1949 to 1950, Spark worked as an editorial assistant for European Affairs. In 1952, her first published book, the poetry collection The Fanfarlo and Other Verse, was released. In 1954, Spark converted to Roman Catholicism. Her first novel, The Comforters was published in 1957 and features several Catholic themes. The following year, Spark released her first collection of short stories, The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories. Yet Spark did not fully secure her reputation as a writer until the 1961 publication of her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. To date, it remains her best-known work. During the 1960s, Spark lived briefly in New York City, but she soon moved to Rome, remaining in Italy for the rest of her life. In 1968, Spark met the artist Penelope Jardine, and the two became lifelong companions, settling in Tuscany. Yet, despite their living together for nearly forty years, Spark refuted rumors of any romantic entanglement.
Muriel Spark (AP Images)
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Novelist, short-story author, playwright, poet, and literary critic Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg on February 1, 1918, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her father, Bernard Camberg, was Jewish, and her mother, Sarah Elizabeth Maud (Uezzell) Camberg was a member of the Anglican Church. Spark took a brief correspondence course on commercial writing at Heriot-Watt College from 1935 to 1937, going on to teach English and then to work as a secretary. Also in 1937 (on September 3), she married Sidney Oswald Spark. The couple moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where their son, Robin, was born in July 1938. Spark’s marriage, however, quickly fell apart, and she left both her husband and son in 1940. However, she was unable to return home immediately due to the travel restrictions during World War II.
Spark’s most prolific years were the twentyyear period from the 1960s to the 1980s. Notable publications from the 1960s include the novels The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), as well as the 1967 Collected Stories 1. During the 1970s, Spark released The Driver’s Seat (1970), The Takeover (1976), and Territorial Rights (1979). ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ was published during this time as well, appearing in the New Yorker on June 2, 1975, and again in the 1982 collection BangBang—You’re Dead and Other Stories. The Stories of Muriel Spark was published in 1985 and A Far Cry from Kensington in 1988. Omnibus novel volumes and short-story collections were published during the 1990s and early 2000s.
After finally arriving in the United Kingdom in 1944, Spark worked as an intelligence officer for the British government until the end
Throughout her life, Spark was recognized with numerous literary awards and honorary degrees. Most notably, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1967 and became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1993. Spark died in Florence, Italy, on April 14, 2006. Her sole heir and literary executor was Jardine.
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PLOT SUMMARY ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ begins with the unnamed narrator’s statement: ‘‘I was born on the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday.’’ In other words, the narrator was born on February 1, 1918 (the same date that Spark was born). The story continues with the narrator noting that she will not smile for her entire first year of life. The implication is that the baby will not smile because of the war. Family members and family friends all try to get the baby to smile. The narrator then states that she was told about this later, but that she already knew this. She knew this because human babies are omniscient for their first year of life. Even now, psychologists and scientists are studying and working to prove this phenomenon. The narrator also notes that poets and artists have always known this. Parts of this power remain, the narrator says, in adults with psychic abilities or in members of primitive cultures. The narrator is able to recall her first year of life in detail, ‘‘the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far.’’ She remarks that she was born helpless and unable to communicate. She is surrounded by women dressed in mourning. They have lost husbands or sons, and the narrator quips that they are absentminded and should go find the men they misplaced. The women coo at the narrator, but she is not impressed; nor is she moved to smile. The narrator’s mother observes that babies are unable to smile until they are three months old. Meanwhile, the narrator’s six-year-old brother marches about carrying a toy gun and singing childish war ditties. The women find it adorable.
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An audio recording of ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ can be found on the 1991 Listening Library cassette Stories of Muriel Spark. The tape is narrated by Eleanor Bron.
of battles on the Western Front) has begun. The narrator can see the ‘‘slaughter.’’ She cries and glowers at the sight. The women sing the absurd war ditty earlier sung by the narrator’s brother. They do so in an attempt to soothe her. The narrator can see the riots and the starving and homeless people in Eastern Europe. She can see the people in London rushing to work and wishing that the war would finally end. Nevertheless, the adults nearby show their teeth, which means they are smiling. They complain about ration cards. The baby tunes in on the writers Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad. Coincidentally, both are telling someone to be quiet. Still, this is not enough to make her smile; and she is supposed to do so any day now. The narrator sees the women in Turkey in their harems, dressed in black. They are boring.
When the narrator is ten days old, Russia drops out of the war. The Russians are still reeling from their recent revolution, and the narrator, in her omniscience, can see the deposed czar and his family in prison. The narrator then notes that she sleeps most of the day in order to gain her strength. She will need it given the state of the world. The fighting on the Western Front has grown increasingly bloody and chaotic. The narrator grows concerned about the future and then falls asleep again.
Back at home, there are more women in black, but it is a ‘‘British black.’’ This is the first concrete indication of the narrator’s location. The baby’s uncle is present. He is coughing because he was gassed in the trenches and is still wearing his uniform. Meanwhile, the commander of the Allied Forces (comprised of troops from Britain, the United States, Russia, Belgium, France, Canada, Australia, and Italy) shouts a rallying war cry in French. Roughly translated, his cry means ‘‘everyone to war!’’ The narrator’s uncle will never truly recover from being gassed, but he must still return to the front.
It is now March 21. The narrator is fifty days old, and the German Spring Offensive (one of the bloodier and more aggressive series
The narrator grows bigger and stronger— she must be strong to deal with all these awful people.
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Bodies are piling up. In France, the soldiers are fleeing. All of the bravest and best have already met their ends. The narrator then recounts her graphic visions of the war. In her omniscience, the narrator watches a play, listens in on the British Parliament, and spies on the writer Virginia Woolf, who is writing in her diary. She nevertheless prefers to watch the carnage on the Western Front. That way, she is prepared for the worst and knows exactly where things stand. At five months of age, the baby is able to grab things and hold up her head. Her aunts worry because she hasn’t smiled yet. Here, it is finally revealed that the baby is a girl (this fact remains a mystery for the first half of the narrative). The rich and powerful are getting married and celebrating their anniversaries in public displays filled with pomp and circumstance. The commander’s war cry is reiterated. Meanwhile, income tax in England is higher than ever. The Russian czar and his family have been moved to Siberia, and the baby witnesses their execution. At her five-month checkup, the doctor declares the narrator to be strong and healthy. The narrator is pleased. The war cry is reiterated once again. The narrator has begun to crawl. The philosopher Bertrand Russell has been imprisoned for his writings in support of peace. At the front, it seems the Germans are losing the war, yet they are winning the battles. (This is an ironic statement.) People, especially the rich, continue to complain about the income tax. Women over thirty are granted the right to vote. The narrator eavesdrops on former Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (who is referred to in the story as Mr. Asquith or Asquith), and the narrator admits that she slept through his famous speech, given in the House of Commons after the armistice (cease-fire) on November 11. She does, however, eavesdrop on a private conversation of his.
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It is February. A party is being held in honor of the baby’s first birthday. Though the war has ended, she still has not smiled. The adults worry over this lack. People at the party are talking about Asquith, on whom the narrator has recently eavesdropped. He was drunk and was behaving toward a woman ‘‘in a very friendly fashion.’’ One of the women at the party speaks of the poet Wilfred Owen and, quoting his poetry, mourns his death in the war. The other children at the party make messes. More war poetry is quoted, and more people arrive at the party. They discuss Asquith’s speech following the armistice and the fact that the baby never smiles. The narrator’s mother is upset by this latter topic and quickly comes to her daughter’s defense. A stout man at the party quotes Asquith’s speech, in which the former prime minister declares that the war has purified the world: ‘‘All things have become new. In this great cleansing and purging it has been the privilege of our country to play her part.’’ It is this quotation that finally makes the narrator smile. Coincidentally, her brother has blown out the candle on her cake at the same moment, and the adults assume it is this event that has finally caused her to smile. Everyone is pleased, especially the baby’s mother. The narrator states that for the rest of her life she has lived and smiled just as any other normal person. But, when she truly smiles, it is always because of the words of the gentlemanly (and now deceased) Mr. Asquith.
CHARACTERS Mr. Asquith
On the day the armistice is signed, the narrator stands on her own for the first time. Her teeth are coming in and she weighs twenty pounds. The narrator states that over eight million soldiers have been killed and over twenty million have been wounded. The women recite poetry about the war and death and note that most of the poets were soldiers and that almost all of them have been killed.
Mr. Asquith in the story is the former prime minister and author/speaker of the words that ultimately cause the baby to smile. The baby admits initially that she slept through this speech, but she hears words from it repeated by the stout man at her birthday party. Nevertheless, the narrator has spied on Mr. Asquith previously on two occasions. In both instances he is portrayed as a normal, fallible human being. In the first moment, he is complaining about his political rival. In the second, he has been drinking and is putting his arm around a woman in a limousine. The character of Mr. Asquith is based on the historical figure of Herbert Henry Asquith, the prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916.
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Brother The narrator’s brother is six years old. He is portrayed at two points in the story. First, the narrator notes that he is playing at being a soldier, marching around with a toy gun and singing a nursery song about the Duke of York and his soldiers. While the women find this adorable, the narrator is not amused. Later, at the end of the story, when the narrator finally smiles, the partygoers believe it is because her brother has blown out her birthday candle.
Father No father figure appears in the story, and this is notable in that the narrator’s father may be at war or may be dead. Since no mention is ever made of him, no mention is made of his possible fate. This uncertainty underscores the way in which the war has changed the expected structure of the characters’ lives.
United Kingdom. The narrator is the story’s main character and protagonist, an omniscient infant (like all infants, according to the narrator) who takes readers through the first year of her life. That first year is eventful in that it encompasses the final months of World War I. The narrator relates events of the war and its end alongside more mundane observations regarding her physical development. The main point of both of these topics hinges on her inability to smile, a fact that does not bother her but that does trouble those around her. Yet, as the baby makes clear, in the wake of such carnage, there is little to smile about.
The stout man attends the narrator’s first birthday party. It is he who quotes Asquith’s speech, inadvertently bringing about the baby’s first smile.
Literary and Artistic Figures
Uncle
Numerous literary and artistic figures of the day are mentioned by the narrator. For the most part, she spies on these figures as they participate in mundane tasks. The writers Bernard Shaw (George Bernard Shaw) and Joseph Conrad are seen telling someone to be quiet. Virginia Woolf is spied mid-yawn. Pablo Picasso’s wedding is mentioned. In essence, these literary and artistic figures are not individual characters, but one character as a whole. They serve to illustrate that the great figures of the day (much like Asquith) are normal human beings. This seems to be a sly comment on the inability of art to address or redress the atrocities of war. Art, like war, is made by mere human beings.
The narrator’s uncle is a soldier who has returned home to recover from his injuries. He was gassed at the front and is constantly coughing. He still dresses in his uniform and will have to return to active duty even though, as the narrator notes, he will never fully recover from having been gassed.
Mother The narrator’s mother figures little in the story. The only time the narrator pays any attention to her is when the subject of the baby’s inability to smile is broached. Early on, the mother comments that babies are unable to smile until they are three months old. Later, the mother comes to the narrator’s defense when the baby still has not smiled. The mother is also portrayed as overjoyed when the narrator finally does smile.
Narrator The unnamed narrator is an infant girl who is introduced on the day of her birth. At first, her gender and location are unclear, though it is later revealed that she is a baby girl living in the
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Women The narrator notes that she is constantly surrounded by women or by her aunties. These women all try to get the baby to laugh or smile. They are all dressed in black, and many have lost their sons or their husbands in the war. The baby looks down on these women; their feeble attempts to make her laugh are met with scorn. The women think that the narrator’s brother is adorable for pretending to be a soldier. One of the women quotes from poems by poets who died fighting the war. The women comprise one character as a whole because they are indistinguishable from one another. They dress and act alike.
World War I In a sense, World War I is a character in the story. It frames the context of the entire tale; even the date of the narrator’s birth is noted in relation to the war. The women and their behavior, all that they talk about, is colored by the war. Even the behavior of the narrator’s sixyear-old brother is influenced by the war. The
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narrator does not smile because of the war; yet, ironically, she smiles because of something that is said regarding the war.
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
THEMES Horrors of War The primary theme of ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ is the horror of war. The ultimate horror of the war is that it colors everything. It frames the baby’s birth date and her inability to smile. It frames her brother’s behavior. The image of a six-year-old marching about with a toy gun and singing war-themed nursery rhymes is chilling. It is made even more so when the women who have lost their husbands and sons in the war find such play acting endearing. The conspicuous absence of the narrator’s father also hints at this horror. Secondly, the literal horror of the war is seen through the narrator’s omniscience. She actually witnesses the ‘‘slaughter’’ and the bloody battles. Often, the baby watches the battles on the front in order to understand what is going on. She witnesses the execution of the deposed Russian czar and his family. She recounts the riots in eastern Europe. She sees the homeless and starving people there. She explains that her uncle, who has been gassed, will never fully recover; but, he continues to wear his uniform and will return to the fighting nonetheless. In addition, she listens in on the arguments in the British Parliament. The entire story serves as a means of recounting the horrors of war. This is most eloquently indicated when one considers the story’s title in light of the narrator’s statement that it is ‘‘the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far.’’ The horrors of war are also indicated more concretely, as when the narrator mentions the more than eight million dead soldiers and the more than twenty million wounded soldiers. The horrors of war are additionally indicated in the deaths of the poets. Yet, their poetry remains, quoted by the women in black.
Research the lives of British women during World War I using the Internet or the book Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I (1999) by Margaret R. Higonnet. What were their lives like? How did they cope with watching their husbands and sons go to war? How did they participate in the war effort? Present your findings to the class in a PowerPoint presentation. Read Else Ury’s young-adult novel Nestha¨kchen and the World War: First English Translation of the German Children’s Classic. The book portrays a young German girl and her experiences during World War I. In an essay, compare and contrast the book with Spark’s short story.
Imagine yourself as an omniscient infant. Write a short story modeled after Spark’s ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ in which you relate the year of your actual birth. Be sure to discuss the historic events that took place, and to mention important literary, historic, and artistic figures of the day.
In the story, the narrator mentions when she should first smile, when she first begins crawling, and when she gets her first teeth. Conduct a research project to determine the scientific accuracy of Spark’s story. Afterward, construct a series of visual aids that portray developmental milestones during the first year of infancy.
These horrors can also be seen in contrast to the relative normality of the United Kingdom; the king and queen celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary with great pomp and circumstance. People complain about the high income tax and food rations; they rush to work but are nevertheless able to smile, to open their mouths and show their teeth. The forced normality in Britain only serves as a stark contrast to the death and
destruction on the front, and to the ravaged citizenry of eastern Europe. The horrors of war are ultimately commented on by the narrator’s first smile. Asquith’s claim that the war had a positive effect, that it cleansed and purged the world, is preposterous. It certainly seems so in light of all that the baby has witnessed and recounted. This absurdity, that war makes the world new, is the inspiration for the narrator’s first smile.
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Failure of Art A secondary theme in Spark’s story is the failure and powerlessness of art. All of the luminary artists of the day, from George Bernard Shaw to Joseph Conrad to Virginia Woolf, are portrayed doing something mundane. The implication is that their work can hardly be uplifting given that it is created by such fallible and unremarkable creatures. ‘‘So what if Pablo Picasso is getting married,’’ the narrator seems to say, ‘‘millions are dying.’’ The failure of art is most remarkably indicated when the narrator notes that she is spying on a production of The Playboy of the Western World. The narrator is unable to pay attention to the play, so she instead listens to the political arguments in Parliament. Yet, she prefers watching the bloody battles to both the play and the Parliament. Art, then, is less compelling than blood. The play the narrator refers to is by John Millington Synge and was first produced in 1907. It portrays a farmer who claims that he has killed his father. Yet, the people who hear his story are more interested in the salacious content than the moral dilemma it poses. Even the plot of the play that the narrator refers to is a comment on the inability of art to address death, war, or immorality. The dead war poets also indicate the failure of art. Yes, their poetry remains, but they are dead. Their poetry can comfort the women in mourning, but it cannot restore their loved ones.
STYLE Allusion An allusion is a literary or artistic device that refers to a historical or mythological event or figure. It can also refer to another literary or artistic work. Allusions can ground a work in the time in which it is written or the time in which it is set. The narrator’s reciting of the details surrounding the war and its end are examples of the use of allusion to make the work seem more realistic or authentic. Other examples are the narrator’s mentions of women being granted the right to vote and the passage of the income tax.
A young girl reflects at a reconstructed World War I trench. (Ó NRT-Travel/Alamy)
salacious story of a murder, though they remain untroubled by the moral transgression of the murder itself. Certainly this conundrum is echoed in the narrator’s world. The people around her laugh and sing and hurry off to work (affecting normalcy), carrying on their everyday lives while millions are dying in the war.
In addition, when an allusion is made to a literary or artistic work, the piece in which it appears can take on the themes—or be contrasted to the themes—of the work being alluded to. This latter phenomenon occurs when the narrator mentions The Playboy of the Western World. In that play, the characters are interested in the
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Refrain A refrain is a term most often used in music, but it can appear in literature as well. In its most basic definition, a refrain is simply a repetition. That repetition is most often a measured and structured device; a chorus in a song is one such example. In literature, a refrain is often a verse, phrase, or quotation, but it can also be a repeating theme or image. In this sense, the images of the slaughter that the narrator witnesses and relates at regular intervals are a sort of refrain. More literally, refrain occurs in ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ in songs, war cries, and poetry. The nursery song that the narrator’s
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1910s: In the United Kingdom, women over the age of thirty are granted the right to vote in 1918. (Men, however, are able to vote at the age of twenty-one. The disparity is not resolved until 1928.)
Today: The Iraq War begins in 2003, and a troop withdrawal is planned by 2011.
1970s: Now that the first wave of women’s rights supporters have accomplished suffrage (the right to vote), the second wave focuses on such issues as wage disparity, equality in the workplace, and sexual equality.
1970s: Poetry in the 1970s retains the hallmark stylistic devices (namely first-person point of view and free verse) popular during the confessional poetry movement, which peaked during the 1950s and 1960s. Ethnic and female voices also emerge as an important poetic faction. Today: The leading poetic movement of the day is New Formalism. The hallmark style of the movement features a return to the formal metric poetry that was popular through the beginning of the twentieth century.
Today: The contemporary women’s rights movement has not assumed a definable focus since the rise of third-wave feminism in the 1990s.
1910s: World War I begins in 1914 and ends in 1918. 1970s: The Vietnam War, which began in 1959, ends in 1975.
brother sings is later sung to her by the women in an attempt to stop the baby from crying. The commander’s war cry ‘‘Tout le monde a` la bataille!’’ is repeated on three occasions. Verses from Alan Seeger’s 1917 poem ‘‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death’’ are repeated twice. All of the refrains that appear in the story are based in fact, as are the allusions.
1910s: Poetry of the day is often about or related to World War I, such as that quoted in Spark’s story. This collective movement is headed by a faction of soldier poets, many of whom are killed during the war.
her story, over eight million soldiers were killed and over twenty million were wounded, and these numbers are based in fact. Such massive numbers of deaths in war had not taken place before in recorded history.
World War I began in 1914 and ended in 1918. It was the first mechanized war, the first to rely on advances in technology (such as airplanes and poison gas), and it was also the first worldwide conflict of the modern age. Accordingly, it had a lasting impact on the twentieth century, both politically and culturally. An estimated ten million soldiers were killed, and civilian casualties came to almost seven million. As Spark notes in
Spark’s story reflects on the last year of the war. She constantly refers to the Western Front, where most of the slaughter was taking place. The Western Front began in Belgium, which German forces invaded in 1914, through France to the Vosges Mountains. Yet, from 1915 to 1917, despite the intensity of the battles there, German forces did not continue to advance. Increased offensives on the part of the United Kingdom, and of the United States, which entered the war in June 1917, forced the Germans to take more aggressive action, which culminated in the German spring offensive in 1918 (Spark also refers to this event in the story. The offensive was predominantly successful, and German troops pushed well into France. However, Allied forces responded by finally agreeing on a unified command, that of General
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT World War I
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Ferdinand Foch (the man responsible for the war cry Spark quotes in ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’). Offenses led by Foch in July ultimately proved to the Germans that their situation was untenable. Germany’s allies began signing armistices as early as September, though Germany itself did not do so until November 11. This date is generally held to represent the official end of the war.
War Poets/Soldier Poets Much of the poetry written during World War I is understandably preoccupied with the war itself, and many of the poets of the day were soldiers. This phenomenon accounts for the term war poet or soldier poet. The deaths of many of these poets are lamented by the characters in Spark’s story. Among those mourned is the English poet and soldier Wilfred Owen. The story also quotes the opening lines from his famous 1917 poem ‘‘Anthem for Doomed Youth.’’ Another poem quoted at length in Spark’s story is Alan Seeger’s 1917 poem ‘‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death.’’ Seeger was an American who fought for France. He, too, was killed in action. Other notable war poets killed during the war include Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, and Charles Sorley. Those who survived include Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. War poetry of the day fell into two categories, that which glorified battle and that which satirized it or disabused its readers of the vainglorious notions attached to the ideals of war, such as honor, courage, and bravery). Poetry of the first sort was more common in the first year of the war, when soldiers were eager to fight the enemy and believed the war would soon be over. As the slaughter continued and the casualty counts rose, the tone of the poetry changed, and most of the poets who are still read today are those in the latter category. It is clear that Spark favors this group, as is clear not only from the theme of ‘‘The First Year of My Life,’’ but from the poetry quoted.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW Critical reaction to ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ has been largely positive. Most reviewers have praised Spark’s handling of the subject of war, particularly her astounding narrative device— relying on the point of view of an omniscient
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News of World War I changed lives. (Image copyright Ozger Aybike Sarikaya, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
infant. New York Times Book Review contributor David Lodge rhetorically asks, ‘‘How can a writer, coming belatedly to this subject [of war], shock and startle us into a fresh apprehension’’? He then goes on to say that ‘‘Spark’s brilliant solution is to present the war through the eyes of a baby.’’ Offering further praise, Lodge finds that the story ‘‘achieves its effect by a breathtaking compression’’ and adds that it ‘‘cross-cuts vivid images of military carnage with satiric vignettes of civilian inanity and nursery routine.’’ Based on this, he declares: ‘‘The effect for the reader is both shocking and exhilarating— the literary equivalent of riding a roller coaster, full of sudden swoops and lurches from the comic to the tragic and back again.’’ In addition, Lodge calls the story ‘‘stunningly original.’’ Applauding the story in World Literature Today, Mona Knapp calls it ‘‘a singularly inspired contrasting of personal and historical events.’’ Knapp finds that ‘‘Spark has the gift of totally penetrating the viewpoint of her character . . . . Her plots are brilliantly conceived and
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superbly executed in a flawless style.’’ Discussing Spark’s short stories in general, Threepenny Review contributor Henk Romijn Meijer remarks that ‘‘there is always poetry in what Spark writes.’’ He also observes that ‘‘over the years’’ Spark’s ‘‘stories became less personal, less urgent, slighter and more fanciful, sometimes no more than amusing autobiographical pieces.’’ Certainly, this holds true of ‘‘The First Year of My Life.’’
CRITICISM Leah Tieger Tieger is a freelance writer and editor. In this essay, she explores narrative device, construction, and theme in ‘‘The First Year of My Life.’’ The first sentence of Muriel Spark’s ‘‘The First Year of My Life’’ (‘‘I was born on the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday’’) is arresting. It causes the reader to pause and calculate the actual date being referred to. It is also notable that this very date, February 1, 1918, is the actual date of the author’s birth. This knowledge lends the speaker a certain veracity, and it leads one to accept more easily the narrator’s later, and somewhat exaggerated, statement that it is ‘‘the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far.’’ This established veracity lends a sense of verisimilitude (the appearance of being truthful or real) to the narrator’s claim that all human babies are omniscient in their first year of life. Still, the narrator does appear to sense that this outlandish claim requires further explanation. She goes on to state that artists have always known this fact, and that scientists are even now working to prove it. In doing so, she calls on the names of such hallowed institutions as Harvard University in order to lend more power to her claims. She also attempts to further bolster her assertion by noting that there is proof of this phenomenon in the residual psychic powers of adults, or in the retention of such abilities in the mature members of more primitive cultures. This statement requires much equivocation, and this is largely because the entire story relies on readers’ acceptance of this conceit. In other words, if readers are unable to suspend their disbelief at the idea of omniscient infants, then the ensuing story becomes entirely meaningless.
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And this, of course, would be a shame, as the story does have great meaning. Ostensibly, it addresses the horrors of war. Secondarily, it addresses the failure of art as a redeeming quality in the face of war. Yet, on another, deeper, level the story truly critiques the stubborn persistence of civilization in the face of its own destruction. Even as civilization is falling apart, even as the starving and homeless riot in eastern Europe, those in western Europe (specifically the United Kingdom) attempt to maintain a sense of normalcy. The women laugh at the narrator’s brother, who pretends to be a soldier. They wear mourning and yet they nevertheless laugh and coo at the baby. They sing a nursery rhyme about soldiers to the narrator in an attempt to soothe her, but the narrator states, ‘‘I never heard a sillier song.’’ The narrator’s disdain for these women and their cheerfulness is clear. Though their husbands and sons may be dead, they seem blissfully unaware of the horrors of war, or of its daily atrocities. Yet, the baby in her omniscience is keenly aware of them. Yes, she does not smile because of the war, but it seems even more apt to remark that she does not smile because those around her can. The language the narrator uses to describe these smiles (‘‘the big people around me bared their teeth’’) could easily depict a growl or a snarl. Given this description, the narrator appears to perceive something aggressive and outlandish, absurd even, in these smiles. This same absurdity is clear in the images the narrator presents of the artists and political figures she spies upon. Virginia Woolf is yawning; George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad are coincidentally telling someone to be quiet; Herbert Henry Asquith is complaining, drinking, or making passes at a woman. These seemingly brilliant personages are portrayed as banal, even feeble. Whatever power civilization has ascribed to them, the narrator seems to indicate, is inherently meaningless. And so, for much of the story, the narrator focuses on growing stronger, on eating and sleeping and gaining control of her motor functions. She must grow so she can do something about the war; and yet the people around her, those who already have control of their bodily functions, seemingly do nothing. They complain about ration cards as those in the East starve. They chat about the king and queen’s silver anniversary, even as the ‘‘slaughter’’ continues.
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
Laurence Sterne’s sprawling novel Tristram Shandy was originally published in several volumes from 1759 to 1767. Considered a landmark work of narrative fiction, the story is related by the eponymous hero. It begins with Tristram’s recounting of his own conception. This device echoes that used in Spark’s story.
Muriel Spark’s most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was published in 1961. The story is often described as young-adult literature. It features the teacher Jean Brodie and her devoted students at an all-girls’ school in Edinburgh.
For a different perspective on children and war read Tomika Higa’s 1995 memoir The Girl with the White Flag. This young-adult war narrative recounts Higa’s experience as a seven-year-old girl in Okinawa, Japan, in 1945, near the end of World War II. Higa is separated from her sisters in the chaos, and her nine-year-old brother is killed as he sleeps next to her. Remarkably, Higa survives, ultimately finding shelter with a handicapped elderly couple. The 2001 book Total War and Historical Change: Europe 1914–1955, written by Arthur Marwick, presents a comprehensive
This tension, between the seemingly civilized moments lived through by the narrator, and the graphic images of war witnessed in her omniscience, largely carries the story. This observation is most cogently made by Mona Knapp in World Literature Today. For instance, Knapp notes that the story is ‘‘a singularly inspired contrasting of personal and historical events.’’ It is this tension, this balance, that creates Spark’s presumably desired effect, that of truly communicating the horrors inherent in the war. Certainly, the story is largely told through these contrasts; the narrative constantly flashes between bizarre
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overview of both World War I and World War II. This broad history attempts to track the major cultural and political shifts that took place across Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, edited by George Walter, was published in 2006. This anthology includes the work of such famous war poets as Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, who is mentioned in Spark’s story, and Alan Seeger, whose poem ‘‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death’’ is quoted in the story. The book is arranged thematically and chronologically, and the poems’ changes in tone are easily traceable in light of the war’s many phases. Anonymous soldiers’ songs and poems by civilian women are also featured in the volume.
Flannery O’Connor was a prolific shortstory writer and a contemporary of Muriel Spark. O’Connor’s The Complete Stories, released in 1971, remained in print as of 2009. She is known as a writer of the Southern Gothic style; her short fiction provides an interesting counterpoint to Spark. Both writers’ work reflects their Roman Catholic faith.
moments of domesticity and descriptions of the chaos and bloodshed at the front. The horrors of the war are most starkly and undeniably felt via this contrast and the bloodshed is most severely underlined when juxtaposed with the forced normalcy of civilian life. In fact, for New York Times Book Review contributor David Lodge, this contrasting balancing act ‘‘achieves its effect by a breathtaking compression.’’ (The narrator does, after all, relate the end of the war and her first year of life in a mere six pages.) In doing so, Lodge observes that Spark ‘‘cross-cuts vivid images
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of military carnage with satiric vignettes of civilian inanity and nursery routine.’’ This contrast (from which the reader can ultimately derive the story’s intended meaning) results, according to Lodge, in an ‘‘effect’’ that ‘‘is both shocking and exhilarating—the literary equivalent of riding a roller coaster, full of sudden swoops and lurches from the comic to the tragic and back again.’’ Certainly, it would seem that the baby’s omniscience is essential to achieving this ‘‘effect.’’ No matter how disingenuous, the story must be told by a baby in order to bring a sense of innocence to the judgment being passed. The baby is meant as a tabula rasa (a blank slate), and can be accepted as an impartial mirror; one that, when held up to society, can merely reflect that which appears therein. Still, as each day goes by, the baby becomes less and less of a blank slate, and she accumulates more and more knowledge of the world around her. What she finds is inarguably bleak, so much so, that the only thing that can bring her to smile is the absurd notion that war, massive death, has cleansed the world. Given that the story was written in 1975, the naı¨ vete´ of Asquith’s statement is exceedingly clear to both the writer and the reader.
Child watching the fire (Image copyright Evgeni Gitlits, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
Source: Leah Tieger, Critical Essay on ‘‘The First Year of My Life,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Spark was the author of twenty-two novels (seven of them published during the extraordinarily prolific period 1957–1963), more than a
dozen short-story collections, several collections of poetry, a number of children’s books, and multiple works of criticism, including volumes on William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and the Bronte¨s. She established early on the strikingly sui generis style that became the hallmark of her fiction—a style combining a selfreflexive focus on novelistic technique, including modes of metafictional play, with a probing investigation of the moral, psychological, and institutional dimensions of human conduct. Hence Spark in effect opted out of the two responses to modernism that David Lodge has called antimodernism and postmodernism. Antimodernist writers such as Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh sought to continue the tradition that modernism reacted against, operating under the assumption that practices of realism ‘‘modified to take account of changes in human knowledge and material circumstances’’ were still ‘‘viable and valuable’’ (Lodge 6). By contrast, postmodernist writers such as Samuel Beckett and John Barth continued ‘‘the modernist critique of traditional realism, but [tried] to go
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David Herman In the following excerpt, Herman discusses Spark’s narrative practices, which set the precedent for later writers. Intended in part to commemorate the death (on April 13, 2006) of Muriel Spark, one of the most important and innovative writers in English to come to maturity in the second half of the twentieth century, this special issue also aims to take stock of Spark’s enduring legacy—her status as an author whose writing practices have reshaped ways of understanding the scope and nature of fiction itself. The essays assembled here explore, from multiple perspectives, the situation of Spark’s work within the landscapes of postwar writing. What is more, the contributors collectively suggest the continuing relevance of Spark’s oeuvre for the narrative traditions, representational projects, and broader cultural formations of the twenty-first century.
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beyond or around or underneath modernism, which for all its formal experiment and complexity held out to the reader the promise of meaning, if not of a meaning’’ (12). Spark, however, chose a third path. Her fiction embraces (or rather extends and radicalizes) the modernist emphasis on technique while also projecting complex social worlds—worlds in which, in texts ranging from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) to The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) to The Hothouse by the East River (1973), characters are impinged on by powerful historical and political forces, their psychologies and interactions shaped by entrenched educational and religious institutions, ideologies of gender, and more or less dominant assumptions about the possibilities and limitations of human agency. Thus, as Marina MacKay argues in her contribution to this issue, Spark is ‘‘an amphibious figure’’; in other words, her novels encompass tendencies displayed both by antimodernists advocating a midcentury return to realism and by postmodernist practitioners who did not share Spark’s ‘‘capacious sociability, [her] meticulous curiosity about the specificities of midcentury manners.’’ Spark’s amphibious narrative practices set a precedent for later writers who have similarly worked to wed sometimes mind-bending formal innovation with the nuanced representation of sociohistorical circumstances, including not just English-language authors such as A. S. Byatt and the Ian McEwan of Atonement, for example, but writers from other traditions who have likewise pursued this third way between antimodernism and post-modernism, such as W. G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano. . . . Source: David Herman, ‘‘Introduction: A Salutary Scar: Muriel Spark’s Desegregated Art in the Twenty-first Century,’’ in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 54, No. 3, Fall 2008, p. 6.
Rebecca Abrams In the following review, Abrams finds herself transformed from casual fan into an ardent admirer of Muriel Spark’s short stories. Somewhere between the third and eighth offering in this collection of Muriel Spark’s complete short stories—there are 41 in all—I found myself transformed from a casual fan into an ardent admirer. From ‘‘The Seraph and the Zambesi,’’ written in 1951, to ‘‘Christmas Fugue,’’ written in 2000, there is not a single disappointment. The early stories set in South Africa are hard-edged, harshly lit compared to
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the shaded, fading interiors of the later ‘‘London’’ stories; but however familiar the terrain may seem at the beginning, each tale craftily weaves its way into something startling. Fate unfolds with calm inevitability. Tragedy is mundane. Lives brush against each other carelessly, but with devastating impact. In ‘‘Bang Bang You’re Dead,’’ a woman watches reels of cine film shot 18 years earlier and recollects the events that took place behind the composed happiness on screen. Her memories are framed as much by the inane comments of the other guests in the room as by the falsifying camera. ‘‘The blacks look happy enough,’’ the hostess remarks. ‘‘Did you have any trouble with them in those days?’’ ‘‘No,’’ says Sybil, ‘‘only with the whites.’’ Everyone laughs. Except, one imagines, Sybil herself, who alone understands that they are watching a murder unfold. Death comes casually in these stories. However, it is not death that’s casual, but the way people live their lives. Spark is constantly teasing out the ironies of ourself-deceptions and vanities, ourstubborn ability to miss the point and not get the joke. Writers, artists, house guests and third parties—not to mention an array of the most delicious ghosts—stalk these stories, all needling the reader into being aware that there is a joke, a game, an act of invention going on. In ‘‘The Twins,’’ the narrator is a writer who goes to stay with old friends and finds herself in a perilous den of far more accomplished storytellers. In ‘‘The Executor,’’ the ghost of a famous novelist haunts his dishonest young niece out of her plans to make money from an unfinished manuscript by completing it herself. Spark’s fictional observers invariably occupy uncertain moral ground. Neutrality, she lets us know, is at all times questionable. If cauterising human folly is Spark’s mission, her bible is an irreverent, mischievous humour. ‘‘The Snobs’’ is a fantastic bit of comic social anatomy, in which the dreadful RingerSmiths are drawn with merciless merriment. The real and surreal often jostle in these stories, and Spark moves effortlessly between the two. In one story, a man realises he is taking tea with a ghost only when a cut finger yields no blood. Another character narrowly escapes death when a soldier fails to con him into buying an abstract funeral. Clearly (and unusually) this collection has been carefully arranged. These stories have been placed not in chronological order—logical yet
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dull—but in a loosely thematic sequence. The overall effect highlights all the elements that unify Spark’s writing—the sharp ear, the savage eye, the playful imagination—and at the same time displays her impressive range. Above all, the trademark of her fiction, novels and short stories alike, is its deceptive lightness, the way it seems almost to shrug its shoulders at the people and lives it so piercingly brings to life. Every word discreetly steers the reader’s mind towards Spark’s goal, but it’s all done with inspired casualness. Truman Capote once commented that ‘‘too many writers seem to consider the writing of short stories as a kind of finger exercise . . . in such cases, it is certainly only their fingers they are exercising.’’ Spark is entirely exempt from such criticism. Source: Rebecca Abrams, ‘‘Review of Merciless Merriment (The Complete Short Stories),’’ in New Statesman, Vol. 130, No. 4559, October 15, 2001, p. 56.
Sara Frankel In the following interview, Frankel and Spark discuss the author’s influences, the significance of faith in her work, and the place for violence in literature. [Frankel]: Do you find it odd that you’ve come to be known primarily as a novelist, after having begun your career as a poet and a critic? [Spark]: No, I always meant to be a writer. Becoming a novelist was quite haphazard, because the publisher asked me to write a novel. It was a man called Alan McLean, at Macmillan, and I told him I didn’t think I would write a novel, I would give him some short stories. He asked me to write this novel to help him keep his job, which was to find young writers. I said okay, I’d try, and we were both very amazed when it was successful. Do you think your parents also pushed you in that direction? No, not at all. They neither encouraged nor discouraged me; I had to take jobs. But they knew I had talent and that that’s what I wanted to do. There was no opposition. On the other hand, they weren’t literary people—my mother was a music teacher, and my father was an engineer and worked in a factory. So they had no books about the place that I didn’t bring in. My brother was more scientific.
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YES, I’M QUITE FASCINATED BY VIOLENCE. I READ POLICIERS, DETECTIVE STORIES, ALL THAT SORT OF THING, AND I THINK A LOT OF LIFE IS VIOLENT. A LOT OF MY NOVELS DON’T HAVE VIOLENCE, BUT SOMETIMES IT’S NECESSARY: YOU CAN’T HAVE NOVELS WITHOUT VIOLENCE.’’
Do you think that childhood is important for writers? Yes, I think it is, because everything seems so wonderful that you see everything as being new. There’s a poem of Traherne’s—Thomas Traherne, the English mystic poet of the sixteenth century—that describes this feeling and in this poem he remembers his childhood and says, ‘‘The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.’’ It’s the most beautiful bit. The wonder of childhood, at seeing things, seeing a field of corn—the excitement over quite little things. I suppose it’s probably something that’s clearer in retrospect, but even at the time I remember being aware of it because my mother used to make things exciting: ‘‘Oh look, there’s a starling,’’ or ‘‘Oh, look over at that.’’ Your voice reminds me a bit of Maggie Smith’s voice in the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Does it? Maybe she listened to me talking. Did you see the movie? Yes. I thought it was wonderful. Have you seen any of the other movie adaptations that have been made of your books—The Driver’s Seat or The Abbess of Crewe? The Driver’s Seat was a good movie—in fact it was an artistic movie—but Elizabeth Taylor was badly cast as Lise. I thought of Lise as a big Nordic girl, a big German girl; the role just wasn’t right for Elizabeth Taylor. There’s too much flesh and health to her—it didn’t look at all as if she was wanting to get a killer to kill her. She looks far too healthy to want to die.
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What do you think of the idea of adapting novels to the stage and films in general?
You’ve attributed finding your own voice as a writer to your conversion.
I think it’s a very good idea. But you musn’t expect the same product to appear on the screen within two and a half hours as when one person in an armchair takes as long as he likes to read. It’s got to change, and the only anxiety is that it’s changed within the spirit of the original. But I’ve been lucky that way.
I don’t attribute it to that, but it coincided with it.
Do you think you stuck to the spirit of the original when you based The Abbess of Crewe on Watergate? Oh yes. I thought the Watergate episode was very interesting, it was completely exaggerated. The Americans created a great big national thing of it, and I thought, well, if they lived in Europe and knew about corruption—all governments are corrupt—they would realize that it was like a nun’s quarrel over a thimble. And Nixon was very foolish in his handling of the thing, trying to cover it up and then all those tapes that came out—it was too hilarious for words. So I thought, well, this is a nunnery, and Nixon’s a nun, Kissinger is a nun, they’re all nuns, and it’s over a silver thimble—and I had some fun with that. To backtrack a bit, can you tell me something about what kinds of books you read when you were younger, that started getting you interested in writing? I read exclusively poetry. I used to go to the public libraries and borrow poetry. You’ve mentioned the trio of influences on your prose writing of Newman, Beerbohm and Proust— Yes, that was much later. That was around the fifties. Do you still feel that they were the most important influences on your work? No, I’ve now got into my own way of writing, and I influence myself. I have the machinery now, so I don’t need to have prose influences. Also, there’s a state of mind that goes with all forms of expression, all techniques; I noticed that when I wrote Beerbohm-like pieces I would think like Beerbohm, because you have to think according to a prose style. A prose style is not just a decorator’s piece of icing on the cake—it’s a form of expressing a theme that can’t be expressed any other way. Well, I have my own voice now.
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Do you think that they’re linked in any way? I think so, because finding my writing voice coincided with my becoming a Catholic. I think becoming a Catholic made me feel more confident, because it took care of a lot of problems. You know, it’s a matter of when you’re at sea you like to have a compass so you can know where the needle’s pointing north, and then you can go on from there. That’s what my conversion meant to me: That’s settled, that’s where I depart from, that’s the north, the norm, and I can go around from that point. Then is it mainly in terms of a point of departure that you define your Catholicism? Largely, yes. It’s very important to me to have a point of departure, because in the modern world nobody has any fixed belief or fixed idea of anything, and in a world like that a fixed point is very important. And it’s not that I took it on for convenience—it’s that I can’t not believe that there is this norm. What other norm could there be, for someone brought up in the Western world, really wanting something? Whether we like it or not, the Christian-Judaic tradition that grew up around the Mediterranean dictates what we think is good and evil, and defines all of the absolutes that we hold to be important. The idea of Christ as an example, for instance, was terribly important to the whole development of the West—sociologically, morally, even politically. What would the slave liberation movement have been without it? But if you go over to the Islamic side, for instance, what have they got to teach us about love, about pity, about all the things that we hold precious? They’ve nothing at all. Therefore I hold, perhaps because I talk from within it, to this Judeo-Christian tradition. And looking around at all the splinter groups, like the Church of England, they don’t have anything to offer that can at all compare with the Catholic Church. You once said, referring to your conversion, that ‘‘I had been reading toward it for years, and one wet afternoon I went and did it.’’ Was it really as casual as you made it sound? No, it’s just that sooner or later I knew that I would have to do something about it. I don’t
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remember if it really was a wet afternoon, but that’s figuratively speaking.
I think he really feels all this. I get a sense that he has a conflict, which is terribly interesting.
Did you see it as something that was the inevitable result of your development over a certain number of years?
Do you think there’s anything contradictory about being a Catholic and being a novelist?
No, you know, I didn’t want to become a Catholic, simply because there are a lot of things about the Catholic Church that I don’t like. Most of it has to do with popular Catholicism: those terrible bleeding hearts, the saints, the Pope, priests—I don’t like priests, for instance. I go to church but I go after the sermons, because the sermons are so bad I couldn’t possibly listen to them. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the Church as a repository of the faith, which represents many of the truths we hold to be most important. I think everybody realizes that, even today. It has an effect. All the trimmings and carryings-on just for the masses—it’s just like anything else. When the Pope goes around he might just as well be a football match, he draws enormous crowds, but the important thing is that people do feel that there’s something here to honor. It’s not the Pope himself, but there’s something in what he represents that expresses their hopes, their aspirations—I don’t think the Ayatollah Khomeini going around would draw crowds like that, except perhaps in Persia. Do you consider yourself a Catholic writer in the same sense that, say, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene are Catholic writers? No. Graham Greene is a different type of Catholic writer. I haven’t discussed it with him so I’m not sure, but I have the impression that he’s always on the verge of disbelief, and so he’s constantly faced with a conflict. I don’t have that conflict, because I can’t not believe: I couldn’t not believe. Is that an intellectual decision on your part? No, it’s a total feeling. Belief is not intellectual; you believe something the way you say that’s your mother, or that’s your sister: it’s a fact. It’s something I’ve recognized, which is. So it’s not a question of making any intellectual decision, but of coming to an understanding of this fact that is. Waugh, I believe, was a Catholic more by political commitment, and—I think— he absolutely believed in doctrines and dogmas. Graham Greene, I sense, has more of a feeling for the dramatic quality of good and evil, of belief and non-belief, salvation and damnation:
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Well, Newman asked this question, and he said he didn’t really see how anyone could write a novel without treating of evil, since if you write a novel you’re writing about fallible human beings. But no, there’s nothing antithetical about being a Catholic and a novelist, or a Catholic and anything. If you’re a Catholic, you’re a human being. Jacques Maritain said that he thought Catholics were in fact the best qualified people to write novels, because they have an understanding of what there is in man and can therefore write what he called ‘‘complete’’ novels. Well, I think Maritain was full of a bit of air, actually. But I see what he means. I can’t help thinking that Christianity is the best religion, the religion that explains everyone to themselves. It’s not one of the by-products, and it’s a natural fulfillment of what man is supposed to be. Can I ask you about your background in Edinburgh, and what you think of it now looking back? Do you consider yourself very Scottish? I’m very Scottish, yes. I don’t feel that much of a personal connection to Scotland anymore, because everything changes. But I know that I’m Scottish by formation. For instance, Scots have a work ethic, and I feel guilty if I don’t work; I can watch other people lazing around and it doesn’t worry me, but I like to work. Did you ever intend to go back to Scotland permanently, for instance when you got back to Britain from Africa in 1944? Well I had gone to Africa—to Rhodesia—in 1938 because my husband got a job there when I was engaged. So I went after him, got married there, and had a son. Then the marriage broke up, and I came home in 1944, but I didn’t go back to Scotland because it was during the war, and I had to work in the Foreign Office. And when the war was over, I got another job and was settled in London, more or less. Did you plan on staying in England then? At that time, yes. But now—I like to go back to England, but I didn’t want to stay there. You get to a point where you cannot express yourself fully in your own environment, you’re never understood, you want to spread. And I got to
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be too well known in England—not exactly on the street, but I was quite well known—and you cannot get people to be normal if they know that you’re a celebrated writer. You can’t see life in its normality, people don’t behave the same way. So it’s better to go around where people don’t know who you are, where you can just be one of the people. Derek Stanford, in his critical biography of you— Oh yes. He gets everything wrong, I must warn you. Dates, names of books, everything. Did you know that he was going to write a book about you? No. I haven’t seen him since about 1950, I suppose. Did you mind? Yes. You see, he doesn’t know anything very much about me, he thinks he does, but he doesn’t. So I had a little affair with him, what does he want? I haven’t seen him now for about thirty years, but he still goes on writing—his ‘‘memoirs.’’ It’s embarrassing, but I do hope that nobody takes much notice. Besides, he can’t write; his sentences are all very involved, it’s like a snail. You once said that you saw yourself as a constitutional exile. Do you still feel that way? Yes, I do. I said it ceases to be a fate; it becomes a calling. And I don’t know if you can really call me an exile, since exile means that you’ve been sent away. Machiavelli was an exile. Solzhenitsyn is an exile; I’m just a traveller, really. So I don’t feel uncomfortable with it—actually I often think about leaving Italy, where I’m more or less settled, and I do go away quite a lot. Do you like living in Italy? Yes, very much. I rather like the Italians. There’re quite a lot of British and Americans dotted here and there, and I’ve got lots of friends among the British and Americans in Rome. They’re different when they’ve settled in Italy; they become English-speaking Italians, almost. It’s very odd. But I have a lot of Italian friends, too. Do you think that living abroad does anything to cut a writer off from his public back at home? No, I don’t. Perhaps it might have in the 18th or 19th century, when a writer’s range of public was largely limited to English-speaking
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readers. But these days, exile or living away from home really doesn’t mean a thing, because I also have a public in Russia, in Eastern Europe, in South America. Do you feel as though you have a genuine relationship to that public? Yes. Look here, I am in Paris concerning my books, the publication of my books. So I began to feel really very European. I have a European background anyway, on the Jewish side of my family—and being away from home is nothing alien to Jews, who moved around all their lives. So I don’t feel outside of anything; I don’t feel disoriented. I think if I went to Africa, or South America, or Australia, I might feel disoriented, more than in Italy or France. But today, with quick travel, television, all the things we know about each other—I don’t think you can compare the traveller of the past with the writer today. Writers like Shelley and Byron, for instance, got away from England for liberty, freedom of behavior—and also they lived more cheaply, I suppose, although that certainly wasn’t Byron’s problem. For him it was a love of adventure, and he was also exiled because he’d already made love to his sister, he was thrown out of England, practically. One way or another there were very good reasons why those people should be exiled. As I say, I’m not an exile so much as a traveller. Waugh once said that he thought the writer, the artist, should ‘‘stand out against the tenor of an age and not go flapping along; he must offer some little opposition.’’ Do you think it’s true that the relationship of a writer to his community, or his age, should be one of opposition? Oh yes, no doubt. Some opposition and some innovation, I would say. Otherwise he’s not an artist; he might just as well be a copyist. There’s no point unless you have something— unless you can improve on society the best thing you can do is to keep quiet. You once said that travelling puts you in a position to write better in opposition to the world. Yes, you know what you’re writing about better when you travel. I think I know more about the English from the ones I meet abroad than I do sometimes in their own setting. It’s like taking a picture and putting it in another frame: you see an altogether different aspect.
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Do you think it makes any difference to a writer to live in a country where the language is not his own? No, I don’t think so. It depends what language, perhaps. But all Latin languages are the basis of English. Besides, with a new language comes a new thought process, always, and this helps you to understand how people think—their language is an expression of their thought process, which is different from one’s own, and this is a help to understanding people. On the other hand, I like to hear English spoken a lot, and I go back to England at least once a year, sometimes twice. One of your characters, Fleur Talbot in Loitering with Intent, mentions at one point how her imagination is more aural than visual—something that Evelyn Waugh also said. Do you feel that way? Oh yes, absolutely. Is that something that British writers tend to feel more than Americans?
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in, I take it as a matter of course that people, men and women, are attracted to each other. It’s just not what I’m writing about. But in some of my novels I have husbands and wives who are perfectly all right. And anyway, there are no ‘‘happy’’ situations—everything is mixed. Nobody is happy for three months on end, it’s the human condition. It’s not possible. In your play Doctors of Philosophy all the male characters are named Charlie; is that meant to suggest that you see all men as equally superfluous? That was really a point of stylization, because it was a women’s play: it was about women and their problems, whether they go to the university and become scholars or whether they give it up for marriage and children. But I didn’t mean to make a philosophical statement about men—it’s only that men are irrelevant for the purposes of the play. What about in your novels?
No, I think it’s more true of poets. All poets hear inner voices—words, sentences—rather than seeing visualized scenes. Dramatists visualize scenes. Henry James visualized everything he saw: everything was scenic.
I find women most interesting, really—especially strong women, strong bossy women. I’m not sure I do men so well. But there are also quite a lot of diabolic men: Sir Quentin Oliver, in Loitering with Intent, and in The Comforters, my very first book, there was Baron Stock.
Quite a few reviewers have seen your novels as cold and overly intellectual. Do you think that’s a valid criticism?
I’ve always had the impression that the energy of your novels comes from these strong, diabolic characters who impose their wills on other people.
I think my work is detached, yes. I don’t go in for emotional things much. By intention. But I don’t mind writers writing about emotions as long as they’re precise about them. What I don’t like is mush. To say that a character screams three times doesn’t tell you anything about a character.
Oh yes, I think so. In fact I like to go on and on and see how far they’ll go. The main thing is to be honest, to follow an idea through, wherever it’s taking you—and not to say, oh, my nice gentle lady readers won’t like this.
What about the criticism that there are no portraits of successful emotional relationships in your novels, except perhaps in The Mandelbaum Gate? Even in The Mandelbaum Gate I don’t see that there’s any successful relationship—or if there is, it’s peripheral really, to the story. No, I don’t deal with men and women and love. It’s not that I see it as irrelevant—although sometimes it is irrelevant—but I don’t see that the relationship between men and women is very good these days. And in any case it’s not my subject. Emotional attachments between men and women would be the thing that appealed to me if I were writing about them, and I do bring it
I never expect anything, because I begin a book without any clear idea of where I’m going. I make it up as I go along, largely. However, I think about the theme a long time beforehand; I think about the environment and the theme. I don’t write regularly or systematically, but I do work every day: something about the book, something toward it. And I’m very particular: you know, supposing I said the fifteenth of August, 1952, it was raining, well I do look it up to see if it was raining at that spot on that day. I’m very scrupulous, extremely. And if I don’t look it up there’s always some reader who will remember that day, and who will write to tell me that in fact it was raining.
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Do you ever find your characters doing things you don’t expect?
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So you think that kind of detail is important? Yes, because it’s authentic. And then within that realistic framework I can do what I like with the unreal. I play around a great deal with time, for instance; in some of my books I do away with time altogether. What interests me about time is that I don’t think chronology is causality: I don’t think that the cause of things necessarily comes hours, moments, years before the event; it could come after, without the person knowing. For instance in Not to Disturb, the servants know absolutely beforehand what’s going to happen, before the people in the room even suspect. They’re arguing it out and then they shoot each other and everything, but the servants absolutely know: they’re even arranging who’s going to inherit what. This is not realism, you know. In The Driver’s Seat Lise knows exactly what she’s going to do, although she sniffs around a lot, looking for it—but in fact she’s just going straight to see a man who’s got tendencies to kill, and he will kill her. In the end she just goes up to him and says, ‘‘You’re coming with me,’’ it’s nearly midnight by that time. The Driver’s Seat is a book about that sort of destiny-driven creature: a girl who didn’t realize what she was doing, but who was in fact going direct. Do you think most people are driven toward violence the way she is? I don’t know. Not everyone creates his own end, I don’t think. But violence and suffering are there, lurking everywhere, and of course death is inevitable—I think life would be insipid without it. Do you find yourself attracted to violence, that is in the intellectual sense? Yes, I’m quite fascinated by violence. I read policiers, detective stories, all that sort of thing, and I think a lot of life is violent. A lot of my novels don’t have violence, but sometimes it’s necessary: you can’t have novels without violence. For instance, in a lot of romantic novels—take Daphne Du Maurier’s—there’s violence all over the place. But she weeps a lot over it, it’s very romantically presented. And generally speaking you find more violence in love story novelists, taking extreme cases. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Barbara Cartland, but her books are full of violence, men whipping brides and, oh my God, this is the romantic thing carried to its absurdity. I’m a classicist. But this attitude of stating everything calmly is very much in the British tradition, you
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know, Wilkie Collins and so on; it’s not invented by me. Traditionally authors have set their violence in a certain frame: for instance Emily Bronte¨, a romantic novelist of great genius, would have a storm raging while the thing’s going on. I just do it in the calm. But it makes no difference to the fact of it. John Updike once said in a review of The Bachelors that he thought your novels lacked a compelling portrait of the good, and that without that it was difficult to provide a convincing portrait of evil. Do you think that’s true? Well I think it depends on what you mean by a portrait of the good. In that novel there was a young Irishman who was very devoted to this girl who was going to be killed by another man if he hadn’t happened to have been sent to jail. The Irishman saved her life, really. I don’t know whether John Updike has given us a convincing portrait of the good, mind you; his characters are just in and out of bed all the time. Have you used much of your own experience in your novels, aside from the obvious ones like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? I tend to take chunks of my life, but I never do it absolutely photographically. I tend to take a chunk and do that area. Sometimes I transpose it in time, and fill in about living in this place, or in that boarding house, like in The Girls of Slender Means, that sort of thing. Once I wrote a novel from a dream, entirely. That was The Public Image. I had been in Rome, and then I was back in New York, and I was going to move to Rome—I dreamt the whole thing in New York, and when I arrived in Rome I wrote the book. It was the easiest book I ever wrote. You once said in an interview with Frank Kermode that ‘‘things just happen, and then one records what has happened.’’ Isn’t that a slightly disingenuous account of what takes place in the writing process? Well, I gave that interview a long time ago. Things do happen, and one records what has happened, but what I meant was a mental event of one’s own. It’s not journalistic; it’s not like being an observer or a passive medium for recording events. But one is a magnet when one is writing books: obviously one’s mind concentrates very hard in a certain field, and one’s unconscious mind is probably working on it, and it appears that things happen that wouldn’t normally happen. One is a magnet for the
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experience one needs. I don’t think that one is, but it appears to be so, I suppose because one notices things which one would otherwise ignore. Where do you live mostly now? In Tuscany, at the moment, because Penelope has a big house there, and I can have the whole top floor. It’s a charming place, really, about 200 kilometers from Rome, two and a half hours. In Rome I have my flat, but I work mostly in Tuscany, in a big room with a wooden table on two trestles. I like a big long table, so I can put dictionaries on it, a sandwich, a cat. . . . You once said, in your essay ‘‘The Poet’s House,’’ that you’d never met a really good writer who lived in high style. Do you still feel that way? Do you mean in how it applies to me? Well I have had a very stylish flat. But no, I’ve never really lived in high style, I just left big space, or made a group of sitting spaces in a corner, that sort of thing. At the moment I don’t live in style, I’ve got a slum. But it’s awfully nice inside. No, I still think there’s no living a really stylish social life, arranging everything, doing the flowers, having people to dinner sitting them in their proper order, and being a writer: of course you can’t do that. I’ve never met anyone who could do the two. Somehow, you go into a house and you know it’s an artist’s house, without them trying, you just know. There’s no way of keeping tidy or anything, for instance. You said earlier that you don’t write realism. What would you call it? I don’t know what it is. It’s certainly not realistic, you would never say that they were realistic novels, although I do try to get an accurate background. Realism has come to mean something rather stark, anyway it’s a category of literature that doesn’t really mean ‘‘the real.’’ Social realism, for instance, is what Russian writers like to do, are forced to do. Would you call what you were doing in The Driver’s Seat that kind of realism—is that what you meant when the narrator says he has no idea what Lise is thinking, were you just trying to say what happened? Yes, God knows. In that book it wasn’t for the author to say. There’s always an unseen presence in novels, even if they’re written in the first person, and that unseen presence is the author who’s writing it. The personality of the narrator who begins at one place rather than in
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another, for instance, and that’s me. And you have to change this every time, because if not you’re just doing the same book over and over again. For that novel it was from the point of view of someone who doesn’t know what anyone is thinking, but who can see, who can observe. Another novel might be from the point of view of the characters’ thoughts: you’re either God, or you’re a fly on the wall, or you’re something else; it doesn’t matter. But you have to take a position before you begin. That’s the most difficult part of a novel: finding the tone, deciding who the unseen, invisible narrator is, and what role he’s going to play for this particular book. You’ve got to consider then the theme, and what type of narration will best fit that theme and technique. I’ve got to think about this quite a lot before I begin. But once having begun, you’ve really got to stick to it, and be consistent. That’s the most important thing. You said earlier that you thought the essential thing in writing was to be honest, for example to follow a particular character through to his end— To be honest about everything. Do you see any contradiction between that kind of honesty and the fact of writing novels, which are basically lies? No, because having invented a character you have to be absolutely honest about the character, without worrying that people won’t like it or that you’re going too far. But if you’re going to stick absolutely to literal truth, there’s no point in writing novels, or in telling the story of Little Red Riding Hood, because Little Red Riding Hood did not exist. Sooner or later you’ve got to realize that you’re working in a medium of parable, allegory, symbol—this is symbolic truth. Within that, you can do anything you like. Then do you think symbolic truth is more important than literal truth? No, literal truth in a court of law is the most important. And for everyday life, literal truth is absolutely indispensable, so we don’t fool each other, and trick each other—otherwise society can’t go on. But it isn’t the only truth, otherwise nobody would read novels. Then you don’t see anything morally reprehensible in the way novelists use reality to make stories—the way Fleur Talbot uses the people around her for her own novel in Loitering with Intent, for example?
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No, because I think she was in a position where people just came her way. She was already writing the story, and it was the sort of situation I was talking about, when you’re writing something and people just seem to walk into your life. I’ve had that experience. But she didn’t use them literally, and she very much opposes what Sir Quentin was doing, which was getting a literal autobiography and calling it fiction. She was jazzing it up, to make it more interesting; what disgusted her was that he was calling fiction autobiography, and she understood the distinction between them. A good fiction writer knows the distinction between fiction and truth better than anyone else. Do you read much contemporary fiction? I do now, yes. I like Heinrich Bo¨ll a great deal, and I like Sciascia, the Italian. I used to read a lot of Robbe-Grillet, and I get anything of Graham Greene’s, because he’s a superb story-teller. But younger people—I haven’t read anything very much lately that was very exciting. I like Cynthia Ozick, I think she’s a very interesting writer, extremely lively and eloquent. And I like this new tendency of literature about literature, I really love it. I thought The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco was awfully good, by the way. Do you think it’s a good or useful thing for readers to want to know something about writers and what they think; how they compose their novels, whether they use an electric typewriter or a MacIntosh computer? I think it’s got very little to do with their work: some live very stodgy and regular lives, others are very wild. Unless they’re writing purely autobiographically, it really hasn’t very much effect on the quality of their work. Right now there’s a big upsurge of writings about Eliot and his early life. But it doesn’t make a bit of difference to the end result; there’s nothing in his life that can explain the poetry. If you were told that he lived an exemplary life, and had been a bank clerk all his life, instead of just for a time, the poetry would still be there, and no more explicable in terms of what he was or did. There’s no scientific way in which you can say, If a writer lives this way the end result will be better than if he lives that way. After the work’s done you can say, This was his life, and it shows here and there in his work. But if it hadn’t been that it would have been something else. For a good writer, anything is reflected.
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Do you think it’s dangerous for a writer to get wrapped up in his public image of himself—what Blaise Cendrars called ‘‘falling victim to his own legend’’? Yes. But I haven’t had the temptation because I’m not quite so celebrated as all that; I’m not a television star or anything. I do know a writer who is a television star and it is a great danger to his work. But I think it’s inevitable that television, for instance, should focus on writers’ personal lives, because very few viewers of television are interested in much else, since they don’t read. Unless the writer is a name and has a whole interesting life of his own, or marries interesting people, or becomes political, they’re not very interested. Look at Gore Vidal, he’s a politician—he’s a great television star, extremely witty and very funny. He’s a jolly good essayist, but he’d be a better novelist perhaps if he didn’t have that myth always pulling at him. But then he’s tempted to go on television because he is political, he’s got something to say. And it probably fulfills some part of his personality that writing alone wouldn’t do. On the other side of that question, do you think it helps or hurts a writer to be put into a position where he had to justify his work to his public? I think it’s good to have to justify your work to the public, because it’s the public who buys it, reads it. If the book is not itself justification enough then I suppose an explanation doesn’t hurt. It depends which public, and my own reading public is a largely literary one; it isn’t the great big vast reading public, or the paperback readers. But there’s a certain point at which if people don’t understand your work, you can’t concede anything to them, you can’t explain. They have to take it or leave it. If they really get annoyed I offer them their money back. Are there any one or two of your books that you look back on with particular pleasure? Well I’m always really rather absorbed with the book I’m writing at the moment—it’s much the most important thing to me, and my whole life fills with it, there are potentials for that book in everything I see. So it tends to be the one I’m working on that I like the best. In The Comforters, Caroline Rose mentions at one point that she’s writing her novel partly in order to combat the idea that ‘‘we’re all courteous maniacs, discreetly making allowances for everyone else’s derangement’’—to overcome a feeling of
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intellectual isolation. Does that have anything to do with why you write novels? Yes, it’s a way of communicating that a shy person can use to overcome—art may in fact be just that. It’s possible—I don’t know, because I’m not an analyst—but it’s possible that the artist is made by an absolute personal need to communicate. I can communicate much better with the page I’m writing, knowing it’s going to go out to unknown people, than I can at a cocktail party, for instance; I feel happier communicating that way. And I think that literature does have an effect, it does change people’s lives—it always has, look at the Bible. Literature has changed countless lives, it’s going on all the time. Source: Sara Frankel, ‘‘An Interview with Muriel Spark,’’ in Partisan Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, Summer 1987, pp. 443–57.
Peter Davison In the following excerpt, Davison extols Spark’s poetic technique, but critiques her verse for lack of crucial imaginative qualities. Muriel Spark’s publishers have this year accorded her the privilege usually reserved for major writers: they have reissued her minor work, to make all available. Perilous though it be, a writer wants his every word preserved, if only because every scrap of finished work discarded is a possibility foreclosed. Could he have performed better as a poet, or a critic, or a biographer, or a chronicler? Those unfinished meals indicate what a chef was lost when a surgeon was made: they are interesting as a professional man’s hobbies are interesting. It was as a poet that Miss Spark opened her career, and the body of work she has chosen to preserve is now gathered in Collected Poems: 1. Her poems are curiosities of the sort written by an author who takes literature seriously as a vehicle, but poetry, not quite. They are technically very skillful indeed, adept with the materials of verse but not approaching the commitment that gives poetic artifice its ultimate truth. She feels at ease with poetry as a form but not as a mode for her ultimate expression. So she writes in strict measures about distant emotions.
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‘‘Perfect things in poetry,’’ Jorge Luis Borges has said, ‘‘do not seem strange, they seem inevitable.’’ Miss Spark’s poems only seem strange. The reader is aware of a consistent voice throughout, but somehow he seldom manages to absorb Miss Spark’s images into the imagination. It is as though the medium of poetry allowed her insufficient time to transform her images into living creations. Just so Muriel Spark, utilizing the empty shell of her verse, has managed to bring her gift of poetry to the novel. There it has scope to travel around its images, as a camera travels around the face on which it has focused and views it from near and far, while time passes, and the light changes, and the present turns into the future. The poetry in her novels carries echoes and overtones more musical than those of most poetry, for Miss Spark’s novels manage to contain in themselves the passage of the years, as though the images that lie cold in her poems were at last given time to engender, fertilize, and develop in the womb of time. Source: Peter Davison, ‘‘The Miracles of Muriel Spark,’’ in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 222, No. 4, October 1968, pp. 139–42.
SOURCES Caputo, Philip, 10,000 Days of Thunder: A History of the Vietnam War, Atheneum, 2005. Cassar, George H., Asquith as War Leader, Hambledon, 2003. Freedman, Estelle B., No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women, Ballantine, 2002. Keegan, John, The First World War, Vintage, 2000. Knapp, Mona, Review of The Stories of Muriel Spark, in World Literature Today, Vol. 60, No. 3, Summer 1986, p. 471. Lindquist, Vern, ‘‘Muriel Spark,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 139, British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945–1980, edited by Dean Baldwin, Gale Research, 1994, pp. 226–33. Link, Arthur Stanley, ed., The Impact of World War I, Harper & Row, 1969. Lodge, David, ‘‘Marvels and Nasty Surprises,’’ in New York Times Book Review, October 20, 1985, pp. 1, 38–39. Marshall, S. L. A., World War I, Mariner Books, 2001.
Capacity, I understand, Is limited by fixed precision, Being a measure of displacement: The void exists as bulk defines it, The cat subsiding down a basement Leaves a catlessness behind it.
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Marwick, Arthur, The Impact of World War I: Total War and Historical Change; Europe 1914–1945, Open University Worldwide, 2001. Meijer, Henk Romijn, Review of All the Stories of Muriel Spark, in Threepenny Review, No. 96, Winter 2004, pp. 22–23.
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Murray, Williamson, and Robert H. Scales, Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2005.
Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Katherine Anne Porter, among others, are included.
Spark, Muriel, ‘‘The First Year of My Life,’’ in The Stories of Muriel Spark, E. P. Dutton, 1985, pp. 263–69.
Owen, Wilfred, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, rev. ed., New Directions, 1965. This collection of poetry is written by one of the leading World War I war poets. Owen’s death is mourned specifically in Spark’s story.
Stannard, Martin, Muriel Spark: The Biography, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2008. Verongos, Helen T., and Alan Cowell, ‘‘Muriel Spark, Novelist Who Wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Dies at 88,’’ in New York Times, April 16, 2006.
FURTHER READING Crane, Milton, 50 Great Short Stories, Bantam Classics, 1983. This anthology of classic short stories is a perfect introduction to the genre. Works by Edgar
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Spark, Muriel, Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography, Constable, 1992. Muriel Spark’s 1992 autobiography was written toward the latter part of her life and career. In it, Spark predominantly reflects on her childhood in Edinburgh and the years she lived in Africa. Strachan, Hew, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War, 2001. This collection of essays on World War I presents scholarship on a wide range of topics related to the war. Military strategies and war technology are also discussed at length.
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Games at Twilight Anita Desai is one of the best-known modern writers from India and one of the founders of Indo-Anglian fiction, fiction written in English by natives of India. Indo-Anglian fiction predates Indian independence in 1947, but women novelists like Desai came to the fore during the decades afterward as women’s roles were changing and the country was modernizing. Her early novels, such as Cry, the Peacock (1963), helped illuminate this process by showing what had previously been socially unimportant: the psychological struggles of women to become individuals. Desai gradually broadened her focus to create the inner portraits of whole families who grew up in India’s modern cities, detailing their difficult adjustments to postcolonial life. Her fiction has been hailed as a turning point in Indian literature for delving into psychological territory.
ANITA DESAI 1978
Desai began her career as a writer by publishing short stories in newspapers and journals. She collected two decades’ worth of work in Games at Twilight (1978). Her short stories contain some of the same themes and techniques as her longer works, so they are a good introduction to Desai’s lyric, symbolic prose and her psychological insight into character. Alienation, the search for identity, the fragmentation of city life, and selfunderstanding are themes touched on in the title story of the collection, ‘‘Games at Twilight,’’ as well as in Desai’s novels. Games at Twilight is available in a Penguin paperback (1982).
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American Academy of Arts and Letters, Girton College, and writes for the New York Review of Books. Since 1993 she has been a professor of writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Desai wrote and published short stories early in her career. Her first novel, Cry, the Peacock (1963) set the trend for a new kind of Indian fiction in English with its psychological probing of characters. Voices in the City (1965), Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Fire on the Mountain (1977), Games at Twilight and Other Stories (1978), Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), Baumgartner’s Bombay (1987), Journey to Ithaca (1995), Fasting, Feasting (1999), Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000), and The Zig-Zag Way (2004) have developed her style to include social as well as psychological issues in a variety of postcolonial settings. Desai has been short-listed for the Booker Prize in fiction three times (her daughter, Kiran, won the Booker in 2006 for Inheritance of Loss). Desai won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983), which was made into a TV series. She is one of the best-known modern novelists in India. Her poetic prose recalls the writing of her favorite authors, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. She also identifies with other postcolonial writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Ma´rquez, Milan Kundera, and Gu¨nter Grass.
Anita Desai (Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Desai was born in Mussoorie, near Delhi, on June 24, 1937, of a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman father, D. N. Mazumdar. Although she grew up speaking German with her family of three siblings, she spoke Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and English as well. At school she studied and wrote creatively in English from the age of seven and published in children’s magazines. She attended Queen Mary’s Higher Secondary School in Delhi and Miranda House at Delhi University; she graduated with a B.A. in English literature in 1957. In 1958 she married Ashvin Desai, a businessman. They had four children, including Kiran Desai, who is also a novelist. Desai later separated from her husband and traveled, teaching in England at Girton College at Cambridge University and in America at Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and Baruch College of the City University of New York. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the
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PLOT SUMMARY It is afternoon on a summer day in a Bombay suburb. It is too hot for the children to play outdoors, but they have been cooped up all day in the house and beg their mother to let them out. She has already bathed them and given them their tea. They promise to stay on the porch, but she knows they won’t. Finally, she opens the door and they run out, yelling with joy. The mother goes to have her own bath and put on a clean sari for the evening. The afternoon is so hot that even animals are not stirring. Parrots, however, are aroused by the children’s cries and fly out of the eucalyptus tree. The children begin to push and shove and argue, and a sleeve gets torn. The older daughter, Mira, separates the fighting boys and organizes games for them. They begin a counting-out game to find out who should be ‘‘It’’ for hide-and-seek. Raghu is
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It. He objects and cries out to the others that they are supposed to stay on the porch, but they have already scattered. The smallest child, Manu, stands on the lawn listening to Raghu count to one hundred, and at the last moment, turns and runs. Manu stumbles over a hose and Raghu catches him. Raghu pronounces him ‘‘dead’’ as Manu weeps. Raghu goes off whistling, looking for the others. Ravi hears the whistling and picks his nose in nervousness. He is sitting on a flowerpot behind the garage and realizes he is too visible. He thinks of running around the garage if he hears Raghu coming, but he knows the older boy is strong, with his athletic legs. He sees Raghu coming and looks around for an escape. The garage is locked, and the driver has the key in his room where he is sleeping now. Ravi knows where the key hangs on a nail, but he is too short to get it. Next to the garage is a shed that is also locked. It is a storage shed with old furniture in it. There is a space where the hinges are coming off the door, and in a moment, Ravi squeezes through the crack. Ordinarily, he would never have gone into such a dark and scary place, but he hears Raghu hunting him. When Raghu misses Ravi, he picks up a stick and beats it on the garage. Ravi is delighted with his escape, but he is also afraid. The shed smells of rodents, and it is dark. He is afraid to touch something and hunkers down imagining all sorts of things like snakes. Feeling something on the back of his neck, he squashes it, thinking it could be a spider. He stays motionless for a long while until he begins to see in the dark. When he sees an old bathtub, he climbs in it. He thinks that maybe it would be better to go back out, get caught, and join in the game with the other children. Soon it will be evening, and the parents will come out into the garden to sit on their wicker chairs and watch the children begin their games in earnest. They might eat mulberries or jamun, and the gardener will turn on the hose to water the garden. Ravi hears the children screaming as they are caught.
It begins to get dark as evening comes on. He hears the water turned on, spraying the garden, sees the shadows through the crack and feels coolness. He thinks he hears the children laughing and singing, but how could they, when the game is not over? They have not yet found him. He suddenly remembers that, to win the game, one has to run out and touch the porch. In a panic, he breaks out of the shed, falls down, and then gets up, running to the porch shouting ‘‘Den!’’ as he begins crying and feeling shame instead of victory. The other children stop their game to look at him in wonder. The mother gets up from her chair and scolds him for being a baby. The children resume their game. Ravi breaks from his mother and runs headlong into the group of children, insisting that he has won because Raghu did not find him. They are surprised and do not understand him. Hideand-seek had ended when a fight broke out, and the mother had to come out of the house and make them change their game. They had played many games since then. They had helped the driver wash the car when the father returned from work; they had eaten mulberries, and they had made the gardener mad by getting in his way when he watered the flower beds. Ravi had been forgotten. Raghu and Mira scold him and tell him to get at the end of the line if he wants to play with them. They begin their game again, chanting a rhyme and making an arch with their arms. Ravi is heartbroken. He does not play with them because he is devastated by his broken dream of winning victory for himself. They had actually forgotten his existence. He is aching and trembling all over. No one understands his pain. He lies down on the grass pressing his face into the ground and then stops crying. For the first time he understands that he is of no account in the world; it goes on without him. It does not revolve around him or his wishes.
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a triumph it would be to win over Raghu, who plays football. He decides to stay where he is so he can win.
Now Ravi begins to think of himself as winning the game and being a hero. He has never experienced that before since he is a younger child. Only once or twice can he remember being distinguished from the others by a treat for himself: a piece of chocolate from an uncle, or a drive in the soda-man’s cart. He thinks what
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CHARACTERS Anu is the name of one of the children. It can be either a male or female name, and this child is not individualized in the story.
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Chauffeur or Driver The hairy-chested driver is a servant in the family and is in charge of the car and the garage. He lets the children help him wash the car.
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speaks of his fast, hairy legs. Ravi feels proud of himself when he outwits this stronger boy. Raghu catches the other children but does not catch Ravi, who has hidden in the shed. Raghu has no sympathy for Ravi’s mistake and pushes him rudely when he cries.
The father is in the background since he is at work all day. When he comes home, the family has an evening ritual of being together in the yard.
Gardener The gardener gets angry when the children supposedly help him water the garden. He threatens to tell the parents of their bad behavior.
Manu Manu seems to be the youngest child and is hardly aware of how to play hide-and-seek, because he doesn’t run and hide as quickly as the other children do. When he does try to hide, he trips, and Raghu catches him first. In Hinduism, Manu was the name of the progenitor of humans. Most Indian children have the names of gods or heroes.
Mira Mira is a typical Indian big sister who is motherly with the other children. In the absence of the mother, she organizes the children into games when the boys start fighting. She treats the children as children, not as individuals.
Ravi Ravi is the main character of the story. He is one of the smaller boys of the family. He is sensitive and fearful, illustrated by his inner feelings as he takes the game of hiding very seriously. He longs to be admired by the older children, to be a star, a hero, and he thinks he can do it by winning the game of hide-and-seek. He reflects that nothing remarkable has singled him out, as a younger brother. Only once or twice does he remember anyone taking special notice of him. He regards the older children as luckier than he is. Victory over the strong Raghu induces him to be brave in the dark, scary shed. He is more than disappointed that he did not win; he is devastated at being totally forgotten. Ravi’s grief is not understood by the adults or other children. They think he is acting like a baby. He feels left out and unimportant in his world. Ravi is a common name for a boy, like Joe or Jim. It is the name of the sun god in Hinduism. This name seems ironic, since Ravi spends most of his time in the dark, in a sort of eclipse.
The Mother The mother of the story is a generic Indian middleclass mother who has many children. The mother manages a large suburban house with servants. She goes to her bath in the afternoon to freshen up for her husband’s return in the evening. When the children nag her continuously about going outside to play, she eventually gives in, though it is too hot. She seems to be a well-meaning mother who has taken care of the children’s primary needs of food, bath, and safety. She intervenes when the children fight and makes them change their game. She does not seem to be especially sensitive to their psychological or emotional needs, as for instance, when Ravi is having a crisis over the game of hide-andseek. She scolds him for being a baby. She tries to find out if he has physically injured himself but does not attend to his emotional scar.
Raghu Raghu is one of the older boys in the family. He is chosen to be It in the game of hide-and-seek. He is big and strong, and plays football (soccer). Ravi
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THEMES Identity Anita Desai’s fiction deals with individuals searching for their identity. This theme has been popular in Western fiction for at least two centuries, but it is a new theme in Indian literature since India was until recently a closed society. Traditionally, the family and social caste system dictated individual choices in everything from education to marriage partners. Desai’s fiction covers new territory. With a global culture and modern cities, with Western education and English as an officially recognized language, with women in the workplace, individual choice has become important, though it means erosion of the old ways. The conflict between the individual’s inner life and the outer social expectations is the subject of Desai’s fiction, particularly in terms of women and children, who had little say in the old society. Like all of Desai’s protagonists, Ravi is much more sensitive than the others. He registers things
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Research children’s games around the world and present your findings in class, using visual aids, film clips, or recordings. Have the class demonstrate some of the games. What games are similar in various countries? Which are distinctive? Is there any serious purpose to children’s games or are they simply for fun? Comment on the oral chanting or songs that often go with the games.
Compare and contrast suburban life in India and in America. What are the main cultural differences, or has the modern technological age leveled most cultural differences? Do a presentation for the class with visual aids such as PowerPoint slides, or show film clips (Bollywood versus Hollywood), and include information from reputable Web sites. Write a poem or a short story on a personal childhood moment of insight like Ravi’s. Include rich images of the landscape the way Desai does to get the feel of the experience across to the reader (the darkness of the shed, the hot day, the feel of twilight). Students can volunteer to read their stories and poems to the class.
class distinctions. What do we know of the servants? Imagine the lives of the servants and discuss what the incident would be like from their point of view. How would the story change? Have one class member do a report on the lower classes of India and the quality of their lives to get the discussion started. Have another class member do a report on class distinctions in America, using the short story by young-adult author Sandra Cisneros ‘‘The House on Mango Street.’’ What do you conclude about class differences in America and India?
Read Desai’s ‘‘Studies in the Park’’ in the collection Games at Twilight. A young Indian student is pressured about passing his exams and rebels against the system. Explain in an essay why the student is disillusioned and what he is searching for. Give examples and use quotations from the story. Evaluate his response. Does it make sense to you? Why or why not?
Do a psychological study of Ravi in terms of the stages of human development. Write a short paper on the topic, using quotations and examples from the story to prove your point.
Desai’s story is about a middle-class Indian family in Bombay (now called Mumbai). Discuss as a group the hints in the story about
going on around him and is easily hurt or excited. An Indian family is usually large and noisy, with many relatives visiting or residing together. During the game of hide-and-seek, Ravi slips into the dark shed and is not discovered. He dreams of being a hero, of being distinguished by winning the game, and with this hope, he is willing to stay uncomfortable in the frightening and dark shed with its rats and spiders. He wants to be ‘‘a breaker of records, a champion.’’ Outwardly, Ravi is undistinguished and unknown. His desires and inner thoughts are not understood by his mother or the other children. It
is only to himself and the reader that he has individuality. His thoughts, dreams, and fears are revealed, as are his sensitivities. Ravi keenly registers the beauty of the summer day and evening. For him, the family ritual in the garden each evening has significance, with the father and mother sitting like a king and queen in their cane chairs surveying the children playing. Withdrawn into the dark shed, Ravi casts his mind over his whole family, and we know them primarily through his memory and impressions. It is his individual point of view that structures the story.
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Alienation Alienation is a frequent theme in Desai’s work. Since both her short stories and her novels are told from the point of view of sensitive individuals, it is not surprising that they find themselves at odds with their environment. Ravi is not adjusted to the way the children play their games. He has expectations beyond theirs. The other children fight and quarrel and hit and scream but then forget about it and go on to the next thing. Ravi cannot take the situation so lightly. He is nervous and picks his nose from worrying about being caught. It is a lifeand-death encounter for his young ego. He spends hours isolated in the dark shed, spinning fantasies in his head about what this game means to him and to the others. He is shocked to find out that his ideas about what he is doing and what is actually going on do not coincide. Ravi feels left out by the others and takes it very hard that they have forgotten about him and did not notice that he was missing. Instead of being comforted for his disappointment, he is scolded by his mother and the other children for being a baby, which adds to his humiliation. He screams out for recognition: ‘‘‘I won, I won, I won,’ he bawled.’’ Mira, the older sister, has no patience and forcibly puts him at the end of the line. His brother Raghu shoves him. Ravi does not back down: ‘‘He would not follow them.’’ He feels so passionately wronged that he makes the situation worse by alienating himself from the others in protest.
Boy with his kite caught in a tree (Image copyright Robert F. Balazik, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
On the other hand, for a sensitive person, the revelation of finding out no one else really cares or understands can be devastating. One gets a sense that this is a formative moment in Ravi’s life, and it is not positive.
The Human Condition Disillusionment Short stories often revolve around some revelation for the character, and this one concerns Ravi’s disillusionment. The fantasy he makes up while hiding in the shed about being a hero and winning the game proves to be false, since he stays in the shed too long and forgets that to win he has to come out and hit the base or den. The deeper disillusionment, however, comes from the fact that no one missed him or wondered where he was. The other children have no idea why he is upset because they were not thinking of him or his point of view. This incident, though small, is highlighted as psychologically important because it represents a common event. It is the moment one realizes the world does not revolve around oneself. The world outside has its own life and goes on despite the inner dreams and wishes of the individual. Sometimes this moment is healthy for a person, and sometimes it is not. It can be a good thing to get a ‘‘reality check’’ for someone given to too much fantasy.
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‘‘Games at Twilight’’ illustrates another important theme in Desai’s work: the human condition. Influenced by existential writers like Albert Camus, Desai shows the surprise of the human being who discovers his or her insignificance in the world. An existential hero struggles with the meaninglessness of life. Whatever game Ravi is playing in his mind about being a hero is an illusion in terms of the bigger world outside. Extending this farther, an existentialist does not find evidence of a benign order guiding the universe. Humans have to construct their own reality. If we took all the characters and saw the same scene from their particular point of view, there would be a dozen different stories. An existential hero finds himself a rebel, like Ravi, by rejecting the status quo, which is just a game society has made up like the children’s game of hide-and-seek. Ravi is aware that the game is somewhat arbitrary, despite the rules; it is not fair.
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STYLE Short Story The modern short story gained popularity in the nineteenth century with the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, and Guy de Maupassant. They gave the short narrative its modern form as a compressed story with a unified plot striving for a single effect. Though the modern short story generally concerns the everyday world of realistic events and settings, it can also use complex symbols to suggest deeper meanings. James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Joseph Conrad helped to make the twentieth-century short story a highly polished form, with surprise turns and philosophical depth, in which the character has a revelation. Anita Desai wrote short fiction in English before she began writing novels. She published several short stories in the 1940s and 1950s before her first story collection in 1978, Games at Twilight. The classic short story of O. Henry or Maupassant, dependent on a tight plot structure, was not however, the short story that Desai chose to write. Her stories are not structured around plot but around character and are more like sketches, illuminating moods, states of mind, and the development of the protagonist’s consciousness. Loosely structured, her stories work through patterns of symbolism, as the repeated images of animals, heat, and twilight focus the meaning of ‘‘Games at Twilight.’’ Her stories often end in an epiphany, positive or negative, a deeper discovery of self or life, like Ravi’s moment of truth.
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Indo-Anglian literature is only about 150 years old. In the beginning Indian authors used formal English to describe Indian scenes. R. K. Narayan is a writer who influenced Desai with his humorous local-color stories about Indian life in his fictitious small town of Malgudi. Mulk Raj Anand wrote harsher stories about divisions of caste, class, and religion. Desai is often referred to as the Indian Virginia Woolf, bringing in a new concern for the inner psychological dimension of the modern Indian city dweller, such as housewives or children or artists. Other Indo-Anglian authors include Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, and Vikas Swarup.
Postcolonial Literature
Indian authors today write in English or in Hindi, the official language of the Republic of India, or in Urdu or Bengali, which are recognized as official languages in some of the Indian states. IndoAnglian literature refers to the poetry and prose by writers in India who write in the English language. They prefer English for a number of reasons. English is associated with the writings of the Indian diaspora, authors such as Salman Rushdie who were born in India but now live in another country. Anita Desai is one of these authors who wrote her early work in India but lives now in America. Writing in English allows for a worldwide audience. Some authors also feel that English can express modern conditions and problems more easily than can the Indian languages, which are rooted in tradition.
Since India gained its independence from Great Britain in 1947, its writers have used the novel and the short story as artistic vehicles to express the contemporary condition of their country. There are many native languages in India, but English, the language of their former oppressor, Great Britain, has the advantage of being a common second language for India’s millions. Through fiction written in English, writers from diverse backgrounds and languages have been able to share their vision and memory of India. With the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981, Salman Rushdie announced a new and serious art form for India, the secular postcolonial novel. The name of his novel refers to the children born after Indian independence into a different world than traditional India, and it has stuck as a name for a whole generation and way of life. He used a hybrid language— English generously peppered with Indian terms—to convey a theme that could be seen as representing the vast canvas of India. This type of fiction has been used by many famous writers in the last twenty-five years and includes such works as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1996), Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1987), and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). Desai’s short stories are postcolonial fiction in that they probe the confusion of a people who are both traditional and modern at the same time, the legacy of having been colonized by the British for two and a half centuries.
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1978: Bombay, the setting of the story, is a large modern city with suburbs and over six million people. It is the financial capital of India and the capital of India’s film industry, Bollywood.
manage their suburban houses, servants, and children. Today: As in the West, Indian middle-class women are juggling careers and motherhood. They are professionals; women with higher degrees are more marriageable than those without.
Today: Bombay is renamed Mumbai in 1996 and is the largest city in the world with fourteen million inhabitants. With its suburbs it has a population of nineteen million and is the fourth largest metropolitan area. It gets world attention through the film Slumdog Millionaire and because of reoccurring terrorist attacks on the city.
1978: Middle-class mothers, like the one in the story, are frequently bored but stay at home to
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Colonial India The British East India Company was given permission by a Mughal emperor (Islamic Persian ruler) in 1617 to trade in India. In protecting its trading interests, Britain used more and more military force until it took over large areas of India and its administration, with the cooperation of local rulers. In 1857, after the Indian Rebellion (also called the Sepoy Mutiny or the Revolt of 1857), the British government took over control of the country from the British East India Company, adding India to its empire. The British ruled in India with many trained Indians as part of their administrative staff. The upper classes of India lost their traditional power, and in order to gain advancement in the new system, Indians had to have an English education and training to get positions in the British Raj. Even today, the privileged classes of India are those with an English education.
boycott English products and to make their own cloth and salt. He used the principle of nonviolence to protest the presence of the British and gained a following of millions. He was miraculously able to unify all the religious factions of India, particularly the Hindus and Muslims, who were rivals. Independence was granted in 1947, with the partition of the country into Pakistan (which later became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan) and India. India today is a secular state, and its citizens belong to many different religions, including Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism.
India’s Independence Beginning in the 1920s, leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi, sought to rouse the Indians from their colonial bondage. Gandhi taught the people to
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1978: Anita Desai is a pioneer of IndoAnglian fiction; both she and the modern fiction of India are largely unknown in the West. Today: Anita Desai’s fiction is popular, read worldwide, and made into films and TV shows. Indian writers frequently win the Booker prize, and there is a growing market for novels about India.
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Postcolonial India Desai’s story takes place in the postcolonial nation of contemporary India. ‘‘Postcolonial’’ has a special meaning for the former territories of European nations, for all of the countries in Africa, Asia, or the Americas that were held by European powers were changed forever by the dominant foreign culture. The postcolonial nations often exhibit symptoms of displacement, shock, and schizophrenic values, amounting to a modern identity crisis. Forced to modernize, they cannot go back to the way things were, yet they cannot forget their cultural heritage. The family in ‘‘Games at Twilight’’ is
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shock in the families of her characters who confront the fragmentation of city life. The focus in ‘‘Games at Twilight,’’ however, is on the child. Anita Desai has written children’s books, such as Village by the Sea (1982), in which lower-class children have to support their failing family. Several stories in the collection Games at Twilight are written from a child’s point of view. Since her novels concern psychological portraits of adults, their malaise is often traced back to childhood incidents, such as Ravi’s rude awakening. Desai writes of Indian culture from a secular point of view, though she includes India’s rich religious and philosophical background in her work. Equally influenced by Western and postcolonial Indian concerns, she writes of both the breakdown of the old order and the search of her characters for a new life. Like Ravi, her characters strive to become themselves in a new and puzzling world.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
Emotions overwhelm a young boy. (Image copyright Mikael Damkier, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
much like a Western nuclear family, and their suburban life represents the new direction India took after independence. People had to move to the cities where there were jobs, and the old extended families and customs began to break down. Western education brought Western desires and consumerism and secularism. Most of Desai’s fiction takes place in large cities like Bombay or Delhi, which Desai describes as ugly and destructive of life, especially to sensitive souls like Ravi.
Women and Children All this change gave rise to an educated Englishspeaking middle class in India that is oriented toward Western lifestyles and values. Desai had a German mother and was given a Western education. She became a voice of the modern middleclass Indian woman in her fiction, showing the inner suffering of stifled, sensitive women fighting against traditional roles in Cry, the Peacock and Fire on the Mountain. Desai champions a freer life for women but shows the cost of postcolonial
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American critic Evelyn Damashek Varady asserts in a 1984 essay in Perspectives on Anita Desai that, although Desai is a major novelist in India, her work is virtually unknown in the United States except for Fire on the Mountain. She notes that Games at Twilight and Other Stories (1978) had received four reviews in England and none in America. Summarizing the British response, she quotes all four reviewers as praising Desai’s literary style. Victoria Glendinning in ‘‘Mood Indigo,’’ in the London Times Literary Supplement, speaks of Desai’s ‘‘lucid English which puts many English writers to shame’’ (quoted in Varady). Hermione Lee in ‘‘Philosophical Guerillas’’ in the Observer, agrees that Desai’s stories are ‘‘absolutely firstrate’’ (quoted in Varady). Ian Stewart in ‘‘Recent Fiction,’’ in the Illustrated London News, praises the ‘‘distilled clarity’’ of Desai’s prose (quoted in Varady). Mary Hope, in the Spectator, says that the ‘‘delicately composed stories’’ reveal ‘‘the tension between convention and exploration, family solidarity and individualism . . . ’’ (quoted in Varady). Varady goes on to speculate as to why Indian authors are so seldom read in the West. She assumes it has to do with a lack of intercultural understanding. She herself finds that Desai ‘‘skillfully conveys the sensory qualities of street scenes and pastoral vistas’’ of India, but criticizes the speech of her American characters who, she says, speak as if they were British. Nevertheless, Varady finds ‘‘Games at
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Twilight’’ one of the more powerful short stories, except for the fact that the tone of Ravi’s thoughts seems too sophisticated for a small boy. In the same volume of criticism, Desai’s countryman Shiv K. Kumar is less forgiving. He claims that in Games at Twilight Desai ‘‘fails to engage the reader’s interest’’ because of her ‘‘overzealous concern with the medium of communication.’’ In other words, her style is ‘‘overwrought.‘‘ In 1981, R. S. Sharma in the Indian Writers Series Anita Desai finds ‘‘Games at Twilight’’ ‘‘symbolic of an adult reality’’ in which the children’s games display the ‘‘primal drives’’ of humans. He feels Desai ‘‘has a deep perception of the brutality of life’’ and sees the whole volume of short stories as a satire on the hollowness of Indian middle-class life. In 2002, Parvati Bhatnagar in ‘‘The Short Stories of Anita Desai: A Study of ‘‘Games at Twilight’’ and ‘‘Diamond Dust’’ appreciates Desai’s unconventional and suggestive short-story style that becomes a word painting instead of a tightly structured form. In ‘‘Introduction: The Fiction of Anita Desai,’’ Suman Bala and D. K. Pabby in 2002 sum up Desai’s major achievements as a fiction writer over the last forty years, citing her blend of Western psychological analysis and Indian sensibility to focus on the status of women and the family in postcolonial India. Desai’s reputation has become international in the twenty-first century as one of the great fiction writers of India.
CRITICISM Susan K. Andersen Andersen holds a Ph.D. in English literature, and after teaching for many years, is now a professional writer. In this essay, she considers Desai’s westernization of the theme of self-realization in ‘‘Games at Twilight.’’ Most criticism of Anita Desai stresses the influence of Western writers such as Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, or D. H. Lawrence on her work. Desai makes use of her rich Indian tradition in her stories, however, not only as locale or social background, but in terms of ideas from Indian philosophical classics such as the Bhagavad Gita. Desai’s characters often quote the Bhagavad Gita in times of crisis. The theme of that book is liberation or self-realization through surrender of the self to God. In ‘‘Games at Twilight,’’ as in much of her work, East meets West in the theme of selfrealization, as Desai changes the meaning of that
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IN THE DARK SHED, RAVI FACES BOTH HIS FEARS AND HIS HOPES IN A DIP INTO THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND.’’
term to reflect the Western quest for authentic individuality. With the colonial disruption of India’s quieter civilization, the tradition of contemplative withdrawal to find self-realization was replaced by bustling mega-cities and commerce, and Indians found themselves living in the same fragmented universe described by Albert Camus and the existential philosophers. Desai’s characters have borrowed the Western anxiety and search for a meaningful postcolonial identity. They delve into their own psyches as a modern analogy to the saintly pilgrimages of the past to find wisdom. Robin Jared Lewis, in ‘‘Anita Desai: ‘Fire on the Mountain’ and ‘Games at Twilight’’’ from Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching, finds Desai’s work inspiring to younger Indian authors: ‘‘Desai’s work has given new scope to the ongoing search for self-realization in modern Indian literature.’’ Some critics have disliked Desai’s focus on the psychological life of her characters at the expense of the exploration of social and feminist themes. Minoli Salgado, in ‘‘Anita Desai’’ in A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English, remarks that Desai’s earlier fiction avoided political issues, except indirectly with her psychological portraits of Indian women re-evaluating their roles. Her later fiction from the 1980s does address social problems more graphically. Games at Twilight is ‘‘a transitional work,’’ according to Salgado, that finds ‘‘fundamental links between the personal, spiritual, and aesthetic and the social, historical, and material [aspects of life].’’ Ravi’s story seems like a simple childhood incident, but the layers of meaning reveal the interconnectedness of different dimensions of Indian life. Ravi’s quest for individuality and the possibility of finding it reflect on the crisis of the modern Indian soul itself. Desai began writing at the age of seven and was probably a sensitive and aware child like Ravi. The story is largely filtered through his
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1999) was short- listed for the Booker Prize in fiction. The novel contrasts the lives of a dispersed Indian family. Uma is a self-sacrificing daughter and gives up her life to care for parents and siblings in India. The second part of the book concerns Arun, the favored younger son, who goes to college at the University of Massachusetts. Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) is a humorous first novel by Anita Desai’s daughter. This is a fantastic tale of a village idiot who is taken for a holy man. Sampath would rather live with monkeys in a tree than with his family. The satire is lyrical and full of the taste of Indian life in its split between ancient and modern values.
India: A History by John Keay (2001) is written by a British historian who does not defend Britain’s role in India. He explains how India became a staging ground for Britain’s wars and talks about the deforestation of the country and depression of rural areas. Keay uses fresh scholarship to reassess the colonization of India.
Q and A by Vikas Swarup (2005) is set in Mumbai, India, and was the story behind the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire. Ram Mohammad Thomas is a poor young waiter who becomes a quiz-show winner and is then sent to jail on accusations that he cheated. Through chilling flashback we see the violent life of India’s poorer classes.
The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) was one of Desai’s inspirations for depicting the modern alienation of Indians after two and a half centuries of colonization. This is a classic novel of twentieth-century existentialism and tells the story of Meursault, a detached French man in Algiers and his absurdist view of life.
Samurai Shortstop by Alan Gratz (2006) is a young-adult novel that takes place in Tokyo in 1890. Unlike Ravi in Desai’s story, who is alienated from his culture, sixteen-year-old Toyo becomes a baseball hero, using traditional bushido training and Samurai values.
point of view. His registering of the summer twilight with its smell of water on dry earth, the ‘‘long purple shadows,’’ the white walls of the house, the color draining from the bougainvillea, and the chanting of the children at their games while he listens from his dark hiding place in the shed, is a concrete portrait of the artistic mind absorbing its surroundings. Ravi is also socially sensitive to the human landscape, wanting to find his place with the other children and to get recognition from the parents who preside over the children’s games. Seema Jena, in Voice and Vision of Anita Desai, points out that in Indian life, ‘‘The individual to a very large extent is subordinated to the group’’ and that this is difficult both for the person who wants more freedom and for the Indian writer. Indian literature before Desai was more concerned with
character types. Her fiction has broken ground by depicting individual personalities and their struggles.
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Ravi is dissatisfied with being one of the anonymous children. They are rough with one another, pushing, shouting, running, fighting. Ravi seems afraid of the opinion and treatment of his older brother Raghu, who is a ‘‘hoarse-voiced football champion.’’ Raghu only sees Ravi as an opponent in the game, not as a sensitive individual. Even the motherly Mira just wants to keep order and does not think of the little boy’s feelings. Robin Jared Lewis asserts that ‘‘Desai’s vision of urban India reflects a culture in which intimacy has become a form of suffocation.’’ Ravi cherishes memories of being special when an uncle took him out by himself for chocolate, or when the soda-man let him
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ride in his cart. Thus he spins fantasies while hiding in the shed of being a hero to be distinguished from the others: ‘‘to be the winner in a circle of older, bigger, luckier children—that would be thrilling beyond imagination.’’ Jasbir Jain, in Stairs to the Attic: The Novels of Anita Desai, mentions that Desai’s characters typically ‘‘are . . . engaged in trying to find out their hidden selves.’’ In order to do this, they initiate a pattern of ‘‘withdrawal before it [the subjective mind] can re-establish a connection’’ with the world. This not only accurately describes her female characters but the boy Ravi as well. He withdraws from the game, longer than anyone would do for hide-and-seek. In the dark shed, Ravi faces both his fears and his hopes in a dip into the subconscious mind. The reader gets a glimpse of his whole life in this inner snapshot. The withdrawal makes him forget the time, and even the rules of the game. He is exploring himself and his desires. This is how he knows himself as separate from the others. He wants to be the equal of the other children, to be taken seriously in his family. M. Sivaramkrishna, in his article ‘‘From Alienation to Mythic Acceptance: The Ordeal of Consciousness in Anita Desai’s Fiction’’ in Perspectives on Anita Desai, describes an ‘‘ordeal of consciousness’’ in which there is a movement that is ‘‘not always successful’’ in the central character from ‘‘existential alienation and despair to a transcendence of these through the quest for a unifying myth.’’ He means that the hero tries to find the way to unify personality, to be whole and at home in the universe.
life and stifling their individuality. Win or lose, they assert themselves after the withdrawal. The dark shed is a perfect symbol of the dark of the subconscious mind. First, Ravi is full of fear and horror at what might be in the shed: ‘‘Ravi had never cared to enter such a dark and depressing mortuary of defunct household goods seething with such unspeakable and alarming animal life.’’ To go beyond ordinary and sanctioned social reality, one has to let go and experience what may teem beneath the surface. This life may be frightening and primitive, or it may be full of depressing memories. The shed contains the family furniture that is broken, another symbol for the family history. Desai’s adult characters often find memories of trauma or a lost childhood in such moments of reflection on the past. Ravi feels both fear and delight at his bravery: ‘‘Ravi shook, then shivered with delight, with self-congratulation.’’ His adventure represents multiple layers of reality. Hiding in the shed requires physical bravery. There are spiders, rodents, and snakes there. It is an act of psychological courage as he confronts his fears and wishes. It is also a metaphysical act of rebellion, as we see at the end of the story, where Ravi becomes conscious of the world as alien and himself as insignificant.
This pattern of a withdrawal from the action to find oneself is also the central pattern of the Bhagavad Gita. In the middle of a battle, full of despair at killing his own kinsmen on the other side, the warrior prince, Arjuna, withdraws to contemplate the meaning of it all, and Krishna, who is an embodiment of God, enlightens him, so that he can return to battle to finish his duty with wisdom. Though she does not refer to the Bhagavad Gita here, Desai does so elsewhere in her fiction, if only to point out how far modern life is from such a vision. Yet, like Arjuna, her characters still search, engaging in a pattern of withdrawal in which they consider their lives. This withdrawal-search is a common pattern in her stories. Sometimes her characters experience a breakthrough, as Arjuna does, and sometimes they fail, as Ravi does. In either case, they rebel against living a meaningless
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S. Indira, in Anita Desai as an Artist, speaks of Desai’s use of symbol and psychological landscape to explore her tragic vision of life. Like T. S. Eliot, one of her influences, she recreates a state of mind by linking mood to concrete objects and landscapes. Twilight, for instance, as Peter Alcock suggests in ‘‘Rope, Serpent, Fire: Recent Fiction of Anita Desai,’’ in Language and Literature in Multicultural Contexts, represents the space between two worlds, neither day nor night, inner nor outer, past nor future. It can suggest the twilight of Indian civilization, between the old and new or, psychologically, it suggests a time for reverie and an altered state of awareness where one may have an insight. Thus, the scene in the story depicts children playing hide-and-seek at twilight, but such a simple scene is able to call up the depth of the individual psyche and also suggest something about the modern Indian psyche as a whole with what Salgado calls its ‘‘subjectivity, formal fragmentation, temporal dislocation, and a quest for meaning.’’ Desai uses the Joycean ‘‘epiphany,’’ or moment of insight, to structure much of her fiction. All the inner work of the character leads to, if not wisdom, at least clarification. This short story and the others in the volume Games at Twilight build to an insight
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for the character, either positive or negative. If Ravi’s is negative, the insight of the boy Suno in ‘‘Studies in the Park,’’ another story in the volume, is positive. He has a vision of beauty and love that turns his life around. Ravi’s is the insight of the existentialist who finds life to be quicksand beneath his feet. Perhaps there is an overall thrust of tragedy to Desai’s work, but it seems that at least she understands the depth of the tragic vision. As in Greek tragedy, the importance is not always the happy ending, but the moment of recognition of the truth about oneself. In a 1979 interview quoted in Jain’s book, Desai mentions that ‘‘solitary and introspective people are always very aware of living on the brink’’ and those are the ones she is interested in writing about, because they are the ones who ‘‘are more aware than others are of what lies on the other side.’’ Desai’s characters are interesting because they insist on pushing through to the other side of chaos to some kind of meaning. The author suggests the human condition through Ravi. Usha Bande, in The Novels of Anita Desai, points out that ‘‘Anita Desai creates a world in which the inner and the outer selves aspire for a harmony.’’ With this challenge, the characters either rise to achieve the harmony or they fail, but at least they make the effort to be conscious. All Desai’s work records the quest of the individual for a wholeness that seems to have been lost along the way. Source: Susan K. Andersen, Critical Essay on ‘‘Games at Twilight,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Brad Coltrane In the following excerpt, Coltrane debates whether high-school students should read world literature as well as American literature, using ‘‘Games at Twilight’’ as an example. Within the literature we teach, English teachers today must look to meet the needs and interests of diverse student populations, while covering the major works of our common national literature. Many argue that American high school students should read world literature to learn about other cultures and literary traditions. At the same time, it stands to reason that American high school students should read American literature to learn about their own heritage. Which of these positions is valid? Hopefully, both are. Unfortunately they represent two prevailing and often opposing notions that limit
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teachers and students to an either/or approach to studying literature. In a curriculum already crowded with required texts, diversity in literature is often an afterthought at best, leaving much world literature out of our classrooms. Most English teachers feel a duty to teach the best-known texts of American literature; with so many American writers to cover, reading anything else seems practically impossible. Even the anthologies we select are usually classified as either American or world literature, but rarely are they both. These apparently conflicting ideas bring up several important questions: Can we have it both ways? Is it possible to blend a curriculum that includes both world and American literature? Is it possible to develop a literary curriculum that begins to erase that line of ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ altogether, replacing it with a wide and everexpanding circle encompassing all that is good literature, regardless of its cultural, national, or linguistic origin? Can we teach both American and world literature effectively, without marginalizing one or the other? My answer to these questions is a hopeful ‘‘yes.’’ Now comes a much more difficult question: how? How can teachers maintain a balance so that no literature is marginalized? How can we select texts of cultural diversity and literary merit? How can we blend world literature into our American literature courses? My means of reaching this end is to pair works by American writers with works from other cultures that share a common thematic link or central issue. To put this into practice, I pair texts, that illustrate some of the potential for a blended currriculum of both American and non-Western writers. Students can read the texts simultaneously (one in class, one independently) or back to back, or they can study one of the paired works after having read the other over the summer. While the following examples are related thematically, I also seek works that challenge our notions of both American and world literature. . . . In pairing any two works, I hope to enable students to identify with the ideas found in works by international writers, just as they find familiarity in works from their own culture. This process creates a conversation between the voices familiar to us and those that are not—or at least not yet. I started this process by looking at the literature that I already knew and building from there. I find that the more I read of world literature, the
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more I discover how much I have yet to read. At times this can seem discouraging, but I am always reminded of the seemingly unlimited potential for blending American literature with world literature; there is so much good reading out there, and so many connections for students to make. Such a process will hopefully lead us to question other sacred terms, including American literature and world literature, and I believe this process to be a healthy one. In the big scheme of things, I hope students will learn to identify with all good literature, regardless of its cultural, national, or linguistic origin. . . . After reading A Separate Peace, students may make interesting comparisons to Desai’s ‘‘Games at Twilight,’’ a widely anthologized short story. Both works deal with central characters on the cusp of maturity, unsure of their changing roles in the larger world. Both authors also develop the motif of children’s games as metaphors for more complicated adult relationships, and both address the underlying theme of death. Source: Brad Coltrane, ‘‘Literature beyond Labels: Blending American and World Literature,’’ in English Journal, Vol. 91, No. 5, May 2002, pp. 28–32.
Minoli Salgado In the following analysis, Salgado discusses how Desai uses epiphany as an underlying structural principle versus using it as a thematic concern in short stories. Epiphany is a central concept in short story criticism. Defined by James Joyce as a ‘‘sudden spiritual manifestation,’’ the idea of epiphany seems to be implicitly accepted by a range of critics as one of the key elements structuring the short story. Mary Pratt, for example, claims that ‘‘the moment of truth stands as the model for the short story, the way of life stands as a model for the novel,’’ suggesting that the revelatory nature of epiphany is somehow supported by the short story form and that it serves as a principle of composition for the writer. This view is qualified by Nadine Gordimer, who argues that ‘‘a discrete moment of truth is aimed at—not the moment of truth, because the short story doesn’t deal in cumulatives.’’ Yet we may question whether the short story is indeed the vehicle of epiphanic moments or if it might instead be the instrument for its subversion. Clare Hanson’s argument that the short story is ‘‘a form which hugs the unknown to itself’’ suggests that the answer might lie somewhere between these extremes: the short story, while promoting
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SHE HIGHLIGHTS THE DIVERGENCE BETWEEN TWILIGHT AND DAYLIGHT AWARENESS, EXPLORING THE SPIRITUAL AND EMOTIONAL CONFLICTS GENERATED BY THE URGE FOR THE FULFILLMENT OF SELF-REFLECTION AND THE NEED TO MEET SOCIAL OBLIGATIONS AND MATERIAL DEMANDS.’’
the desire for spiritual insight, might at the same time work implicitly towards denying the possibility of religious certitudes. This subtle negotiation is evident in the work of Anita Desai. Her short stories bring into sharp relief the difference between epiphany as an underlying structural principle in the short story—provided for by what Hanson has called the ‘‘elisions and gaps’’ in the short story—and epiphany as a thematic concern. For while the stories in Games at Twilight show a common thematic concern with a moment of truth or insight, their textual construction works towards questioning the value of these insights. Therefore, in order to analyze the way in which Desai interrogates epiphany—a moment of spontaneous, sudden, and transforming spiritual insight— it is necessary to analyze her treatment of spiritual awareness as a whole. Indeed, only two of her stories, ‘‘Studies in the Park’’ and ‘‘Surface Textures,’’ describe epiphanies. Desai’s subversion of these epiphanies draws upon a broader subversion—one that questions the value of all insights—evident in nearly all of the stories in the collection. In the process, beyond the thematic and structural discontinuities in her work, Desai locates and, I would suggest, localizes epiphany, giving this socially transcendent and universalizing experience a culturally specific bearing. Illumination is the key theme of Anita Desai’s short stories. Its real and metaphorical manifestations not only structure individual stories, but also serve to provide the collection’s overall pattern— that element of fiction which Desai has claimed is of most concern to her. The stories move between the ‘‘light’’ of insight, however fleeting, and the ‘‘dark’’ of indifference, between a development towards a moment of truth and an acknowledgement of the elusiveness of individual vision. But, as
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the very title of the collection, Games at Twilight, suggests, the stories describe potential and partial illumination. Desai conveys this sense of partial illumination by yoking a character’s renewed awareness to the twilight hours. Twilight is the time when Raghu learns about the ignominy of defeat in the title story; it is the hour of release for Basu as he finally gains some peace in ‘‘Pigeons at Dawn’’; it is the best time for revision and reflection, as Suno discovers in ‘‘Studies in the Park’’; it is the hour of conviviality both forced and genuine in ‘‘The Farewell Party.’’ In all of these stories the conjunction between time and renewed awareness is used to affirm a dream time, a time when the imagination is released, a time when Scheherazade can begin her work of storytelling. It is, in other words, a time for the suspension of belief. This is significant, for it allows Desai to throw into doubt the value if not the validity of the insights gained by her characters. Desai creates ambiguity in her depiction of spiritual insight by combining disruptions of form with implicit social commentary. Thus, she successfully uses various methods to convey a twilight quality: the tense changes in the first-person narratives of ‘‘Studies in the Park’’ and ‘‘The Accompanist’’ emphasize developments in the state of mind of the central character, and the restless shift of focus from one character to another in ‘‘Games at Twilight,’’‘‘The Farewell Party,’’ and ‘‘Scholar and Gypsy’’ draws attention to the temporality and transience of a suspended state of consciousness. This fluid form destabilizes the potential for a unified focus or moral center to the texts. Yet Desai does not stop here. She highlights the divergence between twilight and daylight awareness, exploring the spiritual and emotional conflicts generated by the urge for the fulfillment of self-reflection and the need to meet social obligations and material demands. This conflict is explored in the story of Mr. Bose, who continues to provide private tuition despite finding it ‘‘intolerable, all of it—except . . . for the seventy-five rupees paid at the end of the month.’’ He discovers that ‘‘the two halves of the difficult world he had been holding so carefully together, sealing them with reams of poetry, reams of Sanskrit, had split apart into dissonance.’’ The fragile harmony at the end of ‘‘Private Tuition by Mr. Bose’’ is conveyed in suitably aesthetic terms—literature and music providing the idiom for an uneasy reconciliation and acceptance:
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. . . the grammar re-arranged itself according to rule, corrected itself. The composition into quiet made quite clear the exhaustion of the child, asleep or nearly so. The sounds of dinner being prepared were calm, decorative even. Once more the radio was tuned to music sympathetically sad.
The harmony created between Mr. Bose and his environment is quite clearly an aesthetic construct—his newly acquired tranquillity described as a fabrication, a ‘‘composition into quiet,’’ and it is this overt aestheticism that draws attention to the author’s presence. It is as if Desai has stepped out from the shadows to reveal that Bose’s state of mind is constructed from an awareness that lies outside his own. The passage provides a gloss of unity and harmony, delineating an aesthetic resolution of material conflict. Yet this exposure of the artifice that goes into the construction of a character’s awareness not only draws attention to the external presence of the writer—thereby disrupting a hitherto seamless narrative—but also emphasizes the very exteriority of this moment of reflection, calling into question its authenticity and value. This technique for destabilizing individual insight through self-conscious aestheticism is carried over into Desai’s treatment of epiphany. In ‘‘Studies in the Park,’’ Suno, a stressed student, tries to concentrate on reviewing for his exams in a provincial park. There he sees something that, in his words, ‘‘burnt the surfaces of my eyes so that they watered.’’ The exact import of his insight is, significantly, left unclear; what dominates is the form which his vision takes. It is a vision of a young woman whom he believes to be dying. The sight of her makes him feel as if he ‘‘were gazing at a painting or a sculpture, some work of art.’’ Suno compares the woman’s face to ‘‘a flower, wax-white and composed, like a Persian lily or a tobacco flower at night’’ and sees in it ‘‘a beauty I had never come across even in a dream;’’ he assumes that her paleness indicates that she is dying and even attempts a diagnosis—‘‘she was very ill, with anaemia, perhaps, or t.b.’’—and wonders if the old man accompanying her is ‘‘her husband, her father, her lover?’’ interpreting the intimacy between them as ‘‘inhuman’’ and ‘‘divine.’’ Upon this brief glimpse of strangers in the park rests an undefined insight that liberates Suno from his social responsibilities, leading him to abandon his forthcoming exams and his familial commitments. There is clearly an ironic distance here between the immanent author and the central character—a disjunction allowed for by the use of a first-person
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narrative rich in hyperbole and melodrama. Although the epiphany is undoubtedly a genuine experience for the central character, Desai’s depiction invites the reader to make judgments about it. She not only shows the epiphany to be based upon a vast number of suppositions, but the overtly romantic rendition of her character’s experience suggests that it is shaped by an aesthetic idealism that renders it immature and vacuous—the product of a highly romantic, self-serving imagination. What is more, his vision of death in life so closely corresponds to Suno’s own sense of futility over his exams that it suggests that his epiphany draws upon a desire to escape from exam pressures. This depiction of epiphany as an escape from social pressures is supported by Desai’s treatment of spiritual awareness in general. In ‘‘Scholar and Gypsy,’’ Desai wryly juxtaposes an American woman’s self-discovery and newly awakened religious awareness with the rationalist perspective of her unimaginative husband. Pat, the American woman, describes her experience in typically extravagant terms as an ‘‘escape from India,’’ an escape from ‘‘all those Hindu horrors’’ and all ‘‘the greasy Indian masses, whining and cajoling and sneering.’’ This escape involves a reductive, childlike impression of the mountain folk whose harsh life is idealized under Pat’s new visionary awareness: ‘‘all they have is a black old kettle and a pack of wood on their backs, rope sandals and a few sheep, but they laugh and sing and go striding up the mountains like—like lords.’’ Yet again Desai has developed a storyline that upholds the importance of individual insight while simultaneously creating a formal dissonance that questions the value of this insight. Destabilization is furthered by the context within which spiritual experience occurs: if the only option for a spiritually transformed person such as Suno is to opt out of society altogether (a pattern also found in the epiphanic story ‘‘Surface Textures,’’) it implicitly calls into question the viability of the spiritual experience to penetrate the real contradictions of existence. In ‘‘Studies in the Park,’’ it is as if Desai self-consciously locates Suno’s epiphany in a tangibly godless world, exposing the experience as a self-indulgent fabrication and thereby subverting its transcendental potential to break the boundaries between spiritual and material worlds. These boundaries form the subject of over half of the Twilight stories, in which Desai repeatedly draws attention to a character’s failure to find a link between spiritual and material worlds,
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exposing the fragmentation of experience that is the very antithesis of epiphanic awareness. Art and artifice, she suggests, can provide a means of overcoming this fragmentation. Yet even in stories such as ‘‘The Accompanist’’ and ‘‘Sale,’’ in which Desai explores the liberating potential of an artist’s awareness, she simultaneously reveals its limitations. In ‘‘Sale,’’ for example, an artist who paints imaginary birds and flowers is shown to be hopelessly misunderstood by a couple of prospective clients. They withdraw with embarrassment upon interpreting his enthusiasm for personal anecdote as a sign of pressure to buy his paintings. In crossing the boundary between solitary genius and ordinary man, the painter’s work, too, is called into question by these devotees of High Art who wish to maintain their romantic view of the artist as gifted genius despite the ample evidence of the symbiotic relationship between material and spiritual need. Art has been created out of the ‘‘rags and grime’’ of the city studio and is less an ‘‘inspired act of creation’’ (as the prospective clients believe) than an habitual way of seeing, a way of surviving both physically and emotionally in the filthy city. The underlying logic of ‘‘Sale’’ is that the truth of imaginative insight, the path toward epiphany, must be publicly denied in order for the artist to achieve material success. The depiction of spiritual awareness in Desai’s short stories, then, is destabilized through a combination of plot—focusing on the failed attempts of an individual to permeate the boundaries between material and spiritual worlds—and disruptive formal techniques. This combination works to take the reader out of the text and dissipates the potential for creating the single, reunifying effect of epiphany. It is as if the compression imposed upon the short story form invites not the integrative vision of epiphany but the dissipation of partial insights. This is substantiated by Desai’s disavowal of epiphany in ‘‘Surface Textures,’’ in which she brings together several of the techniques found in her treatment of spiritual awareness in a ruthless interrogation of the value of the sudden, spiritual revelation. ‘‘Surface Textures’’ centers on Harish, a civil servant who is permanently transformed when he observes the contours of a melon that his wife has brought for lunch: ‘‘from the start [he] regarded it with eyes that seemed newly opened. One would have thought he had never seen a melon before.’’ From that moment on, he is captivated by the sight and shape of everyday objects, paying no attention
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to anything else. His eyes ‘‘slide about’’ over the surfaces of things, ‘‘taking in things normally considered nondescript and unimportant [such as] the paving stones on which . . . feet momentarily pressed, the length of wire in a railing at the side of the road, a pattern of grime on the windowpane of a disused printing press.’’ This trance-like state and aestheticized awareness is clearly induced by an epiphany. Yet it leads him not merely to lose his concentration—so that ‘‘the people in the queue outside went for another day without rice and sugar and kerosene for their lamps and Janta cookers’’—but also to lose his job, his wife, his family, and his home. Harish’s epiphany dislocates him socially and psychologically. His worship of surface textures induces a trance-like state that leads him, in turn, to be the object of devotion. He, therefore, comes to be socially relocated as a Swami. But we may question whether Harish is mad or simply a mystic. Desai’s ironic detachment leaves us little room for doubt. Harish’s exclusive contemplation of external reality, including the objects of devotion brought to him, and the contentment of his devotees to interpret his silent form as a manifestation of divinity, reveal that both worshippers and worshipped are deluded by appearances. For Harish and his devotees, spiritual awareness is founded upon exteriority. By creating a disjunction between truth and the absolution of spiritual insight, between meaning and its individual interpretation, Desai seems to contend that all truths, including those that are founded upon epiphanic experience, are partial, personal, and plural. In ‘‘Surface Textures,’’ Desai has not only made epiphany relative by exploring the difference between objective reality and subjective experience and creating an ironic dissonance between the two; she has provided it with a context as well. In doing so, she has come to interrogate the cultural value placed upon manifestations of divine insight. Seeing may literally be believing for the characters of Anita Desai, but the textual disruptions in her short stories question the possibility for lasting, meaningful insight. Indeed, her work seems to promote what Dominic Head has described in his analysis of Joyce as the multi-dimensional ‘‘nonepiphany,’’ one in which epiphany becomes ‘‘a nexus of a variety of forces rather than a single effect.’’ Such a plural and disruptive form of epiphany may well be imposed upon the short story by the exigencies of the form. Not only does the very length of the short story enforce omission and
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exclusion, liberating the text from the imposition of authorial commentary, but the very openendedness—what Clare Hanson has described as the ‘‘tangentiality’’ of the short story—seems to invite, and simultaneously to undermine, the possible rendition of a single-effect, unifying epiphany. What is more, unlike the unifying, transcendent epiphanies that conclude her novels Clear Light of Day and In Custody, the relative epiphanies of Desai’s short stories invite the reader to question their meaning and worth. This interrogatory procedure transforms the epiphanies from a passive principle—one that extols the value of passive awareness in the character and passive acceptance in the reader—to an active force that invites the reader to inquire into the very possibility of finding true value. Desai’s consistent suggestion that the path to spiritual insight is at odds with social commitments—commitments whose power can seem overwhelming even to those who are familiar with the Indian social context—is revisionary. Through it she promotes the individual’s right to determine the course of his or her life. This right is no mere platitude. It gains real urgency and force when set within the Indian social context, in which Desai has gone so far as to claim that the concept of the individual does not exist. Whether this revisionary impact is the result of a conscious effort by the author is debatable. Desai has repeatedly drawn attention to the need to ‘‘compromise with life’’ and social reality. More importantly perhaps, she has suggested that art, the act of writing, is itself a compromise between the experience of epiphany and its articulation: A writer who wishes to capture the spirit of place requires not the power of observation so much as a burning intensity of vision. If his vision has such intensity, his gaze will become powerful as the magnifying glass that is held between the sun and a sheet of paper, compressing and generating enough heat to burn a ring through the paper. In the end, this is what a book is: the blackened remains of a fire lit by the writer. Source: Minoli Salgado, ‘‘When Seeing Is Not Believing: Epiphany in Anita Desai’s ‘Games at Twilight,’’’ in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 20, No. 1, Summer 1996, p. 103.
Nancy L. Paxton In the following review, Paxton points out that Bande’s analysis of Desai’s novels is directed toward western readers.
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Usha Bande provides an excellent and provocative introduction to the fiction of Anita Desai, one of India’s most compelling contemporary writers in English. Bande surveys Desai’s major fiction beginning with Cry, the Peacock (1963) and ending with In Custody (1984). American readers of Bande’s study will find helpful her documentation of the critical response to Desai’s work in India. Arguing that Desai’s ‘‘real concern is with exploration of the human psyche,’’ Bande applies concepts from Third Force psychology, as articulated by Karen Horney and Abraham Maslow, in her close readings of Desai’s texts. Directed by Desai’s claim that she is ‘‘interested in characters who are not average but have retreated, or been driven into despair and so turned against or made to stand against the general current,’’ Bande uses Third Force psychology as a means to understand the often mysterious behavior of Desai’s characters. Her analyses of Maya, from Cry, the Peacock; Monisha and Amla, from Voices in the City; and Bim, from Clear Light of Day are most convincing. In identifying what moves these protagonists toward self-actualization, Bande eloquently describes how their aesthetic sensibilities contribute to their growth, a theme neglected by many of Desai’s critics. Bande’s analysis of Desai’s novels is clearly directed toward Western readers, and her text is peppered with often digressive references to English and American writers and critics. Although she often refers to Indian cultural traditions in explaining the behavior and motives of Desai’s characters, Bande does not address the problem of how—or whether—concepts from Western psychology can be accurately used to analyze the subjectivity of Indian characters. Bande uncritically labels many of Desai’s characters as either ‘‘normal’’ or ‘‘abnormal’’ without apparently investigating the cultural biases imported by these categories. Her analysis of Fire on the Mountain, in particular, is diminished because she labels Nanda Kaul as ‘‘abnormal’’ because she cannot connect with her psychotic great-granddaughter. Jungian critic Bettina Knapp, whose analysis of this novel Bande apparently did not consult, argues, by contrast, that Kaul’s behavior reflects her commitment to her own spiritual growth and her efforts to recognize and heal the damage that traditional gender roles have created in her life. Bande’s reading of this novel shows how her reliance on Third Force psychology has unnecessarily limited her theoretical perspective.
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AND I’M VERY MUCH AWARE THAT THERE’S OFTEN A GREAT DISCREPANCY BETWEEN A PERSON’S PHILOSOPHY AS HE EXPOUNDS IT AND ABOUT HIS PRIVATE LIFE, AND IT’S THIS DISCREPANCY THAT INTERESTS ME, THAT ENGAGES ME AS A WRITER.’’
Desai’s treatment of women characters and her comments about them also indicate that feminist analyses of gender, sexuality, subjectivity, and colonialism could amplify Bande’s analysis. Although Bande applies Karen Horney’s model of female development, she dismisses, as irrelevant, the insights of other unnamed feminist critics, and her bibliography omits any reference to the extensive feminist scholarship on these topics. Finally, Bande’s analysis was apparently very poorly copyedited; the frequent transposed letters, missing articles, grammatical errors, and stylistic infelicities diminish the power of this otherwise original and important study of the novels of Anita Desai.
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Source: Nancy L. Paxton, ‘‘The Novels of Anita Desai: A Study in Character and Conflict,’’ in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 1990.
Florence Libert In the following interview, Desai discusses her education, literary influences, and major themes in her works. [Libert]: Your father was Bengali and your mother was German. Where did you learn English? Was it spoken at home? [Desai]: No, I don’t think it was spoken at home. We spoke German and Hindi at home but when I went to school, I was taught English. You went to a missionary school, didn’t you? Yes, and English was the language I was taught first to read and write. It was my first written language. Have you tried to write in the other languages you speak? No, I haven’t. It’s remained my literary language. Why?
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I think it had a tremendous effect that the first thing you saw written and the first thing you ever read was English. It seemed to me the language of books. I just went on writing it because I always wanted to belong to this world of books. The books around me were in English and I wanted to have my own books amongst them and I always wrote in English even when I was a child. You started writing when you were very little, didn’t you? Yes, it became a habit.
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more and more by poetry, less by the prose I read. There was a time, say, when I was writing Fire on the Mountain, when the model I had before me was Japanese poetry really, because they seemed to be able to compress and to regain the essence of what they wanted to say in a way I wanted to do in prose. After that I began to read more modern poetry. Again a great deal of Russian poetry like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and later on Milosz, Brodsky, and now I find that if I want to hold up any model for my writing, it’s always poetry not prose.
I’ve read somewhere that you studied English literature at University. Did you only study the English literary tradition or did you also look at other literatures written in English?
But have you ever tried to write poetry?
No, at that time, Commonwealth literature was not even offered or was not even spoken of. It was a very traditional course in traditional British literature starting with Chaucer and Spenser and I think going no further than T.S. Eliot.
No.
Did you learn anything about any of the Indian literatures?
No, I don’t write poetry, no. Not even for yourself? What about playwriting? I don’t do any playwriting although I have written a screenplay recently. But that’s based on a book of mine; it’s the screenplay which is an adaptation of In Custody. We hope to film it this winter if everything moves ahead smoothly. And where is it going to be shot?
Nothing at all. Do you read literature written in any of India’s regional languages? Well, I read Hindi and the other languages I try and pick up in translation whenever I can, although that proves to be very discouraging because translations are often very poor. It’s rare to come across a good translation. Usually they are so discouraging that you don’t want to continue with them. I do read a bit of Hindi whenever I can find something. And Bengali? Did you ever speak Bengali at home? No, I didn’t. I read it in translations. What authors do you think have had the strongest influence on your writing? Different ones at different times. When I was very young and beginning to write seriously, I suppose the influences were Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence and Henry James. And then I broke free of this tradition of British literature in which I’d been reared and started reading widely in Russian literature and found myself overwhelmed by writers like Dostoievsky and Chekhov. There was a time of my life when I was certainly very influenced by Camus and I read The Stranger over and over again. And then I became influenced
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Was that your idea? No, I had known the director and the producer for a very long time, Merchant and Ivory, who filmed quite a lot in India and in England too. And for years they’ve been asking me to write a screenplay for them which I never did. But when I wrote In Custody, they felt this was the book they wanted to film. Now to move on to the status of Indian writing in English in India . . . You’ve stated that there is no literary tradition of Indian writing in English. Do you still hold this view?
No.
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In India, of course. It will be shot in India and the screenplay will be translated into Urdu. It’s going to be in Urdu with English subtitles.
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Well, I should say it’s a very new tradition. It’s even younger than this century. It was only in the ’30s and ’40s that Indian writers writing in English began to get any kind of reputation. Earlier there had been a few attempts. There were a few poets, chiefly, who wrote a bit in English but never made a reputation as English poets. And I should say our earliest writers to have made a reputation were people like R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao who only wrote in the ’30s and ’40s. So, it’s a very new, very young tradition. Do Indo-English women novelists have a wide audience in India?
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I don’t think they have a wide audience, they have a small, restricted one. What readership do you have in India? I find that I’m mostly read in Indian universities, if I’m read at all. Indians aren’t great readers, aren’t great bookbuyers. They always turn to music or to the visual arts for pleasure and entertainment rather than read. Even if we had great literary traditions, these were translated into oral traditions. At one time all literature was recited rather than read and that remains the tradition in India. It is still rather a strange act to buy a book and read it, an unusual thing to do. Are your novels studied at Indian universities? I believe that some of them are recommended texts. There are still very few universities which offer Commonwealth literature or Indian literature, in India. There’s just an occasional book that they might include. And how have your novels been received abroad? I think my reputation abroad has been very different because I’ve been one of the few Indian writers who have been published abroad so they take me as a representative of Indian literature in a way. In an interview with Atma Ram, you said that ‘‘the English language spoken and written in India has become an Indian language with about as much relation to English as Patois has to French.’’ Is this really so? Patois is unintelligible to a French speaker. Well, I would say that in the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s too when I began publishing, we were all still trying to write an official, formal English. And we were all perfectly aware that this was not the language spoken around us, that our models were still literary models. We were using English literary models for our own writings. And I don’t think it happened till the ’80s, till Salman Rushdie came along that Indian writers finally felt capable of using the spoken language, spoken English, the way it’s spoken on Indian streets by ordinary people. And using that as a written language, that’s a very new phenomenon. And it’s only in the last five years that a great many young Indian writers have started using that spoken language very freely and confidently. You don’t do that, do you?
And now if we could turn to the nature of your fiction. In most of your work the attention is focused on never more than a handful of individuals. Do you consciously set out to write novels and short stories with few characters in them? Well, when I write, my interest is always in the individual rather than in any mass movement. If I were writing about the political situation or even the social situation, I would want to include a great many more characters. But since my interest is the individual, a certain psychology of the individual, I’ve had very few characters in my books. What is your own view with regard to the social role of the writer? I think you can only be a social critic quite unconsciously. You have to be chiefly true to yourself, to your own vision. If you are that, if you are uncompromisingly telling the truth about yourself, about your characters and about society, then you become willy-nilly a social critic. But I don’t think a writer can set out to be a social critic. In countries which are afflicted by grave social, economic and political crises, writers often adopt the role of social critic. Does such a tradition exist in India? Well, this did come about at the turn of the century. Towards the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, there were writers in Bengal and also some Urdu writers in the north who took it upon themselves to write about society as they found it and to criticize all that they found wrong with it with a deliberate reformist ideal in mind. Writers like Tagore, Chatterjee, Priam Chand, they were all reformists and they were social figures just as much as they were writers. So, yes, there is a tradition. But this is not what you think you want to do, is it? Well, when I read their work, I find I can only take an interest in it if I become interested in the individual, if I see how these problems afflicted
I still don’t. Do you intend to?
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Well, various people have said that they’ve noted a change in my writing with In Custody and going on to Baumgartner’s Bombay. And I think in recent years my interest has become using dialogue to a much greater extent and once you do that, of course you have to reflect the dialogue which is actually spoken around you. Earlier my interest had been interior monologue really, the interior self.
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individuals. I suppose that as a fiction writer, that is what chiefly interests me. Why are the protagonists of most of your novels outsiders? Well, as I say, it’s really the solitary individual who’s interested me and therefore I tend to pick outsiders, somebody who is slightly outside society and therefore is able to observe society without being part of it and plays the role of the hermit, the solitary individual. Do you ever read literary criticism of your work? Well, I read the book reviews, the reviews that come out when the books are published because my publishers send them on to me and of course I’m interested in how they’ve received them. But I tend to avoid serious criticism. Why? For two reasons. One, I find it very disconcerting when I read any such thing or hear it, it seems to be about another person, about a work I don’t know at all. Because it’s looking at my work from a completely different angle. So, do you think your work has been misunderstood? Well, as I say, I don’t read it, so I’m not quite sure to what degree it has been understood or misunderstood. But I always find it a little worrying, so I avoid it. Apart from the study of the individual, do you think that there is a unifying thread which runs through all your work or parts of it? I suppose there are other interests certainly. It isn’t only an individual psychology that I’m pursuing when I write. I’m interested in language, in prose style, in aligning words to experiences and images. I suppose that is really at the heart of any writer’s work, trying to find a vocabulary that is in harmony with one’s experiences, with the images one has in one’s mind. And if we could now turn to Fire on the Mountain. Many critics have asserted that Nanda Kaul dies at the end of Fire on the Mountain and have seen in her death a fitting end to a story which is about the loss of illusions. It seems to me that the climax is rather ambiguous. Could you comment on this?
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Did you consciously do that? No, no. It seemed to me a very complete, very definite, very obvious ending with the shattering of Nanda Kaul’s illusions, with the total destruction of her illusions, it didn’t seem to me necessary to carry this onto a physical destruction. In fact, I would have considered that too melodramatic. I’d now like to ask you a few questions about some of the short stories which appear in Games at Twilight. I was left a little bemused at the end of ‘‘Surface Textures.’’ What did you mean to express when you showed the central character, who is lost in a world of surfaces, being revered as a ‘‘swami’’? Well the Guru figure is something that interests me quite a lot really. And I’m very much aware that there’s often a great discrepancy between a person’s philosophy as he expounds it and about his private life, and it’s this discrepancy that interests me, that engages me as a writer. And that is what I was writing about in the story ‘‘Surface Textures,’’ about a man who doesn’t set out to be a Guru, has no philosophy at all and yet turns into one because that is what people want of him. There is a scene which appears in two different stories: in both ‘‘Sale’’ and ‘‘Private Tuition by Mr. Bose,’’ at the end of a narrow passage, the protagonist sees his wife, her head bowed, her hair loose, wearing a red sari and kneading dough in the kitchen, with a child by her side. Was this a conscious repetition? In fact, there was a critic who once attacked me for a failure of imagination, for lacking in imagination in using the same image twice because I failed to find another. That wasn’t the intention at all. Including both of them in one collection of stories makes it so obvious to any reader that I had used the same image twice and I did it really deliberately because it seemed to me the most perfect, the most economical way of conveying the image of household, family, hearth and home that I wanted to convey in both stories. It seemed unnecessary to find another image because once you had the hearth, the mother and child, you had everything you wanted.
Well, it wasn’t my intention to kill Nanda Kaul at all. Looking back on it, I can see that I have written it in a way which leaves the ending rather ambiguous.
In ‘‘Studies in the Park,’’ there is a scene in which Suno’s perception of life is totally transformed by a vision; the vision of an infinitely beautiful, pale, young woman who seems to be dying, lying on a bench with her head resting on the lap of an old man. There is a certain ambiguity as to whether the woman is actually dying. What did you mean to convey through this scene?
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Well, that’s unnecessary, whether the woman is ill, whether she does die seems to me unnecessary. What is important in the story is the effect that the image has upon Suno. Why did Suno want to see this vision again, if it is so horrible? Because he leaves his own world, the one which has been created for him by his family, particularly by his father, the one of work, achievement, career. He decides to abandon all these and go in search of what he has only caught an image of and he has only a sense that it will lead him into darker, deeper realms occupied by death and the hereafter. And because it was such a beautiful image that he saw, he is willing to go further in search of it. You’ve only written one volume of short stories. Is the novel the genre you most feel at home with? Yes, it is. I prefer to work on a novel because it gives the time and space which I require. I need a lot of time to work slowly and think out a book carefully. Whereas a short story has to be worked at very fast, it’s like a poem, it has to be written with a kind of immediacy, it must be done at once. I do that occasionally but not very often. Well, to turn to your latest novel . . . In Baumgartner’s Bombay, the protagonist is a man. Why have you once again chosen to have a man as a central character when in most of the fiction that you’ve written so far, the protagonists have been women?
streets picking up scraps for his cats—that I began to imagine his past. And that gave me the key to open that German world. And I was able to use my mother’s memories of pre-war Germany and our own perception of the war far away from India simply as a set of rumours and news that came to us. I was able to incorporate that all into the book. There are quite a number of German words that you don’t translate. . . . Yes, I found those words were unnecessary to translate. For instance, the German nursery rhymes, they simply wouldn’t have sounded right in English. They seemed to hold their quality only as long as they were in German. Are you now working on another novel? No, I have been teaching these last two years and that has taken me quite far away from my writing life. But as from next year, I am going to be cutting down on teaching and I shall have more time for writing when I am back in India. Have you always written when you were in India? I wrote Baumgartner’s Bombay when I was in Cambridge. Do you find you write differently when you are in a different atmosphere? I should think I do. I feel a need now to go back to India and start writing about India again.
Well, I made that decision when I wrote In Custody really because I felt that as long as I wrote about women, and just had my chief characters as women leading traditional women’s lives in India, I was restricting myself to home and family. And if I wanted to walk out into the wider world and bring in history and experience and events and action I simply had to write about male characters. And I did that in In Custody and again I had to do it with Baumgartner’s Bombay. What has prompted you to write a novel about a German in Bombay? Well, you see, my mother was German. I grew up speaking German and I always wanted a way to include that German part of my upbringing, my experience, my work. Even through a male character? Yes. And I found it very difficult because it sounded so out of place in the Indian context. And it was when I saw this Austrian Jew in Bombay—I actually saw a man pottering around the
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Source: Florence Libert, ‘‘Interview with Anita Desai,’’ in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring 1990, pp. 47–55.
SOURCES Alcock, Peter, ‘‘Rope, Serpent, Fire: Recent Fiction of Anita Desai,’’ in Language and Literature in Multicultural Contexts, edited by Satendra Nandan, University of the South Pacific, 1983, p. 19. Bala, Suman, and D. K. Pabby, ‘‘Introduction: The Fiction of Anita Desai,’’ in The Fiction of Anita Desai, Vol. 1, edited by Suman Bala and D. K. Pabby, Khosla Publishing House, 2002, p. 2. Bande, Usha, The Novels of Anita Desai: A Study in Character and Conflict, Prestige Books, 1988, p. 173. Bhatnagar, Parvati, ‘‘The Short Stories of Anita Desai: A Study of ‘Games at Twilight,’ and ‘Diamond Dust,’’’ in The Fiction of Anita Desai, Vol. 2, edited by Suman Bala and D. K. Pabby, Khosla Publishing House, 2002, p. 196. Choudhury, Bidulata, Women and Society in the Novels of Anita Desai, Creative Books, 1995, pp. 42–43.
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Desai, Anita, Games at Twilight and Other Stories, Penguin, 1982.
Jena, Seema, Voice and Vision of Anita Desai, Ashish Publishing House, 1989, p. 10.
Lewis, Robin Jared, ‘‘Anita Desai: ‘Fire on the Mountain,’ and ‘Games at Twilight,’’’ in Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching, edited by Barbara Stoler Miller, M. E. Sharpe, 1994, pp. 155, 156. Parker, Michael, and Roger Starkey, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott, Michael Parker and Roger Starkey, eds., St. Martin’s Press, 1995, pp. 1–30. Salgado, Minoli, ‘‘Anita Desai,’’ in A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English, edited by Erin Fallon, et al., Greenwood Press, 2001, pp. 133–35. Sharma, R. S., Anita Desai, Indian Writers Series, Vol. 18, Arnold-Heinemann, 1981, pp. 149, 157–58. Sivanna, Indira, Anita Desai as an Artist: A Study in Image and Symbol, Creative Books, 1994, pp. 7–8. Sivaramkrishna, M., ‘‘From Alienation to Mythic Acceptance: The Ordeal of Consciousness in Anita Desai’s Fiction,’’ in Perspectives on Anita Desai, edited by Ramesh K. Srivastava, Vimal Prakashan Publishers, 1984, p. 17. Varady, Evelyn Damashek, ‘‘The West Views Anita Desai: American and British Criticisms of Games at Twilight and Other Stories,’’ in Perspectives on Anita Desai, edited by Ramesh K. Srivastava, Vimal Prakashan Publishers, 1984, pp. 195, 197, 200.
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Afzal-Khan uses the postcolonial theories of Frantz Fanon, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and others to understand how these novelists have attempted to break away from colonial constraints through the way they use the genre of the novel. She discusses the tension between myth and realism in Desai’s work.
Jain, Jasbir, Stairs to the Attic: The Novels of Anita Desai, Printwell Publishers, 1987, pp. 10, 112, 146.
Kumar, Shiv K., ‘‘Desai’s ‘Games at Twilight’: A View,’’ in Perspectives on Anita Desai, edited by Ramesh K. Srivastava, Vimal Prakashan Publishers, 1984, p. 203.
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Desai, Anita, The Village by the Sea: An Indian Family Story, Heinemann, 1982. Thirteen-year-old Lila and her twelve-year-old brother, Hari, help their rural family in hard times. Hari goes to work in Bombay, and Lila tries to keep house with few resources. Though it is a children’s story, Desai deals with Indian poverty. Ramanan, Mohan, and P. Sailaja, eds., English and the Indian Short Story: Essays in Criticism, Orient Longman, 2000. A collection of scholarly papers investigates the Indian diaspora and the impact of colonialism on the Indian short story. The volume includes discussion of well-known authors as well as issues such as feminism, translation, regional work, and dialect and English used together. Rushdie, Salman and Elizabeth West, eds., Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing: 1947–1997, Holt Paperbacks, 1997. This important anthology of fiction and nonfiction includes the most famous writers of the Indian literary renaissance and includes Rushdie, Anita and Kiran Desai, Gita Mehta, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Satyajit Ray, and others. It is arranged chronologically with Rushdie’s introduction explaining why the authors wrote in English.
Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, Cultural Imperialism and the IndoEnglish Novel: Genre and Ideology in R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway, Oxford University Press, 2008. One of Anita Desai’s models, Woolf inspired Desai with her inner portraits of sensitive and alienated people, using poetic language. This is a day in the life of middle-class London hostess Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party. A series of unexpected inner and outer revelations upsets her, including the arrival of a former lover from India.
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The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind RAY BRADBURY 1953
‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ is a short story by Ray Bradbury, first published in the magazine Epoch in 1953 and included in Bradbury’s short-story collection The Golden Apples of the Sun in 1953. This volume is currently available in a Harper Perennial edition published in 1997. Bradbury included ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, his 1980 collection of one hundred of his favorite short stories, which remains in print. The story is also available in Bradbury’s Classic Stories 1: From ‘‘The Golden Apples of the Sun’’ and ‘‘R Is for Rocket,’’ published by Spectra in 1990. ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ is a fantasy set in ancient or medieval China. It describes the escalating confrontation between two rival cities and how their rivalry proves destructive to both. The mandarins who rule the cities must seek another, more productive way of conducting their affairs. But how are they going to do it? The story is a highly imaginative one, rich in the kind of poetic, metaphorical language that Bradbury typically uses. Entertaining in itself, the story also has a deeper level of meaning, serving as an allegory of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated world politics during the 1950s and for decades beyond.
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known today. The Martian Chronicles, about the colonization of Mars, appeared in 1950, and it established his reputation as one of the leading science fiction writers. This book was followed by The Illustrated Man (1951), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), which contained ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind,’’ and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). The last is one of Bradbury’s most famous works, set in a dismal future in which a totalitarian government has banned all books. Other important works by Bradbury are the novels Dandelion Wine (1957), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), and Death Is a Lonely Business (1985) and the short-story collections A Medicine for Melancholy (1959), I Sing the Body Electric! (1960), The Machineries of Joy (1964), Long after Midnight (1976), The Toynbee Convector (1988), and Driving Blind (1997) .
Ray Bradbury (The Library of Congress)
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Bradbury is one of America’s best-known writers. A prolific author since the 1940s, Bradbury has written nearly six hundred science fiction and fantasy short stories, as well as several novels. He has also written realistic stories and novels, detective fiction, plays, screenplays, poetry, and essays. Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to Leonard and Esther Bradbury. His father was a telephone lineman. The family moved around when Bradbury was a child, living in Arizona for several years and then moving to Los Angeles, California, in 1934. Bradbury was a voracious reader and discovered the pleasures of science fiction in the pages of Amazing Stories when he was eight years old. He began writing his first stories when he was eleven. His first published story appeared just before he graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1938. After graduation, he had a job selling newspapers but gave that up in 1942, deciding to become a full-time writer. His poor eyesight meant that he was exempt from military service.
In 1973, Bradbury’s first collection of poetry, When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, was published, followed by Pillar of Fire and Other Plays (1975). The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury was published in 1982. Bradbury developed his own television series, Ray Bradbury Theater, which ran from 1986 to 1992. In this series he produced sixty-five adaptations of his short stories. Bradbury has won many awards, including the Benjamin Franklin Award (1954), the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement (1977), and the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America (1980). In November 2000, he was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
PLOT SUMMARY
Bradbury’s first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947. Two of his stories won O. Henry awards, and another story was selected for Best American Short Stories 1948. During the 1950s, Bradbury wrote many of the short stories and novels for his which he is best
‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ has no specific setting in time and place, but it is suggestive of ancient or medieval China. The story begins with the Mandarin questioning a messenger. In ancient China a mandarin was a bureaucrat. In this case, the Mandarin appears to be the man in charge of a city. He is distressed at the news brought by the messenger. The town of KwanSi, two miles away, is building a wall around their city, shaped like a pig. After the messenger leaves, the Mandarin talks about this news with his daughter, who at first does not understand why her father is upset. He explains that their
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Bradbury married Marguerite McClure in 1947. They remained married for fifty-six years, until her death in 2003. They raised four daughters together.
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own city is surrounded by a wall shaped like an orange, which means that the Kwan-Si pig will eat them.
advice. The rebuilding of walls goes on in a titfor-tat manner just as before, but the city continues to sink more deeply into crisis.
The Mandarin fears that their city is in for hard times. People will think that the city surrounded by the wall shaped like a pig is prosperous and lucky, and will go there instead. The daughter suggests that the Mandarin consult with his stonemasons and those who build temples so that a solution can be found.
Eventually, in desperation, the Mandarin of this city summons the mandarin from Kwan-Si for a meeting. Both mandarins are old and ill, and the daughter’s voice tells them that the current situation is intolerable and must end.
When the builders come, the daughter stands behind a screen, whispering to the Mandarin what he should say to them. When they hear the news about the wall being built around Kwan-Si, they are as upset as the Mandarin. Prompted by his daughter, the Mandarin tells the builders that they must change the shape of their city into a club with which to beat the pig. The men are happy to hear this and depart. The new wall is completed within a month. Shaped like a club as ordered, it is powerful enough to drive off not only pigs but any other threatening animal, even a lion. The Mandarin is happy. However, his happiness does not last long. The messenger arrives with the news that the town of Kwan-Si has now built its wall in the shape of a bonfire, which will soon destroy the other town’s club. The Mandarin is alarmed, thinking that everyone will prefer Kwan-Si and think it is much stronger than their own city. Kwan-Si will flourish while his own city declines. From behind a screen, his daughter whispers that he should instruct their builders to construct their walls in the shape of a lake. The water will put out the fire of Kwan-Si.
The two mandarins are taken outside and carried up a small hill. The daughter points out to the two mandarins the kites that are being flown by some children. She makes them see that a kite needs the wind in order to fully exist, and that the wind and the sky need colorful kites to create variety and beauty. The daughter then instructs the mandarin from Kwan-Si that he must rebuild his town so that it resembles the wind. In turn, her town, she says, will build so as to resemble a golden kite. The two towns will then be able to cooperate with each other, since each will supply what the other needs. The mandarins are happy and immediately recover some of their strength. They praise the wisdom of the daughter. In this way, the two towns emerge as the Town of the Golden Kite and the Town of the Silver Wind. Both flourish at all levels. All the inhabitants of both cities are aware of their new cooperative relationship, and the Mandarin of the first city is satisfied.
The people of the city rebuild their walls to resemble a lake, although it takes them some time to do it. However, then comes the news that Kwan-Si has rebuilt its walls in the shape of a mouth, and the mouth will be able to drink up their lake. The mutual reshaping of walls continues for some while. The Mandarin’s town builds its walls like a needle to sew up the mouth; KwanSi counters with a wall like a sword to break the needle. The threatened town responds with walls like a scabbard to sheath the sword, but Kwan-Si shapes its walls like lightning, ready to destroy the sheath. The Mandarin’s city goes into decline. People get sick and die. Even the Mandarin himself becomes ill, but his daughter still gives him
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CHARACTERS The Daughter The Mandarin’s daughter is the person who eventually comes up with the correct solution to the problem that is devastating the two cities. She appears to be very close to her father, and he relies on her absolutely for her advice. Unlike the Mandarin, she does not passively resign herself to defeat but seeks an active strategy for success. She shows great creativity and ingenuity in devising a plan, although at first the town of Kwan-Si has an answer to everything she and the Mandarin devise. Eventually, though, she transcends her own limited perspective and proposes a genuinely wise solution that will keep both towns happy. She thus becomes the voice of wisdom and saves the towns from themselves. Her
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wisdom is acknowledged by both mandarins, who sing her praises.
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
The Mandarin The Mandarin is an old man who is in charge of an unnamed city two miles away from Kwan-Si. It appears that the Mandarin has lived in the same town since he was a child. He is also referred to once as the Emperor. He appears to be a conscientious man who takes his responsibilities seriously and wants the best for his people. The news that Kwan-Si has built a wall resembling a pig makes him both sad and angry, but he appears to have no ideas of his own about how to deal with the problem. He just thinks that doom has come to the city and there is nothing he can do about it. He depends entirely on the ingenuity of his daughter. After a while, the perpetual rivalry and fear between the two towns takes its toll on his health, and he becomes very ill, but he recovers some of his strength as soon as a solution is found.
One of the most dangerous incidents during the cold war was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the United States came close to nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Read John F. Kennedy, a biography for young adults by Catherine Corley Anderson (Lerner Publishing Group, 2005), and create a PowerPoint timeline explaining how President Kennedy handled the thirteen days of the situation and how war was averted.
With several other students, create a dramatic performance of ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind.’’ One student should be the narrator, while the others take the parts of the characters. Give a performance to your class and lead a discussion afterward about what the story means.
Read ‘‘The Flying Machine,’’ another Bradbury story in the collection The Golden Apples of the Sun, also set in ancient China. Write a short essay in which you compare and contrast ‘‘The Flying Machine’’ with ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind.’’ Do the stories have any theme in common? Which is the more powerful story, and why?
The cold war is over now, but the world is still mired in conflict. Research one recent international problem or conflict. Let your imagination flow freely and write a fantasy story that includes at least one character from both sides. Show how the two conflicting groups can move beyond conflict to cooperation.
The Mandarin Kwan-Si The mandarin Kwan-Si is the man in charge of the town of Kwan-Si. So important is he, it would appear, that his own name is also that of the city over which he presides. The mandarin is old and sick, and it is strongly implied that he, like the mandarin of the first town, has been weakened by the constant conflict between the two towns. When he meets the first mandarin, he readily agrees that the situation is intolerable and must be changed.
The Messenger The messenger appears twice, bringing news of the building of the town walls at Kwan-Si to the Mandarin.
THEMES Conflict The story presents two different models for relationships between human communities. They can choose conflict or cooperation. At first the unnamed city of the Mandarin and the growing city of Kwan-Si choose the conflict model. Each city feels threatened by the other. For example, the people in the first city think that the wall shaped like a pig will allow Kwan-Si to devour their city, which has walls shaped like an orange. Therefore,
the first city elects to counter the pig by building a wall shaped like a big stick. Kwan-Si soon develops a strategy to counter this, which in turn is countered by the first city, and so the conflict goes on and on, escalating all the time. The conflict model—the idea that these two cities must necessarily have opposing interests—proves to be disastrous. The cities keep trying to outwit each other, but their triumphs are always short-lived.
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Traditional Chinese artistic pattern of kites flying (Image copyright John Lock, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
The other side always has an answer and a fresh challenge. The result is that neither city flourishes. In the first city, for example, all the attention given to building a wall takes valuable resources away from business and agriculture. The people therefore get poorer. The longer the rivalry between the cities continues, the worse the situation becomes: Sickness spread in the city like a pack of evil dogs. Shops closed. The population, working now steadily for endless months upon the changing of the walls, resembled Death himself, clattering his white bones like musical instruments in the wind.
In other words, all the city’s resources are being poured into its futile attempt to defend itself against a perceived threat. The result is the opposite of what is intended. Instead of preserving itself and flourishing, ‘‘the city [grinds] to a halt.’’ Everything that is really important for people’s welfare, in terms of the quality of their
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lives, is being neglected. The same thing happens in Kwan-Si, as the Mandarin of that city admits when the two mandarins meet. The fact that the Mandarin Kwan-Si is very ill and is carried into the meeting by ‘‘four starving footmen’’ is ample indication that Kwan-Si is suffering from the perpetual conflict just as much as the first city. Finally, the two cities agree to try a different kind of relationship. They switch from a conflict model to a cooperative model in which both sides can flourish. They recognize that their cities can in fact nourish each other by supplying what the other needs. They do not have to operate on a system that rewards the one only by punishing the other, since this system has proved to be a failure for both sides. As a result of changing the way they think and act, the two cities flourish as never before. The harvests improve, their economies get stronger, and the people recover their health. The ingenuity that before went into
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stoking their perpetual conflict now is used to enhance the welfare of both cities.
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STYLE Allegory
Wisdom The two cities are ruled by men, but the conflict between them is finally ended by the wisdom of a woman. This woman is the daughter of the Mandarin, to whom he always looks for advice. At the beginning of the story, when the Mandarin first consults her, she stays calm while he gives vent to his emotions. Then it is the daughter who devises a strategy to combat Kwan-Si’s pig-shaped wall. The Mandarin is so dependent on his daughter that she even has to stand behind him, concealed by a screen, and supply him with the words he needs to say to his architects and builders. She is, quite literally, the power behind the throne, and she is also self-effacing, wanting no credit for herself. When the Mandarin turns around to thank her, she is gone. When the situation has become completely intolerable, it is the daughter who insists that Mandarin Kwan-Si be summoned. It would seem that no one has thought before of bringing the two leaders together for talks. The daughter then at last devises a strategy to end the conflict, and she explains it carefully to both mandarins as if she is speaking to two children. Then she assumes the voice of authority and tells the mandarins what they are to do. Wisdom has finally broken through, although it has taken even the daughter quite a while to find the correct solution. However, it is clear that she is the only one who could do it; she is the only character with any ingenuity or the capacity to think ‘‘outside the box,’’ to envision doing something differently from the way it has been done before. It is ironic that when the men praise her, they try to make her into a male figure, calling her a ‘‘boy, a man, a stone pillar, a warrior, and a true and unforgettable son.’’ This rather ignores the fact that the men in this story behave with a kind of uniform stupidity and do not have a worthwhile idea between them. It is the woman who eventually saves them from themselves.
The story may be interpreted as a political allegory. An allegory is a narrative in which characters, objects, or events represent something independent of the actual story told. As William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard state in A Handbook to Literature, ‘‘Allegory attempts to evoke a dual interest, one in the events, characters, and setting presented, and the other in the ideas they are intended to convey or the significance they bear.’’ This story may be read as an allegory of the cold war that dominated global politics from the late 1940s to the end of the 1980s. The cold war pitted the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, against each other. The Soviet Union had been a U.S. ally during World War II, but its communist ideology, its postwar control over most of Eastern Europe, and its desire to further spread its influence beyond its borders brought it into conflict with the democratic, capitalistic West. The conflict was called the cold war because there was no actual fighting directly between the United States and the Soviet Union, although they did take sides in numerous regional conflicts. One characteristic of the cold war was the nuclear arms race. The United States had developed the atomic bomb during World War II, and it dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. These bombings brought the war to a speedy end. For a few years, the United States was the only nation that possessed a nuclear weapon, but the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949. This led directly to the arms race. In response to the Soviet acquisition of the atom bomb, the United States developed the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, testing the first such bomb in 1952. The Soviets followed, testing a hydrogen bomb less than ten months later, in 1953. Throughout the 1950s, the arms race continued.
Because she is something of a mysterious presence, her voice emerging as a whisper ‘‘like a snowflake’’ from behind a screen, the daughter might be thought of symbolically as the creative aspect of the mind, the inner zone from which ideas emerge. Sometimes this creative voice is strong, sometimes it is faint; sometimes the ideas are good, sometimes they are not. Without it, though, nothing new can emerge.
The two superpowers in the cold war thus resemble the two cities in the story. When KwanSi builds a wall, the first city feels threatened by it. The inhabitants believe they could be destroyed by the pig-shaped wall, so the first city tries to counter what it sees as an aggressive move by the other city. The rivalry and fear continue to escalate in a series of tit-for-tat measures, just as it did in the 1950s during the cold war. In the cold war, each side felt threatened by the other and felt the
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need to respond by developing more and more powerful weaponry in an attempt to gain the advantage. Each nation had the capacity to destroy the other. Each nation feared that the other might strike first, crippling its own ability to respond. The dominating factor was fear. In this way, ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ has a level of meaning beyond the surface events of the story. Although it is set in ancient China and consists of a rather fantastic plot involving the shaping of city walls, the allegorical level of meaning gives it a particular relevance for the 1950s, when the story was published. The story might also be thought of as a fable. A fable is a form of allegory, usually a short story in which animals talk as if they were human, but a fable can also feature human characters. The main point of a fable is that it is has a clear moral, often but not always stated in a maxim at the end. The implied moral of this story is that it is better to cooperate than to fight.
Setting and Symbolism Although the setting is not stated explicitly, the story seems to be set in ancient or medieval China. The setting can be deduced from the Chinese-sounding name of one of the cities, Kwan-Si, and the fact that the rulers of the cities are called mandarins. The period in which the story is set can be deduced from the fact that there is no modern technology in the society depicted. The building of the city walls involves huge amounts of manual labor. The Mandarin says his builders ‘‘must go bearing trowels and rocks’’ in order to construct a new wall, and it appears that all the inhabitants of the city contribute to this effort: ‘‘Everyone carried stone to the walls.’’ Moreover, the city celebrates the new wall with fireworks, which are believed to have been invented in twelfth-century China, during the Song Dynasty, although it is unnecessary to try to date the story with this degree of specificity. The ancient setting is important because it makes the symbolism of the story more believable. Setting and symbolism work together. To make the story work, the author needed to set it in a culture with a prescientific view of the world. Ancient cultures, including but not limited to China, took a more magical and superstitious view of the world than people do today. This is conveyed in the following passage: Life was full of symbols and omens. Demons lurked everywhere, Death swam in the wetness
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of an eye, the turn of a gull’s wing meant rain, a fan held so, the tilt of a roof, and, yes, even a city wall was of immense importance.
In a culture such as this, symbols become reality. The city that because of the shape of its wall looks more powerful and prosperous will attract more people to it and will flourish while the other city declines. While in the story this is presented as a matter of life and death (which suggests that the shapes of the walls might be symbolically interpreted as representing deadly weaponry), at another level of interpretation, perhaps the attitude of the inhabitants of these cities is not so different from two rival cities today trying to enhance their image to get a better share of the tourist trade.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Cold War Even before World War II ended in 1945, the world divided into two power blocs, East and West. The United States and its Western European allies believed that the communist Soviet Union was an aggressive power that would seek to expand its influence throughout the globe. In 1946, George Kennan, who was then the American charge´ d’affaires in Moscow, wrote a dispatch about the intentions of the Soviet Union that was to have a profound influence on President Harry Truman and other U.S. policy makers. Kennan wrote that the Soviet Union was a serious threat to the United States (quoted in Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948, by Robert J. Donovan): [The Soviet Union is] committed fanatically to the belief that with the US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.
According to Donovan, by the end of 1946, the image of the Soviet Union as ‘‘powerful, ruthless and deceitful’’ was fixed in the minds of U.S. policy makers. The stage was set for the emergence of the cold war, in which U.S. policy was the ‘‘containment’’ of the Soviet Union. Whenever the Soviets appeared to be exploiting regional conflict or instability for their own gain, the United States tried to counter what it perceived as a threat.
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1950s: The cold war dominates global politics. Because both sides possess large arsenals of nuclear weapons, any future world war could involve the deaths of millions of people. There is however, a growing understanding that a nuclear war is unwinnable and should never be fought. Today: Threats to world peace include international terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons by rogue nations. The United States seeks to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, arguing that this would pose a grave threat to stability in the Middle East, especially to Israel, a close U.S. ally. 1950s: During the McCarthy era, named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, fear of communist infiltration results in some Hollywood writers suspected of having communist sympathies being blacklisted (prohibited from working in the filmmaking industry). Bradbury addresses issues of censorship in his novel Fahrenheit 451, which is published in 1953.
percent of all challenges are unreported, so the actual figure is much higher. Books are often challenged by parents wanting to protect their children from issues related to sex, profanity, religion, and racism.
1950s: The United Nations (UN), established in 1945, attempts to act as a world peacekeeping body. However, it does not always succeed in its aims. In 1956, the Soviet Union invades Hungary, and the UN Security Council calls on the Soviets to withdraw. However, the resolution is vetoed by the Soviet Union. The fact that the great powers, specifically the United States, Soviet Union, and Communist China, can veto Security Council resolutions restricts the effectiveness of the United Nations.
Today: Censorship is an issue in many public libraries. According to the American Library Association, 520 challenges to library books were reported in 2008, although about 75
Today: United Nations forces are deployed in many peacekeeping missions around the world. UN missions help build institutions of government, human rights monitoring, the disarmament and reintegration of former soldiers, and many other tasks. Countries in which UN operations are deployed in 2009 include Chad, Sudan, Liberia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Cyprus, Kosovo, and Lebanon.
One of the most alarming features of the cold war was the nuclear arms race, which began in earnest when the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949. By 1953, both the superpowers possessed the much more powerful hydrogen bombs. In 1954, the United States launched its first nuclear-powered submarine. In that same year, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that the U.S. would be prepared to use nuclear weapons in retaliatory strikes against Soviet aggression. During this decade, both superpowers also developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that could fire nuclear weapons to any part of the globe. This meant that no American or Soviet city was safe from nuclear attack by the other side. Europe
was not safe either, since, divided between East and West as it was, it would certainly be a major battlefield in any future world war. As a consequence of these huge and deadly arsenals, everyone in the world had to face the possibility that should World War III break out, human civilization would be destroyed. Although during the 1950s there was talk of ‘‘peaceful coexistence’’ between the two superpowers, this had little effect on the escalating arms race. In the late 1950s, the United States feared it was falling behind in the arms race. This was referred to at the time as the ‘‘missile gap’’ between the United States and the Soviet Union. This socalled gap later turned out to be false, but it was an important factor in the 1960 presidential
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Traditional Asian painting depicting kite flying (Image copyright WizData, Inc., 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
election in which John F. Kennedy was elected president. Kennedy claimed in the campaign that the Soviet Union would soon possess nuclear superiority and that the United States should therefore increase its own stockpile of nuclear weapons. One of the few factors that created some political stability during this time was that the certainty of massive retaliation by the other side in the event of a nuclear attack was a deterrent to using such weapons. This deterrent effect became known as mutual assured destruction (MAD). One of the consequences of MAD was that the superpowers did try to manage their potentially deadly rivalry without recourse to open warfare. This does not mean, however, that the use of nuclear weapons was not contemplated or advised in situations of crisis during the 1950s. Two relevant cases were the crises in the Taiwan Straits in 1954–1955 and 1958–1959, in which the communist forces that controlled the Chinese mainland confronted Chinese nationalist forces that ruled Taiwan in a dispute over
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islands in the Taiwan Straits. In 1955, Secretary of State Dulles said that the United States was considering using atomic weapons against communist China. In the second Taiwan Straits crisis, in 1958, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff asked President Dwight Eisenhower to give the Seventh Fleet Commander authority to order nuclear strikes against China. Eisenhower, who was warned by the Soviet Union that it would come to China’s aid in the event of a nuclear attack, refused to give permission. In another crisis, when Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 during the crisis over the Suez Canal, the Soviet Union threatened rocket attacks on those three countries. The Western powers at the time considered these threats a bluff, and historians tend to agree with them. Soviet prime minister Nikita Khrushchev, who was in office from 1953 to 1964, often used brinkmanship (attempting to get the other side to back down by bluffing) to try to win concessions from the United States, but he also wanted to avoid war at all costs.
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CRITICAL OVERVIEW The Golden Apples of the Sun, the short-story collection in which ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ appeared, received positive reviews when first published in 1953. The book, which includes science fiction, fantasy, and realistic stories, is regarded as one of Bradbury’s strongest shortstory collections, and it has rarely been out of print in the nearly sixty years since it was first published. When the book was reprinted by Subterranean Press in 2008, a Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that it ‘‘remains vivid and memorable.’’ Because of the success of this and other short-story collections, during the 1950s Bradbury possessed, according to Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Toupence in Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, ‘‘undisputed credentials as a master of the short story.’’ ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ was not a story that reviewers singled out for comment, however, although with its rich, poetic, metaphorical language and fantastic premise, the story has an unmistakable Bradbury stamp to it. One exception to the reviewers’ silence about this story was Deborah J. Brannon, who reviewed the Subterranean Press reprint for Green Man Review. She comments that although some of the stories are now dated, several of them reveal ‘‘slow wonder and the engrossing intricacies of the inner life.’’ One such story was ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind,’’ which Brannon describes as ‘‘a lovely fairy tale and exhortation for cooperation.’’
CRITICISM Bryan Aubrey Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. In this essay, he discusses ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ as an allegory of the cold war. There can be few readers of ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind,’’ especially those who note the date of the story’s first publication, who have not viewed it an allegory of the cold war, with the deadly rivalry between the cities regarding the shape of their walls being a metaphorical presentation of the nuclear arms race. However, in an interview with Steven L. Aggelis in 2002, in which Aggelis asked whether ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ and ‘‘The Meadow,’’ another story that appears in the same shortstory collection, were intended as ‘‘pro United
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BRADBURY’S REMARKABLE STORY, WRITTEN OVER FIFTY YEARS AGO, NOT ONLY PROVIDES AN ALLEGORY FOR THE DANGEROUS AND FUTILE ARMS RACE AND COLD WAR OF THE 1950S BUT ALSO SUGGESTS A WAY BEYOND THEM.’’
Nations pieces,’’ Bradbury denied that he had any political theme in mind. Be that as it may, ‘‘The Meadow,’’ first published just two years after the end of World War II, the founding of the United Nations, and the birth of the atomic age, undoubtedly has some thematic links to ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind.’’‘‘The Meadow’’ opens with a description of many of the great cities of the world destroyed and lying in ruins. The reader immediately thinks of the aftermath of nuclear war, but it is quickly revealed that the destruction is not of real cities but of Hollywood movie sets. Smith, an old night watchman, is then shown trying to nail the sets back up again. For him, the sets are more real than the actual world he reads about, in which there are always wars. In the world of the sets, which depict many cities and nations, there is peace. Everything is so crowded together, and so intertwined, there is no room for conflict, ‘‘because you got Boston joined to Trinidad . . . part of Trinidad poking out of Lisbon, part of Lisbon leaning on Alexandria, Alexandria tacked onto Shanghai,’’ and so on. In his eyes, pulling the sets down is an act of war. He thinks of himself as the last builder, while everyone else is part of the wrecking crew, and he manages to convince a movie producer to let the sets stand. The producer realizes he has the ‘‘World Federation’’ in his own backyard and he never realized it: ‘‘all the cities and countries here, leaning on and holding each other up.’’ The movie sets are thus metaphors for the nations of the world that are so interdependent that they are compelled to live at peace with one another. To bring one down, say by fire, would mean that they would all collapse. Bradbury traced this story to his early teenage years when he would go to the movie studios and watch as they built and then destroyed the
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
Fahrenheit 451 is one of Bradbury’s bestknown works. The science-fiction novel was published in 1953, the same year as ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind.’’ It is set in the future, in a society in which firemen do not put out fires but start them in order to burn books. In this society, mindless conformity rules, and fireman Guy Montag is ordered to burn his secret collection of books. Montag flees and joins up with a band of men who memorize the contents of books, trying to keep literature and ideas alive.
On The Beach, a celebrated novel by Nevil Shute, first published in 1957, is set in Australia in the aftermath of a nuclear war. A radioactive cloud is spreading south, killing everything in its path. An American submarine captain and the local inhabitants live out their last days, knowing that death will come soon. There is no escape. When first published, the novel gave expression to the fears people had in the 1950s of the terrible consequences of nuclear war. The novel was reprinted in a Vintage Classic edition in 2009.
First published in 1950 and available in a 1991 edition published by Spectra, I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov, is a collection of nine interlinked short stories by one of the masters of science fiction. The stories are all about robots, including the history of robots, their interactions with humans and the laws that govern their behavior. A mixture of scientific fact and fiction, the stories are considered classics of the genre.
sets. He acknowledged in the interview with Aggelis that in ‘‘The Meadow’’ the sets were ‘‘metaphorically representative of the world,’’ but the story ‘‘wasn’t about politics at all.’’ This comment surely suggests a general truth about any creative artist: the writer may not always be fully aware, at the conscious level, of what he or she is producing but is able nonetheless to tap
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The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology (2000), edited by Edward L. Ferman and Gordon Van Gelder, is a collection of the best stories from fifty years of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was founded in 1949 and was an early outlet for some of Bradbury’s stories. Award-winning authors represented in this anthology include Bruce Sterling, John Crowley, Maureen F. McHugh, Elizabeth Hand, Gene Wolfe, Bruce Holland Rogers, Harlan Ellison, Paul Di Filippo, and Ursula Le Guin. Bradbury is represented by his ghost story ‘‘Another Fine Mess.’’ My Soul to Keep (1998), by African American fantasy writer Tananarive Due, is a novel suitable for a young-adult readership. The settled lives of an African American family are disturbed by supernatural events and the surfacing of memories from the distant past. A wife learns the startling truth about her husband—that he is an immortal being who is five hundred years old, and he offers his wife the same gift of immortality if she will choose to accept it. Enchantress from the Stars (2003), a sciencefiction fantasy young-adult novel by Sylvia Engdahl, has been highly praised by readers, reviewers, and such famous names in the genre as Madeleine L’Engle and Ursula LeGuin. It is a Newbery Honor book. The story features Elana, who belongs to an interstellar civilization, going on a mission to another planet to forestall an invasion.
into the collective consciousness of the society, articulate its concerns and—in this case—give it a vision of what direction it might take to serve the general good. There would be no denying, for example, the thematic similarities between ‘‘The Meadow’’ and ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ that are political in nature. They both end with a vision of societal cooperation rather
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than conflict, of peace rather than war. In ‘‘The Meadow,’’ Smith, the night watchman—his name, because it is such a common one, makes him a kind of Everyman figure—shows the man in authority an alternative to destruction. Similarly, the Mandarin’s daughter in ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ also shows those in authority a better way than perpetual conflict. In terms of the cold war allegory, Smith and the daughter show the way beyond mutual assured destruction, the phrase that expressed the inevitable consequences of nuclear war between the superpowers during the cold war. Bradbury may not have thought of ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ in political terms, but most readers likely will. It is a prescient story in so many ways. Not only does it comment on the global politics of the 1950s, it looks well beyond that and anticipates some of the developments that took place in the decades from the 1950s to the 1980s, when the cold war finally ended. In its highly poetic, metaphorical way, the story expresses a utopian, idealistic vision of what human society might become. That utopian vision is the opposite of the reality that the two cities create for themselves at the beginning of the story. They manage to get locked into a self-perpetuating destructive standoff that is the equivalent of what is sometimes referred to as a zero-sum game. This term is derived from game theory and has been also used in the analysis of economics and politics. Basically, a zero-sum game is one in which, if one entity wins, the other must lose. Two people fighting to a finish, for example, are involved in a zero-sum game: one person is going to knock the other one out, and there can be only one winner. More precisely, in economics, zero-sum means that if one country makes economic gains, those gains will be exactly balanced by another nation’s losses. The same analysis could be applied to global politics. If, for example, the United States should gain some political advantage as a result of some crisis somewhere, that means, according to zero-sum game, that another country must sustain an equivalent disadvantage. So it is with those two fictional Chinese cities: If one is up, the other must be down, and that is the model on which the leaders base their decisions. Of course, this means that their happiness and security depend entirely on whether they are ‘‘up’’ or ‘‘down’’ at any particular moment, and they do whatever they have to do to secure their own advantage.
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In war, whether cold war or ‘‘hot’’ war, it often proves useful to demonize the enemy, and this is exactly what the first mandarin does regarding Kwan-Si. He calls it a ‘‘vile city’’ and rejoices at the thought of the misery its inhabitants will experience when his city’s big stick drives Kwan-Si’s devouring pig away: ‘‘I would like to see the Mandarin of Kwan-Si when the news is learned. Such pandemonium and hysteria; he will likely throw himself from a mountain!’’ Demonizing the enemy has other advantages for rulers; if a leader can do it effectively, the people will obey because they are scared, which is exactly what happens in the story. The people slavishly do what their leaders tell them they must, even though, metaphorically speaking, those same revered rulers are leading them over a cliff. It is not difficult to find an equivalent to this in the cold war allegory. In the 1950s and beyond, Americans were taught to despise the communist Soviet Union as a godless society; communism, after all, is an atheistic ideology. Since many people in America, then as now, tended to identify very strongly with their religious faith and their belief that the United States was a Christian nation, it was easy for them to view the Soviet Union not only as a military threat to their existence but a mortal threat also to their most cherished beliefs and values: a godless, anti-Christian foe that should be vigorously opposed by all rightthinking people. Indeed, several decades later in 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan took a leaf out of the mandarin’s playbook when he famously referred to the Soviet Union as an ‘‘evil empire,’’ which meant that it was easy to justify pointing thousands of nuclear weapons in its direction, with a lot more promised for the future. After all, if the enemy is ‘‘evil,’’ why would a leader not act in this way? It would surely be the leader’s duty to do so. Duty is something the two mandarins in the story no doubt think they know a lot about. It is their duty, they must surely believe, to defend their cities against the evil enemy. In their determination to do so, they keep upping the ante, increasing the risk and the scale of their battle to the death. Eventually, they begin in effect to hurl the cosmos at each other. When Kwan-Si’s wall resembles a sun, the other city builds a moon to eclipse it. The battle has gone, metaphorically speaking, beyond terrestrial borders into outer space. In terms of the cold war allegory, a parallel can be drawn to developments in the 1980s. In a scenario that might almost have been taken
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directly from the story, the Reagan administration planned its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as Star Wars, which was to act as a space-based missile shield that would be able to destroy incoming Soviet nuclear missiles before they reached their target. (Because of the technical difficulties it presented, SDI was never fully developed or implemented.) Finally, in ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind,’’ the two mandarins get together for a summit meeting. In 1953, when the story was first published, there had been no cold war summit meeting between the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union. The first one, which included the leaders of Great Britain and France, took place in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1955. Another summit meeting was held in Paris, France, five years later, but unfortunately, unlike in the story, there was no voice of wisdom floating out from behind a silken screen to guide the superpowers to a better understanding. In an atmosphere soured by the shooting down two weeks earlier of a U.S. spy plane over the Soviet Union, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev walked out of the meeting after U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower refused to apologize for the incident. Although the Paris summit of 1960 failed, summit meetings between the leaders of the two superpowers continued to be a feature of global politics from the 1960s to the 1980s. Such meetings were considered to be useful tools for managing the cold war, which alternated between periods of mutual accommodation known as de´tente (from 1963 to 1975) followed by renewed periods of confrontation (1975–1985). In 1986, when there were hints that the cold war might be thawing just a little following the coming to power in 1985 of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, there was a dramatic summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, between Gorbachev and Reagan. It was almost, but not quite, the equivalent of the moment in the story when the voice behind the screen whispers, ‘‘Let us put an end to this.’’ This is the moment when the two mandarins, inspired by the voice of the daughter, realize two things: first, that the conflict they believed to be a zero-sum game (either ‘‘we win, you lose,’’ or ‘‘we lose, you win’’) is in fact a version of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD, a conflict in which both sides end up as losers. MAD was the doctrine that characterized the cold war and might be thought of as a ‘‘we lose, you lose’’ situation. Such a situation, the mandarins realize, has to be changed. Much the same mentality entered into
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the negotiations at Reykjavik, which James E. Goodby, in ‘‘Looking Back: The 1986 Reykjavik Summit,’’ describes as ‘‘the most remarkable summit ever held between U.S. and Soviet leaders,’’ in which the two leaders ‘‘seriously discussed the elimination of all ballistic missiles held by their two countries and aired the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons.’’ The Reykjavik summit ended in failure because Gorbachev insisted that the United States terminate the Star Wars program, and Reagan refused. However, much of what was discussed and agreed upon at Reykjavik entered into a historic arms agreement that was signed at the next Reagan-Gorbachev summit, held in Washington, DC, in 1987. This agreement was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which was the first arms control agreement to reduce nuclear arms. Under the INF, the Soviet Union destroyed 1,846 missile systems, and the United States destroyed 846. By 1989, the cold war had ended, and the relationship between the superpowers was showing signs of moving beyond the zero-sum game into something more remarkable and mutually productive. This shift was captured in a remark made in 1988 by Georgi Arbatov, senior policy adviser to the Soviet leadership, and quoted by Strobe Talbott in his article, ‘‘East-West No More Mr. Tough Guy’’: ‘‘We are going to do something terrible to you—we are going to deprive you of an enemy.’’ This statement, so astonishing and so welcome to those who had lived through the insecurity and the fear generated by the forty-year cold war, might have come from the mouths of one of the mandarins at the end of ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind.’’ In depriving their respective cities of an enemy, they move beyond zero sum to what is sometimes called nonzero sum but is perhaps more clearly described as a win-win situation. Bradbury’s remarkable story, written over fifty years ago, not only provides an allegory for the dangerous and futile arms race and cold war of the 1950s but also suggests a way beyond them. In 1989, when Gorbachev declared that the Soviet Union wished to join with the United States to construct a world free from the ‘‘psychological and ideological struggles’’ of the past, the new administration of George H. W. Bush took him at his word. In those heady days after the cold war was formally declared to be over and a new era in global politics was about to dawn, almost anything seemed within the realm of the possible. You could almost hear ‘‘the good clear wind’’ of the Town of the Silver Wind and ‘‘the
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Kite flying (Image copyright Graeme Dawes, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
kite singing, whispering, rising’’ from the Town of the Golden Kite. Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Ryan E. Smith In the following interview, Bradbury discusses technological advances, why he never learned to drive, and his greatest love: writing. Before George Lucas took wishful stargazers to a galaxy far, far away . . . Before Buzz Lightyear urged youthful daydreamers to infinity and beyond . . . Before all of them, there was Ray Bradbury. Now a titan of the science fiction world, Bradbury made his reputation in the 1950s as the author of futuristic tales that blended social commentary with literary flourishes. He took us on rocket ships to colonize another world in The Martian Chronicles and warned of a future where firemen burn books and spurn the written word in Fahrenheit 451.
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Over the years, Bradbury has turned his imagination to a host of other topics and genres, writing more than 30 books, nearly 600 short stories, and all sorts of poems, essays, and plays. And he’s not done yet. Though he suffered a stroke in 1999, the 88year-old is still bursting with passion—for life, for the future, and especially for writing. He continues to work with the help of a daughter who takes dictation over the phone, and his newest collection of short stories, We’ll Always Have Paris, was published earlier this month. Bradbury, who lives in Los Angeles, recently took some time to speak with The Blade by phone about the new book, technological advances, why he never learned to drive, and the greatest love of his life—writing. Q: How much are you writing these days? A: Every single day of my life, for 70 years. Q: What is the process like? A: Just like it always was: In the middle of the night, a metaphor jumps around in my head. I wake up and write the metaphor on the back
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THERE’S A SIMPLE RULE TO FOLLOW I GIVE TO EVERY YOUNG WRITER: WRITE WHAT YOU LOVE AND LOVE WHAT YOU WRITE. EVERYTHING I’VE DONE IS SOMETHING I LOVE DOING.’’
of my hand . . . When I wake up in the morning, I look at that metaphor and I run to the typewriter. . . . Q: You mentioned that it’s important to write impulsively in the introduction of your new book. Why is that? A: It’s got to be that way. You mustn’t think about what you do. Just do it. That’s a good Zen rule. Don’t try to do something; do something. Q: You have tried to avoid the title of ‘‘science fiction writer’’ in favor of ‘‘teller of tales’’ and I was wondering why that is. A: I’ve never been a writer of science fiction. I write fantasy ideas. I was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, and he was not a science fiction writer. He was a fantasy writer. Q: What is the distinction between the two? A: Well, science fiction has to do with changing ideas in machinery and chemistry and things like that. Q: You grew up reading science fiction as a youth and became a famous person in the genre . . . A: I fell in love with H.G. Wells. I read The Invisible Man. I saw the film and I wanted to be H.G. Wells. I read Jules Verne. I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Jules Verne affected me. And so that was very important. I read Edgar Rice Burroughs, all of his Martian books, and when I was 12 years old I couldn’t afford to buy the Martian books of Edgar Rice Burroughs so I wrote the sequel myself. My very first book when I was 12 was a Martian book, a sequel to a book by Edgar Rice Burroughs. How about that? Q: I’ve heard that you don’t read modern science fiction. Why is that? A: No, I don’t want to . . . I don’t have the time. I haven’t read science fiction in many years. Q: Who do you read now?
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A: I re-read [George] Bernard Shaw, the plays of Bernard Shaw, the essays of Bernard Shaw, the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald—The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. He’s one of my favorite writers. Q: You have dreamed up all sorts of technology for your stories, but you seem to have a big ambivalence to using it all in real life. You never used computers or learned to drive a car. Can you talk a little bit about that? A: Well, I didn’t learn to drive a car because writers never have any money. . . . I was married 10 years before my wife and I bought a car and she learned to drive. I didn’t want to learn to drive because I was afraid I’d be a maniac. Men are lousy drivers. Women are the best drivers, so I never wanted to be a driver. Q: What about technology in general? Do you embrace it much today? A: There’s too much Internet stuff. It’s dominated too much of our life. We should eliminate that. And computers are a bore. I have three typewriters. I’d rather use a good typewriter than a computer. Q: So how do you feel about technological advances? Do you think that they’ve really advanced us? A: Well, there’s a hell of a lot of it, of course. They’ve got hundreds of new inventions there to fill your life up with junk. You’ve got to be careful not to fill your life up with junk. Simplify your life. Q: So many of your stories, including in your new book, leave the reader feeling very uneasy. Do you think of yourself as a pessimist or an optimist? A: I’m an absolute optimist. I was on the Walter Cronkite show the night we landed on the moon. I predicted the future. We’re going to populate the moon, we’re going to go to Mars, we’re going to populate Mars, and then we’re going to go off to the [star system] Alpha Centauri to live forever. I’m an optimist about our future. Q: Are you equally optimistic about human nature? A: Listen, we’ve always done well, haven’t we? We have people like President Reagan who said, ‘‘Tear down the wall.’’ That’s optimistic, isn’t it? And it worked, didn’t it? He destroyed the wall. He destroyed Russia.
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Q: The poem ‘‘America’’ in your new book begins very optimistically: ‘‘We are the dream that other people dream.’’ A: That’s a true poem. I want people to read that because that’s what we are. We are the dream that other people dream. Q: Why did you decide to close the book with that piece?
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So I’m going [to] keep busy. I’m 88 years old, but stand back and get out of the way. Q: What compels you to keep writing? Like you said, you’re 88. A: Because I’m in love. I love being alive. Do you realize, most people don’t know I remember being born. I loved every second of my life for the last 88 years. That’s true love, isn’t it?
A: Because my family came here from England. The Bradburys came here. My mother came here from Sweden. We were all immigrants. It’s a great future we have.
Source: Ryan E. Smith, ‘‘Ray Bradbury Continues his Great Love, Writing,’’ in McClatchy-Tribune Business News, February 15, 2009.
Q: How do you feel about versions of your books that have appeared in movies and television?
In the following review, Steele states that Bradbury’s most characteristic work is to be found in his short stories.
A: The Illustrated Man was lousy because they did a bad script, but Something Wicked This Way Comes was beautiful because they followed my script and I directed part of the film myself. Q: What do you think about the other versions of, say, The Martian Chronicles? A: The Martian Chronicles was not very good. That TV series was mainly boring. They had a good cast but the director was asleep on his feet. A better version is Fahrenheit 541. [Director Francois] Truffaut made a very nice film. It’s not perfect, but he’s got Oskar Werner in the lead and it’s got a wonderful score by Bernard Herrmann and the film is beautifully photographed. And the ending of the film is the best ending of any film I’ve seen in years. Q: Are there any more adaptations of your stories on the way? A: We’re doing a new version of The Illustrated Man at Warner Brothers next year. And we’re doing a new version of Fahrenheit 451 next year also, but the plans are up in the air right now and there may be some other versions coming up. Q: What interests you these days when it comes to writing? A: There’s a simple rule to follow I give to every young writer: Write what you love and love what you write. Everything I’ve done is something I love doing. I love doing it, and I will keep on loving the rest of my life Q: Are there certain topics that interest you more today than maybe when you were younger? A: I’m going to go on loving writing. I’m writing more plays for the theater. I have three plays opening in California in the next three months. . . . I’m going to do more theater. I’m going to do more short stories. I’m going to write more screenplays.
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Colin Steele
Ray Bradbury once said that for every short story he had published, he had another that was unpublished. Given that each volume of the Ray Bradbury Stories contains 100 stories, the mind boggles at his total output. Bradbury at the age of 88 continues to be a prodigious talent, one which saw him awarded in 2007 a Pulitzer special citation in ‘‘recognition of life achievement’’. His most characteristic work is to be found in his short stories. Even his best-known work, Fahrenheit 451, started out as one. These two massive volumes provide an excellent introduction to a wide range of Bradbury’s ‘‘monsters and angels of my imagination’’ exhibited in his carefully crafted prose and vivid images. Many of the stories come from classic collections, such as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, which were ideally suited to the short story magazines where they first appeared, like The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and Harper’s. Bradbury grew up in a small Midwest American town and a number of the stories reflect its mores and values. His nostalgia for the 1920s is reflected in his introduction to the first volume, where he recalls visiting a ‘‘seedy two-bit carnival’’ at the age of 12. He was inspired to write by seeing ‘‘Mr Electrico’’ perform at the carnival. This experience resulted in his fictional ‘‘dark carnivals’’, where freaks lurk in the shadows of the sideshows and candy stalls. It is also typically Bradburian that when he subsequently met Mr Electrico, he turned out to be a defrocked Presbyterian minister. Bradbury stories often have that unsettling feel. As he has aged, his stories have become set in ‘‘that country whose people are always autumn people, thinking autumn thoughts . . .
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autumn is the season of death . . . falling leaves, browning grass, chilling winds, early darkness’’. His stories also often reflect contemporary social and political issues. He once said, ‘‘I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.’’ In the 1950s he was concerned about civil rights, the threat of atomic war, and the impact of technology, particularly television, on social values. In ‘‘The Veldt’’, an automated house of the future contains a state-of-the-art virtual nursery from which the children wreak vengeance on their parents when they threaten to pull the plug. Echoes here also of Bradbury’s story of a newborn baby in ‘‘The Small Assassin’’. While Bradbury was reflecting on the use of television as a babysitter, he also foreshadowed the impact of virtual reality 50 years before the event. Classic stories include ‘‘The Fog Horn’’, aka ‘‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’’, inspired by Bradbury lying in bed listening to the Santa Monica Bay foghorn. Two lighthouse-keepers summon a long-lost dinosaur who thinks he has found a companion via the lighthouse foghorn but then dies ‘‘of a broken heart there on the shore’’. Bradbury poignantly evokes an atmosphere of sadness. A personal form of regret comes in ‘‘The Picasso Summer’’, in which an observer of Picasso’s drawings on the beach is unable to save them from the incoming tide. One of Bradbury’s most influential stories is ‘‘A Sound of Thunder’’, in which a time-travel safari member squashes a prehistoric butterfly with history-altering consequences. Those who want to follow up on Bradbury’s life and the background to the short stories should seek out Sam Weller’s The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (2005). Bradbury has written, ‘‘This is my life! It’s as if somehow Sam Weller slipped into my skin and my head and my heart it’s all here.’’ The good news is that Bradbury’s fiction output continues. An all-new Bradbury collection, We’ll Always Have Paris, will be published later this year. Source: Colin Steele, ‘‘Collections Open the Doors to Bradbury’s Imagination,’’ in Canberra Times, March 28, 2009, p. 15A.
Ben P. Indick In the following review, Indick chronicles Bradbury’s fifty-five- year writing history. Ray Bradbury may be 81 and recovering from a stroke, but he is not yet ready to be mummified ` like a Thousand Times Great Grand-Mere, a star among the eccentric stars of his latest novel, From
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the Dust Returned (Morrow, Forecasts, Aug. 27). Bradbury looks thin, and his voice is a bit hollow, but he talks. And laughs. On the wall of his living room, where it has been hanging for 50 years, is a painting by Charles Addams, the great New Yorker cartoonist, showing an eerie Victorian gothic haunted house inhabited by a family of lovable freaks, the Elliotts, who are featured in some of Bradbury’s best-loved stories and take center stage in From the Dust Returned. Originally intended to grace the cover of the long-planned novel, the painting is finally being put to use. Bradbury was a brash, broke and confident 26-year-old living in New York when Weird Tales magazine rejected ‘‘Homecoming,’’ his first Elliotts story. Weird Tales was his first serious publisher, paying him $20 apiece for ‘‘The Jar’’ and ‘‘Skeleton,’’ but ‘‘Homecoming’’ wasn’t traditional enough for the editors, who wanted stories imitating Poe and Lovecraft. So he submitted the story to Mademoiselle, where Truman Capote, then an editor, accepted it for the Halloween issue. Addams was chosen to do the artwork. Bradbury decided to do a book based on the story and illustrated by Addams after he and the artist became close. ‘‘But he wandered off to do his Addams Family [inspired by the Elliotts], and I wandered off and did my other Family stories on my own. Along the way I bought the painting from him for $200 when I couldn’t afford it and paid by the month. It took me three or four months.’’ It took another 55 years for the book to appear, but it still seems remarkably fresh, as vibrant as any of Bradbury’s earlier work. The reason, insists the writer, is that ‘‘all of my books surprise me. I’m writing them all the time.’’ Bradbury’s first foray into the world of writing came in 1939, when the Waukegan, Ill., native was 19 and working as a newsboy in Los Angeles. Setting himself up as the publisher of a fanzine, Futuria Fantasia, he managed to recruit an impressive lineup. ‘‘Forrie Ackerman paid for it. Henry Kuttner and Robert Heinlein wrote for it and Hannes Bok drew for it,’’ he says. His first published story was ‘‘It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Hu-’’ (sic), which appeared in Script magazine in Beverly Hills: ‘‘no money but a lot of free copies.’’ After his success with Mademoiselle, the editors of Weird Tales accepted his strange and unique stories, ‘‘but they kept fighting me. ‘Do real ghost stories!’’’ He published his first book, the story collection Dark Carnival, with Arkham House in 1947,
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but his breakthrough came in 1949, when he sold The Martian Chronicles to Doubleday. He needed the money, because by then he was married to Maggie McClure and expecting their first child. The book’s origin was near miraculous. ‘‘I was writing it for four or five years, but I didn’t know it. It took a Doubleday editor, Walter Bradbury (no relation to me) to point out I had written a novel. He told me to go back to the YMCA where I was staying and write an outline. We had no money, Maggie was pregnant. He told me, ‘Bring it to the office and if it’s any good I’ll give you $750.’ I stayed up all night and wrote the outline of a novel I didn’t know I had written and took it to the office of Doubleday the next day. Walter Bradbury looked at it and said, ‘That’s it, here is $750.’ So I was rich, because in 1949 that paid our rent for a whole year in Venice, Calif. It paid for our first baby, too, because babies in those days only cost about $100.’’ Although he is often called to appear on TV as a science fiction writer, he insists he is not one. ‘‘Only Fahrenheit 451 is science fiction. The Martian Chronicles is fantasy. There is no such place as Mars. It’s based on the dreams I had as a child, on the photographs taken at the Lowell Observatory and the sketches by Schiaparelli and the Martian books by Edgar Rice Burroughs.’’ His second love has always been the theater. After working for seven months on the screenplay for Moby Dick, one morning he looked into the mirror and ‘‘there was Herman Melville. He assumed my identity.’’ John Huston had told him that he wanted the interpretation of the story to be Bradbury’s, and then unjustly took co-credit for the film. Still, the work in Ireland paid off in his Irish one-act plays, ‘‘The Anthem Sprinters.’’ He recalls, several years ago, a production in San Francisco and the marquee read, ‘‘Two Irish plays tonight, by Sean O’Casey and Ray Bradbury. Isn’t that great, huh?’’ After a pause, he adds, ‘‘I cried.’’ Waukegan has appreciated Bradbury, who returns annually and visits the ravine where ‘‘I used to play. . . . They’ve renamed it ‘The Ray Bradbury Park.’’’ Asked about another famous Waukeganite, Jack Benny, he says, ‘‘We used to appear on concert programs together. I introduced him, and he would play the violin. We were known as ‘The Boys from Waukegan.’ He was a very nice gentleman.’’ Ray chuckles as he recalls a Steven Spielberg story. The great filmmaker was asked in an interview, ‘‘If you could make God say
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something, what would it be?’’ Spielberg answered, ‘‘Thanks for listening.’’ Bradbury laughs. ‘‘Isn’t that beautiful? God whispered to Spielberg to tell him to become Spielberg, and whispered to me to become Bradbury, and I listened.’’ Concerning the recent terrible terrorist events, he refers to a recent essay in which he wrote, ‘‘Mankind is too soon from the cave, too far from the stars, we are the in-between generation, not having accepted the gift of life completely. We diminish it by such acts. Not by war, hatred and greed, but then we recover and do good things. We are half and half people. We need forgiveness. We have to move forward, go back to the moon, go to Mars, on into the universe, meantime struggling with the two halves of ourselves. The events of recent weeks have been a real struggle not to go crazy.’’ Source: Ben P. Indick, ‘‘Ray Bradbury: Still Talking and Still Listening,’’ in Publisher’s Weekly, Vol. 248, No. 43, October 22, 2001, p. 40.
Anita T. Sullivan In the following essay, Sullivan seeks to provide evidence of fantasy in Bradbury’s work from the very beginning. Elements of what may be called ‘‘fantasy’’ were present in Ray Bradbury’s works from the beginning of his writing career. His own recent remark distinguishing science fiction from fantasy in literature is that ‘‘science fiction could happen.’’ This implies, of course, that fantasy could not happen. But in today’s world, where change occurs at such rapid rate, nobody would venture to state dogmatically that any idea is incapable of realization. Therefore, whether or not a work of literature is fantasy becomes more a matter of the author’s intention rather than a matter measurable by objective criteria. This is especially true of an author such as Bradbury, who by his own admission writes both science fiction and fantasy. Bradbury’s own brand of fantasy apparently came to birth in the world of the carnival. His imagination was nurtured with carnival imagery, both through the teachings of his Aunt Neva and his own experiences. Whenever a travelling circus or carnival came through Waukegan in the 1920s and early 1930s, Bradbury and his younger brother were always present from the time the train pulled in until the last piece of cotton candy was sold. Young Bradbury was affected deeply by the spectacle afforded such shows, and the carnival
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THE FANTASY STORIES, ON THE OTHER HAND, ALLOW THE READERS’ SPIRITS TO EXPAND RATHER THAN TO CONTRACT, AS IS THE EFFECT IN THE HORROR TALES.’’
became for him a sort of subconscious touchstone for a whole system of moods and images which emerged later in his writings. As a result, the carnival world can be thought of as a clearinghouse for Bradbury’s imagination—the place where he goes for his symbols when he is writing a tale of horror, nostalgia, fantasy, or some combination of the three. It is easy enough to point to ‘‘carnival imagery’’ in his horror tales of the 1940s. The opening lines of ‘‘The Jar’’ (1944), for example, take the reader immediately to a carnival sideshow: It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you (The October Country, Ballantine, 1955).
Many of his horror tales contain witches, skeletons, dwarfs, magicians, and carnival ‘‘freaks.’’ Even ‘‘The Big Black and White Game’’ (1945), his first straight tale, emits a breath of fantasy by the use of images throughout the story which link the Negro baseball team with black magic. In the 1940s Bradbury primed his fantasy sensibilities by creating a family of slightly offbeat witches who are latter-day remnants of what (they claim) was a long and noble line of highly effective magicians. Their magic is strangely erratic, however, and not altogether obedient to their commands. Uncle Einar, for example, in the story ‘‘Uncle Einar’’ (1947), would be a perfectly ordinary man except that he has green wings. This is quite an embarrassment to him because he is afraid to fly in the daytime lest he be mistaken for an Unidentified Flying Object and shot down. He seems to be unable to work any spells or even to play little magical practical jokes. He has only one claim to witchery, his cumbersome wings, which his wife finds quite handy for out-of-the-ordinary domestic chores.
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But of Bradbury’s tales at this time more were horror than fantasy. Perhaps he would regard an attempt to distinguish between horror and fantasy in his works as mere semantic quibbling. The difference, it seems to me, can almost be described as a matter of levity. In the horror tales, he was completely serious and trying his best to achieve a shock effect upon his readers. In the best of these, he probably succeeded because he also achieved, in the writing process, a shock effect upon himself. He was trying to exorcise something in himself as he wrote. Thus his horror tales were not written to enable his readers to escape, but rather to cause them to suffer so that they might be cleansed. (I am certain, however, that Bradbury did not consciously think these things as he wrote.) The fantasy stories, on the other hand, allow the readers’ spirits to expand rather than to contract, as is the effect in the horror tales. The thrust of his effort seems to lie in the creation of a mood, and, lost in this mood, the readers can escape to a Secondary World. This ability to create a Secondary World of fantasy J. R. R. Tolkien calls ‘‘sub-creation’’ and claims it is the most potent and most ‘‘nearly pure’’ form of art. The first story of Bradbury’s in which the element of fantasy far outweighed that of horror was ‘‘Jack-in-the-Box’’ (1947). In this tale he creates a complete Secondary World in which the characters move and speak, and only at the very end does the Primary World intrude to break the spell. A young boy has never been outside the house and to him it is the entire universe. He has been told that his father, whom he regards as God, was killed by ‘‘Beasts’’ in the garden, and that for him to go outside would mean a similar death. Through this universe of hushed rooms he wanders alone, or with his mother-teacher, a fragile creature of pathetic innocence. From the highest stair he gazed down through four intervals of Universe. . . . Father (or God, as Mother often called him) had raised its mountains of wall-papered plaster long ago. This was Father-God’s creation, in which stars blazed at the flick of a switch. And the sun was Mother, and Mother was the sun, about which all the Worlds swung, turning. And Edwin, a small dark meteor, spun up around through the dark carpets and shimmering tapestries of space. You saw him rise to vanish on vast comet staircases, on hikes and explorations (The October Country, p. 158).
But Edwin’s world is suddenly shattered. He comes downstairs one morning to find his mother lying on the floor, completely cold and silent. She
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does not respond to his efforts to arouse her, and finally in desperation and despair he leaves the house, an act which for him amounts to committing suicide. In the garden he finds a Jack-in-theBox with which he had been playing inside the house a few days before. He had flung it out the window in a fit of anger when the top refused to open. Now the box is broken and the Jack doll lies on the grass. ‘‘Freckles of sunlight quivered on the broken lid and touched tremblingly over and over the face of the Jack, jumped out and sprawled with its arms overhead in an eternal gesture of freedom’’ (p. 171). The boy is free, and the story closes as he runs in a frenzy of delight through the town outside the walls of his house, astounding the local people by his constant cry, ‘‘I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m glad I’m dead’’ (p. 173). Bradbury here clearly demonstrates his ability to fantasize, or subcreate. The story is out of the main stream, however, even when placed in the context of later Bradbury fantasy tales, for ‘‘Jack-in-the-Box’’ depicts a ‘‘you-go-there’’ situation rather than a ‘‘they-come-here’’ one. The author is transporting his readers to a selfcontained Secondary World, which he gives ‘‘the inner consistence of reality,’’ to quote Tolkien again (p. 43). That is, the author makes his Secondary World, for the time being, the only world there is. Fantasies which would be of this type are works such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, James Stephens’ Crock of Gold, James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen, George Macdonald’s Lilith and Phantastes, James Thurber’s Thirteen Clocks, and of course, many fairy tales, medieval romances, and stories written for children. In this kind of fantasy, the author must convince his readers that what is happening is what is supposed to be happening, even if the laws which prevail are contrary to those which function in the normal world. Bradbury has written few of what I would call ‘‘you-go-there,’’ or what Tolkien calls ‘‘nearly pure’’ fantasies. There are at least two with an Oriental mood and setting, both published in 1953, ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind’’ and ‘‘The Flying Machine.’’ ‘‘Death and the Maiden’’ (1960) is definitely another of these, and ‘‘Perhaps We Are Going Away’’ (1962) might also be called pure fantasy. Aside from these few, the remainder of Bradbury’s fantasy pieces are what I have called the ‘‘they-come-here’’ type. Here the Primary World with all of its rules and laws is considered
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the norm, and the fantasy involves some kind of intrusion by creatures or ideas which ordinarily would be confined to a Secondary World. Most often there is no real intrusion—no green monsters pouring down from the sky—but merely a temporary distortion of the physical principles governing our known world or a shift in perspective which allows the reader and/or the characters to view their world through something other than a plain glass. In a rather ingenuous statement in 1968 during an interview with Mary Hall, quoted earlier, Bradbury described the nature of his fantasy writing. ‘‘I wrote a love story recently,’’ he said, ‘‘with just a little twist on reality’’ (p. 31). Almost without fail Bradbury cannot resist the use of a ‘‘little twist’’ to keep his stories from being straightforward narrative accounts of events as they might appear to the average person. Examples of these milder fantasies would be ‘‘Shoreline at Sunset’’ (1959), ‘‘Come into My Cellar’’ (1960), ‘‘Forever Voyage’’ (1960), and ‘‘A Miracle of Rare Device’’ (1962). But sometimes the ‘‘little twist’’ becomes much stronger. A hole is torn in the fabric, and something unauthorized gains temporary entry to upset the normal order of things. This becomes the ‘‘they-come-here’’ type of fantasy referred to above. A classic example would be Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion. Bradbury’s best example—and probably the finest work of fantasy he has yet done—would be his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, published in 1962. In this work the invaders from the Secondary World are the ‘‘autumn people,’’ who function in darkness and are the stuff of which Evil is made. By this writing Bradbury has left behind the summer of nostalgia and has entered the autumn of fantasy. The novel is a good example of the fusion of fantasy, horror, and nostalgia which he manages so well. Nostalgia seems to function best for him in summer, horror and fantasy in the fall. His Aunt Neva instilled in him an awe of and fascination with autumn. The October Country is the title he chose for an anthology of his early horror tales, many of which are set in the fall, and The Autumn People is the title of another of his anthologies. Bradbury was born in summer, August 22, but close enough to fall so that its evidence could be subtly felt. He has said that, if he had his choice, he would have been born in October. The setting for Something Wicked This Way Comes is October, just before Halloween, in the
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same Green Town, Illinois, which was the background for Dandelion Wine. Two boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, and Will’s father are the chief characters. Through the eyes of the boys, Bradbury allows his imagination to create an eerie nightmarish mood which he sustains throughout the book. Through Mr. Halloway, he expresses his own philosophy. Although the story takes place in the same town which is the setting for the nostalgic Dandelion Wine, and involves two adolescent boys, there the resemblance stops. The mood in the second book is distinctly autumn, even without the actual fact of its being October. There is a conflict here, a threat to be dealt with; for the ‘‘autumn people’’ who have come to Green Town threaten to engulf it with terror. Mr. Halloway describes them: ‘‘For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider web hears them, trembles—breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them’’ (p. 142).
‘‘The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain . . . ’’ (p. 147). ‘‘All the meannesses we harbor, they borrow in redoubled spades. They’re a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people’s sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn’t care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That’s the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the scream from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way’’ (pp. 148–9).
Then he goes on to admit what everyone in Green Town feels but does not know why: ‘‘Maybe I’ve always dreamt about such carnivals, and was just waiting for it to come so’s to see it once, and nod. Now that tent show plays my bones like a marimba.
The autumn people are represented here by a small travelling carnival which comes to town in the middle of Halloween night and sets up its dark tents outside the town. ‘‘Cooger and Dark’s Carnival’’ it is, and right away the boys recognize that it is more than it seems on the surface. The hall of mirrors lures people in and shows them reflections of a part of themselves that they once were and can no longer be, so they are plunged into aching despair. The carousel behaves normally during the day, but at night it runs at supernormal speed, and whoever rides it adds years to his life within minutes, or turns from a man into a squalling babe. The Dust Witch travels around in a balloon searching for ‘‘Good’’ people to destroy, for the aim of the autumn people is to slowly leach out the forces of Good from everyone in the town so that Evil can claim its own. Only the two boys and a quiet, scholarly, middle-aged janitor stand in their way.
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The theme running through the book is that Evil is a shadow: Good is a reality. Evil cannot exist except in the vacuum left when people let their Good become not an active form, not a pumping in their veins, but just a memory, an intention. As Bradbury has indicated in other stories and articles, he feels that the potential for evil exists like cancer germs, dormant in all of us, and unless we keep our Good in fit condition by actively using it, it will lose its power to fight off the poisons in our system. Mr. Halloway, late in the story, realizes that the presence of ‘‘Cooger and Dark’s Carnival’’ has caused the darkness in himself to wax.
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‘‘My skeleton knows. ‘‘It tells me. ‘‘I tell you’’ (p. 149).
Since Evil thrives on the vacuum left by lack of Good, Mr. Halloway concludes that by reactivating the positive force within himself he might have a chance to drive it away. But it is touch-and-go, for already the Dust Witch has come and frozen the hearts of Jim and Will, sewn up their ears and their eyes, gummed up their lips, so that now they are like walking zombies, unable to exercise their own wills. He too will become that way if he doesn’t work fast. So, when the Witch comes for him, Mr. Halloway laughs. He laughs hysterically, he guffaws, he chokes and hollers with mirth. And the Witch flees. ‘‘ . . . chased, bruised, beaten by his laugh which echoed, rang, swam to fill the marble vaults, she whirled at last, claws razoring the wild air and fled to fall downstairs’’ (p. 170).
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Making use of his unexpected power, Mr. Halloway finally slays the Witch with a bullet on which he has marked a smile. He and Will bring Jim back to life with hilarious laughter, and the scourge of ‘‘Cooger and Dark’s Carnival’’ is lifted from the town. The mirth which destroys the Dust Witch and preserves both Mr. Halloway and the boys is a powerful weapon indeed. But it would not have such force were it merely an empty social laughter or a malicious snicker. This laughter derives its energy from its progenitor, which is love. With love to give it impetus, it is as lightning in the hands of Zeus. Love is the best humanizing force man possesses, Bradbury seems to be saying in this book. He expresses the same idea in a long article he wrote in Life magazine the same year, 1962: Above all, humanity is an Idea, a concept, a way of doing, a motion toward light or dark, a selection between the will to destroy and the will to save. The more times such selection tends toward the Good, the more human we say that thing is becoming. We must seek ways to know and encourage the Good in ourselves, the will toward light. . . .
The idea of the healing powers of love is perhaps most beautifully expressed in the story ‘‘A Medicine for Melancholy’’ (1959). The story is almost a parable. A young girl in eighteenthcentury London is slowly fading away before the eyes of her concerned parents. No doctor is able to diagnose her illness, and finally in desperation they take her, bed and all, and put her outside the front door so that the passersby can try their hand at identifying what is wrong with her. A young Dustman looks into her eyes and knows what is wrong—she needs love. He suggests that she be left out all night beneath the moon, and during the night he visits her and effects a cure. In the morning the roses have returned to her cheeks and she and her family dance in celebration. The same situation occurred in Dandelion Wine when Doug almost died of a fever and was cured by two bottles of air left in the night by the local junkman. The idea, or moral, if that is a better word, expressed in these two stories seems to be at least implicit in the majority of Bradbury’s stories from the late 1950s until the present. He did not cease to be a teacher when he stopped writing science fiction, but he did place a moratorium upon the more evangelistic kind of moralizing which he was practicing in the late 1940s and
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early 1950s. Now, at last, his own sense of values seems to have become completely at one with his art. Source: Anita T. Sullivan, ‘‘Ray Bradbury and Fantasy,’’ in English Journal, Vol. 61, No. 9, December 1972, pp. 1309–14.
SOURCES Aggelis, Steven L., ‘‘Conversation with Ray Bradbury,’’ in Conversations with Ray Bradbury, edited by Steven L. Aggelis, University of Mississippi Press, 2004, p. 200. Bradbury, Ray, ‘‘The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind,’’ in The Golden Apples of the Sun, Bantam, 1967, pp. 64–68. Brannon, Deborah J., Review of The Golden Apples of the Sun, in Green Man Review, http://www.greenmanreview. com/book/book_bradbury_apples.html (accessed August 20, 2009). Donovan, Robert J., Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948, W. W. Norton, 1977, pp. 188, 196. Eller, Jonathan, R., and William F. Toupence, Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, Kent State University Press, 2004, p. 371. Goodby, James E., ‘‘Looking Back: The 1986 Reykjavik Summit,’’ in Arms Control Today, September 2006, http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2006_09/Lookingback (accessed August 25, 2009). Kaminer, Wendy, ‘‘The Banality of Censorship,’’ in Atlantic Monthly, August 24, 2009, http://correspondents. theatlantic.com/wendy_kaminer/2009/08/the_banality_ of_censorship.php (accessed August 25, 2009). Review of The Golden Apples of the Sun, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 254, No. 49, December 10, 2007, p. 39. Rosenthal, Andrew, ‘‘The Malta Summit; Bush and Gorbachev Proclaim a New Era for U.S.-Soviet Ties; Agree on Arms and Trade Aims,’’ in New York Times, December 3, 1989. Sewell, Mike, The Cold War, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Talbott, Strobe, ‘‘East-West No More Mr. Tough Guy,’’ in Time, May 23, 1988, http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,967441-1,00.html (accessed August 25, 2009). Thrall, William Flint, and Addison Hibbard, A Handbook to Literature, revised and enlarged by C. Hugh Holman, Odyssey Press, 1960, p. 8. ‘‘Timeline: From Atomic Discovery to the 21st Century,’’ in Nuclearfiles.org: Project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, http://www.nuclearfiles.org/ (accessed August 22, 2009).
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‘‘United Nations Peacekeeping,’’ in United Nations, http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/index.asp (accessed August 25, 2009). Wolfe, Gary, K., ‘‘Ray Bradbury,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 8, Twentieth-Century American ScienceFiction Writers, Gale Research, 1989, pp. 16–33.
Reid, Robin Anne, Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, 2000. This book for students and the general reader contains a chapter on Bradbury’s life and eight additional chapters, each of which analyzes one of Bradbury’s major works, mostly his novels.
FURTHER READING Gaddis, John Lewis, The Cold War: A New History, Penguin Two, 2006. Gaddis is a senior historian who has published a number of books on the cold war. This concise history of the conflict is written for the general reader and makes excellent use of newly available Russian archival material.
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Mogen, David, Ray Bradbury, Twayne’s United States Authors Series, No. 504, Twayne Publishers, 1986. This is a survey of Bradbury’s life and work in all genres up to the mid-1980s. Mogen includes material from ten hours of interviews that he conducted with Bradbury in 1980.
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Wright, Robert, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Vintage, 2001. Wright argues that the more complex and interdependent human societies become, the more they move beyond zero-sum games into nonzero-sum. He believes that the flow of evolution is therefore toward cooperation rather than conflict.
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House Taken Over ‘‘House Taken Over,’’ by Julio Corta´zar, is a brief short story that portrays a spinster sister and her bachelor brother as they live a quiet existence in their sprawling ancestral home. Much of the narrative is devoted to descriptions of the house and of the siblings’ efforts to maintain it. When not cleaning the house, the sister, Irene, spends her time knitting. Irene’s unnamed brother, who is also the story’s narrator, spends his free time reading French literature. The story and its characters seem rather static until a mysterious presence begins to take over the house. Brother and sister are first relegated to their own wing, and then they are fully evicted. This presence is never explained, but the suspense and sense of mystery that pervade the remainder of the story are undeniable. The introduction of this understated otherworldly element places the story squarely in the Latin American tradition of magical realism. This tradition is particularly characterized by subtle supernatural elements incorporated into an otherwise ordinary scenario.
JULIO CORTA´ZAR 1946
‘‘House Taken Over’’ was Corta´zar’s first published short story. It appeared as ‘‘Casa tomada’’ in 1946 in the periodical Los Anales de Buenos Aires. Jorge Luis Borges, one of the leading literary figures in magical realism, was the editor of the periodical at the time. ‘‘House Taken Over’’ next appeared in the 1951 collection Bestiario. It was first published in English in the 1967 End of the Game and Other Stories. This same collection was published as Blow-Up and Other Stories the
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being arrested for his participation in a political demonstration. In 1946, Corta´zar became the manager of the Argentine Publishing Association, a post he held until 1948. Also in 1946, Corta´zar’s first published short story, ‘‘Casa tomada,’’ appeared in the periodical Los Anales de Buenos Aires. It next appeared in the 1951 collection Bestiario. The story was first published in English as ‘‘House Taken Over’’ in the 1967 End of the Game and Other Stories. In 1948, Corta´zar began working as a public translator in Argentina, but by 1952, he had moved to Paris and was working as a translator for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Corta´zar continued to work for UNESCO for the rest of his life, and he remained predominantly a resident in France. On August 23, 1953, Corta´zar married Aurora Bernandez. The couple did not have any children and divorced after roughly twenty years of marriage.
Julio Cortazar (AP Images)
following year; a 1985 reprint of this title was still in print as of 2009.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Julio Corta´zar was born in Brussels, Belgium, on August 26, 1914. His sister, Ofelia, was born there the following year. Their parents, Maria Scott and Julio Corta´zar, were Argentine citizens living abroad, and the family returned to Argentina around 1918. From then on, Corta´zar grew up in Banfield, a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. His father abandoned the family not long thereafter. Corta´zar was an avid reader and writer at an early age. As a young man, he earned a teaching certificate in 1935 and then briefly attended the University of Buenos Aires before beginning his career as a high school teacher. In 1938, he published the poetry collection Prescencia under the pseudonym Julio Denis. Corta´zar then began working as a professor of French literature at the University of Cuyo in 1944. He resigned the following year, after
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The 1950s and 1960s were Corta´zar’s most prolific years. In 1956, he published his second short-story collection, Final del juego (End of the Game). His first novel, Los Premios, was released in 1960. The volume was translated into English as The Winners in 1965. Another notable publication is the 1962 collection of fables Historias de cronopios y de famas (published in English as Cronopios and Famas in 1969). One of his most famous works, however, is the 1963 experimental novel Rayuela. The novel was translated into English as Hopscotch in 1967. In 1968, Corta´zar released a second experimental novel, 62: Modelo para armar (translated as 62: A Model Kit in 1972). Corta´zar’s later work took on an increasingly political tone, as can be seen in his 1973 novel Libro de Manuel (published in English as A Manual for Manuel in 1978). Other, more experimental collections of short stories, essays, and vignettes, such as Un tal Lucas (1979; published as A Certain Lucas in 1984) also appeared at this time. During this period, Corta´zar married Carol Dunlop. The two were not married long, as she died of leukemia in 1982. By the early 1980s, Corta´zar’s health had also suffered. He died following a heart attack in Paris, France, on February 12, 1984.
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PLOT SUMMARY The story begins with the statement, ‘‘We liked the house.’’ It is not yet apparent who is represented by ‘‘we.’’ The unnamed narrator then states that the
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house is large and ancient; it preserves the memory of their youth and of the family’s past generations. In the next paragraph, the narrator explains that he and Irene (presumably part of the ‘‘we’’ referred to earlier) live in the house together. Since the house is so big, several people could live there comfortably. However, given that the house is so large, it takes him and Irene several hours each day to keep it clean. They wake at seven in the morning and clean until lunch. The narrator believes he and Irene are both single because they spend all their time maintaining the house. Irene has declined two eligible husbands. The narrator’s love, Marı´ a Esther, died before the couple was to be engaged. (It is at this point that it first becomes clear that the speaker is a male.) Both Irene and the narrator are approaching their forties. Here, the narrator reveals that Irene is his sister. He says they are symbolically married to one another, and that the family line will die with them in their ancestral home. Their distant cousins will benefit. The cousins will inherit the house and sell it for construction materials, and they will then sell the plot it is on as well. The narrator thinks it would be better if he and his sister tore the house down themselves. After cleaning the house all morning, Irene spends the rest of her time knitting, She makes clothes for herself and her brother, even though they can afford to buy them. She never leaves the house, and the narrator buys her yarn for her. While in town, he also visits the local bookshops. The narrator enjoys French literature but remarks that nothing decent has been shipped to Argentina since 1939. Here, the narrator reveals his location and hints at the date (at the very least, it is 1940). When the narrator is not reading, he entertains himself by watching Irene knit. He says she is wonderful at it and waxes poetic about her knitting. ‘‘It was lovely,’’ he states. The narrator says Irene has made so many shawls they could open a store, but they do not need the money. The income from the farms they own provides more than enough. Next, the narrator describes the house, with its numerous wings and rooms. One side of the house faces the Rodrı´ guez Pen˜a (an actual street in Buenos Aires). He details the tapestries, iron grating, and tiles that adorn the house. Parts of the building are connected through a series of passageways. Some of the wings feel like individual apartments. The narrator and Irene mainly live in one such apartment, separated from the
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rest of the house by a heavy oak door. He then says that the house is always dusty. The rest of Buenos Aires is clean, he says, but only because people spend all their time cleaning it. ‘‘There’s too much dust in the air, the slightest breeze and it’s back on the marble console tops and in the diamond patterns on the tooled-leather desk set.’’ The feather duster does little more than stir up the dust so it can resettle on the furniture after a few moments in the air. The narrator switches subjects again, commenting: ‘‘I’ll always have a clear memory of it because it happened so simply and without fuss.’’ Once more, it is not clear what exactly he is referring to. It was eight in the evening, he says, and Irene was in her bedroom knitting. The narrator decides to go to the kitchen to make tea. In the hall, the door is half shut. On the way to the kitchen, he hears a noise coming from the dining room or possibly the library. It sounds like people talking or like furniture being overturned. Then the noise is in the hall. Quickly, the narrator throws himself at the oak door—‘‘before it [is] too late’’—and locks it. Then he goes to the kitchen and makes his tea. Afterward, he tells Irene, ‘‘I had to shut the door to the passage. They’ve taken over the back part.’’ It is not clear who ‘‘they’’ are, but Irene understands her brother. She replies: ‘‘In that case . . . we’ll have to live on this side.’’ Then the narrator drinks his tea, but it takes Irene a while to resume her knitting. The narrator observes that she is making a gray vest and that he likes it. The first few days of being cut off from the rest of the house are challenging. Both siblings left many of their belongings behind. On the other hand, their living quarters are much easier to clean. The siblings begin to sleep late, and they have more free time. Irene happily uses the extra time to knit more. However, since the narrator’s books remained in the main house, he struggles to fill his days. He decides to organize his father’s stamp collection. ‘‘We were fine, and little by little we stopped thinking. You can live without thinking.’’ The narrator notes that although he and Irene sleep in separate bedrooms, their apartment is so quiet that they can hear each other breathing, mumbling, or moving around. They both have trouble falling asleep. Aside from the siblings’ movements, the apartment is quiet. In the kitchen and the bathroom, though, Irene and her brother speak loudly or sing. These two rooms
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are closest to the main house, so the siblings presumably make noise there in order to avoid overhearing the mysterious sounds. Because the siblings make so much noise in those rooms, the rest of the apartment seems all the more quiet. That is also why the noises they make at night are all the more unsettling. The narrator says, ‘‘Except for the consequences, it’s nearly a matter of repeating the same scene over again.’’ He is thirsty and goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Then the narrator hears ‘‘the noise’’ coming from either the kitchen or the bathroom. Irene sees her brother freeze and goes to stand beside him. When they are both convinced that ‘‘the noise’’ is coming from inside their apartment, the siblings run to the vestibule and slam the iron grating shut. Irene is still holding her knitting, but the yarn is in the apartment, so she drops it to the ground without a glance. Irene and the narrator have nothing but the clothes on their backs. The narrator thinks about the money in his room but knows it is gone for good. He looks at his watch and sees that it is eleven o’clock at night. He takes Irene by the waist and notes that she may have been crying. They exit the vestibule and head into the street. The narrator locks the front door and throws the key into the sewer. ‘‘It wouldn’t do to have some poor devil decide to go in and rob the house,’’ he says, ‘‘at that hour and with the house taken over.’’
She spends her time cleaning the house or knitting clothes for herself or her brother. She does so even though they can afford to buy clothing. Irene also trusts her brother’s opinion. He purchases her knitting yarn and she always approves of his choices. Irene spends her time being pointlessly productive: she has knit so many shawls that she could open a store and sell them, but they sit forgotten in drawers surrounded by mothballs. Some part of Irene is aware of this. When she and her brother are evicted from their house, she drops the knitting and leaves it without a backward glance. The ease with which she abandons her primary pastime is nothing short of astounding. Although the reader is unsure as to what the mysterious noises indicate, Irene understands her brother perfectly. When he tells her, ‘‘I had to shut the door to the passage. They’ve taken over the back part,’’ Irene replies: ‘‘In that case . . . we’ll have to live on this side.’’ Despite calmly accepting this turn of events, it takes Irene some time to resume her knitting. This exchange reveals her to be pragmatic but still affected. Irene’s life is inextricably intertwined with her brother’s. When she talks in her sleep, it disturbs the narrator. Near the end of the story, when her brother freezes in the hall, she notices and joins him. However, while she is able to abandon her knitting with ease, she seems less able to abandon the house. Her brother takes her by the waist and leads her outside.
Marı´a Esther CHARACTERS The House In a sense, the house itself is an integral character in ‘‘House Taken Over.’’ It rules over the siblings’ lives. It is blamed for their respective spinsterhood and bachelorhood. They spend half of their time cleaning and maintaining the house. The house is also a family heirloom. It symbolically connects the siblings to their past, which is why they cannot bear to part with it, despite that fact that doing so would be the most practical course of action.
Irene Irene is the narrator’s sister. It is not clear whether she is the elder sibling or the younger. It is clear, however, that she is a childless spinster in or nearing her forties. Irene has turned down two eligible suitors who proposed marriage, and she has since settled into a chaste ‘‘marriage’’ with her brother. Irene is also a recluse who never leaves the house.
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Marı´ a Esther is the narrator’s dead lover. The narrator partially blames his bachelorhood on her death. However, her death and her role in the narrator’s life are explained in only one sentence. It seems clear that she was not nearly as important a figure as the narrator makes her out to be. In fact, she appears to be no more than a convenient excuse.
Narrator The unnamed narrator is Irene’s brother. He owns and maintains his ancestral home with her. He is arguably the story’s protagonist since all of the events are seen through his point of view. However, he does not appear to change or grow throughout the narration and is certainly not a hero in the usual literary sense of the word. The narrator spends much of his time cleaning the house, though on some level he knows it to be a pointless endeavor. The dust settles back on the furniture as soon as it is removed. After he and
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Irene die, distant cousins will dismantle the house and sell it and the land for a profit. He thinks it would be better if he and Irene circumvented this process and sold the house themselves. On the other hand, he remarks that he and Irene are in a chaste but fitting marriage, one that will see the family line come to an end in the very home in which it began. The narrator picks out his sister’s yarn and enjoys watching her knit. He finds both the action of her knitting and the products thereof to be ‘‘lovely.’’ While the narrator does admire the house and describes its notable features, his most effusive descriptions are devoted, oddly, to Irene’s knitting. In addition to his sister’s knitting, the narrator also enjoys French literature. He inquires at the local bookstores, but he notes that they have not received any good French books since 1939. When the narrator is cut off from his books, he is lost. The only thing he can think to do to occupy his time is organize his father’s stamp collection. The narrator has an interesting sense of pragmatism. On his way to the kitchen to make tea, he realizes that the house is being taken over, and he throws himself at the oak door that separates his and Irene’s chambers from the main house. Then, however, rather than immediately informing Irene of this strange and remarkable development, the narrator completes his task, continuing on to the kitchen and making tea as he originally intended. It is only after this task is accomplished that he tells Irene what has happened. He does so, too, in a matter-of-fact tone. On some level, though, he is aware of the direness of their situation. Both he and his sister are unable to sleep. They speak loudly in the rooms closest to the main house in order to avoid hearing the noises coming from there. He acknowledges that he and his sister are living without thinking—living in denial.
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Noises The mysterious noises that ultimately force the siblings from the house are also something of a character. In fact, they are the only agents of change in the story. Their appearance forces Irene and the narrator into their own apartment. The siblings are clearly afraid of these noises; they sing loudly in order to avoid hearing them and ultimately flee the house for good as soon as the noises have breached their tiny apartment.
THEMES Social Class ‘‘House Taken Over’’ paints a stark picture of the life of the Argentine upper class. Irene and her brother have inherited a large house and gather income from the farms that they own. All of this means that neither has to work. They have enough income to enjoy a leisurely and well-off lifestyle. Oddly enough, the siblings insist on maintaining the house themselves. Irene also knits clothes for herself and her brother, despite the fact that they are well able to afford store-bought clothing. While both choices seem thrifty, they are remarkably self-limiting. The narrator blames his bachelorhood and his sister’s spinsterhood on their devotion to maintaining the house. There is also something wasteful in Irene’s constant knitting. She has made so many shawls that she could sell them in a store, but instead they languish in a drawer filled with mothballs. As rich people, Irene and the narrator are required to do very little, and that is exactly what they do. Irene knits and her brother reads. Notably, neither seeks out the company of other people.
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The narrator’s pragmatism, or stoicism (a philosophy emphasizing control of the emotions), is also evident in the story’s last scene. He realizes that his money is gone without becoming upset. He cannot recall whether or not his sister was crying at the time, only that she may have been. He also calmly notes the time and carefully locks the house that he and his sister have been forced to abandon. He does so because he fears what might happen to an unwitting robber.’’
The narrator and Irene are entirely, and increasingly, isolated. They are also largely isolated because of their class. Since they do not need money, they do not need to work, nor do they need to rely on others. Their money insulates them from the rest of society. Still, their isolation is largely self-chosen; Irene has turned down two perfectly good suitors. The narrator has not felt compelled to seek a new love following the death of Marı´ a Esther. The narrator seems proud of his chaste marriage to Irene, seemingly reveling in the poetic justice of the family line coming to an end in the same house in which it began. Irene
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Examine the details of the house as they are laid out in ‘‘House Taken Over.’’ Create a visual representation of the house in the form of a three-dimensional diorama in a shoebox. Present your artistic work to the class. Read the classic young-adult book Bless Me Ultima (1972) by Rudolfo Anaya. This Mexican novel is set during the 1940s and thus presents a salient contrast to ‘‘House Taken Over.’’ Compare the use of magical realism in both works in an essay. The narrator of the story is a fan of French literature up to 1939. French literature during the early twentieth century was characterized by the symbolist, Dadaist, and surrealist movements. Research these movements and give an oral presentation in which you explain them and how their influence can be seen in ‘‘House Taken Over.’’ The narrator notes that the street on which his house is located is the Rodrı´ guez Pen˜a. The street is named after an important Argentine historical figure. Use the Internet to research Pen˜a and compile a PowerPoint presentation with visuals based on your findings.
house as they were already sealed off from the rest of the world. The siblings are so afraid of this mysterious intrusion that they literally cut themselves off from it. They sing loudly in the rooms adjoining the main house in order to avoid having to hear the noises they fear. Both siblings seem to have been expecting this turn of events. Both seem to know who the mysterious ‘‘they’’ are. Both are also well aware of the consequences, as Irene acknowledges, ‘‘In that case . . . we’ll have to live on this side.’’ Given this statement, both seem to have anticipated this development and its consequences. Ironically, the very thing that pushes the siblings further and further into isolation is also the thing that ultimately pushes them out into the world.
never leaves the house. Her brother does so only to buy her yarn and to look for more French literature to add to his library. In addition, while the siblings could use their leisurely life to make friends, socialize, or open their lavish home to others, the thought never even crosses their minds. The existence of distant cousins is acknowledged, but only in a vaguely threatening way. The cousins never come to visit, nor are they invited. Instead they are seen as the destructive force that will profit from dismantling the siblings’ household. The siblings are so isolated that when the mysterious ‘‘they’’ enter the household, the narrator hurls himself at the door to block them. He further isolates himself and his sister, sealing themselves off from the rest of the
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Denial The narrator and his sister are clearly in denial. They deny their existence, avoiding all contact with the outside world. They also live in denial in regard to the mysterious noises that inhabit the house. After the narrator and Irene are relegated to their apartments, they do not speak of their change in circumstances. In fact, they sing loudly in the rooms that adjoin the main house in the hopes of avoiding any concrete encounter with the mystery they so fear. The only times the siblings are forced to confront their circumstances are when they go in search of some item that was left behind in the main house. That the siblings are in denial is also evident in their inability to sleep. Something is troubling them, but they do not speak of it. The siblings do nothing to address the noises that have taken over their home; instead, they simply do their best to ignore them. When the noises have finally infiltrated the siblings’ apartment and forced them into the street, the only action they take is to lock the door lest some poor robber be subjected to the horrific ‘‘they.’’ Again, neither sibling attempts to directly face the cause of their misery.
STYLE Unreliable First-Person Narrator The unnamed first-person narrator in this story is characterized not by what he does but by what he says, thinks, and feels. The reader experiences all of the events in the story through this lens. The reader understands Irene and her actions only through her brother’s opinions. While this creates
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Old wooden door closed with a padlock (Image copyright Vicente Barcelo Varona, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
a sense of intimacy between the reader and the character of the narrator, it also distances the reader from all else. There is no second opinion of events, no objective point of view, only subjective. This paradox is occasionally defined by the term unreliable narrator. A first-person narrator can present hazards for the reader, who must infer what is going on despite any details that are left out. What the narrator chooses to divulge and what the narrator chooses to conceal are suspect. In addition, the narrative in this story is somewhat jarring, making seemingly random leaps from subject to subject between paragraphs. These shifts are also hard to understand, as it is not immediately clear what exactly the narrator is referring to.
It also takes some time for the speaker to reveal that he is a male. These are instances of understatement. The most salient example in the story is when the narrator comments, ‘‘I’ll always have a clear memory of it because it happened so simply and without fuss.’’ Here, it is not clear what exactly is being referred to. The mysterious noises that follow remain a mystery because of this pervasive understatement.
Overstatement
Understatement, the use of restraint in describing important points, is a large part of the narrator’s unreliable and jarring story. The elusive meanings of his sudden subject shifts are largely caused by understatement. For instance, the story begins with the statement ‘‘we liked the house.’’ However, it is not yet apparent who is included in that ‘‘we.’’
At the same time, these moments of extreme understatement are contrasted with moments of overstatement. The speaker devotes a great deal of the narrative to describing the architectural details in the house, as well as its layout. He also details his and Irene’s daily routine, especially as it pertains to cleaning the house. Another subject that the narrator devotes a great deal of attention to is Irene’s knitting. He describes the clothing she makes and even effusively details the actual act of her knitting. Both topics are over-explained. As such, they only serve as a contrast to the patently under-explained events that lay at the heart of the story.
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
Today: Latin American literature is dominated by such popular styles as mystery, suspense, and police procedurals. These styles are far more literary and ironic than their American counterparts. This phenomenon is a calculated move away from magical realism, a style that ultimately began to constrain Latin American writers because of its overwhelming popularity. 1940s: Following a military coup in 1943, in which Juan Pero´n is instrumental, Pero´n becomes president by popular election in 1946. He wins the post again in a 1952 election, but is overthrown by a military coup in 1955. Pero´n is reelected as president in 1973, though he dies the following year.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Juan Pero´n Argentine dictator and subsequent president Juan Pero´n came into power at the time that Corta´zar began his writing career. Furthermore, the 1940s were the beginning of a tumultuous and historic period in Argentine politics and economy. This same tumult may have been partially responsible for Corta´zar’s decision to live abroad. To a certain extent, the uncertainty and anxiety of ‘‘House Taken Over’’ can be seen as a reflection of the political climate in which it was written. Pero´n began his military career at the age of twenty and was promoted to colonel in 1941. Two years later, he was instrumental in the military coup that overthrew then-president Ramo´n Castillo. Under the new regime, Pero´n became minister of war and then undersecretary of war. However, he gained the most power in his subsequent position as secretary of labor. In that post, Pero´n made great headway as a champion of the working class, making significant economic and labor reforms.
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Today: Ne´stor Kirchner is elected president in 2003. He does not run for a second term; Kirchner’s wife, Cristina Ferna´ndez de Kirchner, runs in his stead. She wins the election in 2007, becoming the first woman to be elected president of Argentina.
1940s: The literary style of magical realism begins to emerge in Latin America. It is heavily influenced by the aesthetics of surrealism.
1940s: Argentina’s strong economy, built mostly on the production of agricultural products, begins to falter in the face of increasing industrialization. The country’s economic troubles contribute to its political turmoil. Today: Following a steady economic decline that lasted throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, Argentina’s economy begins a slow recovery. In 2003, the country is able to expand its exports and increase its gross domestic product. Inflation, however, remains high.
Pero´n met his future second wife, Eva Duarte, in 1944. She was instrumental in furthering his political career. In fact, his popularity had become so immense that the military government feared his growing power and arrested him in 1945. However, demonstrations held on October 17 led to Pero´n’s release. He then married Eva on October 22. In 1946, Pero´n successfully ran for president. From then on, he and his wife campaigned to lessen the country’s debt, create aid programs for the poor, and establish better pay and conditions for workers. Although Pero´n undoubtedly improved the country, he was despotic in his methods; politicians who opposed him were removed from positions of power. Pero´n was successfully reelected as president in 1952, but Eva died of cancer not long after. Her passing, coupled with Pero´n’s iron-fisted methods in an increasingly troubled economy, ultimately cost Pero´n his popularity and his power. He was deposed by military coup in 1955. Pero´n relocated to Spain, living in exile until 1973. That year, following yet another military coup in Argentina,
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Yarn and knitting needles (Image copyright Susanne Karlsson, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
he was once again elected president. However, Pero´n died the following year; he was replaced as president by his third wife, Isabel Martinez.
Magical Realism The literary style of magical realism is typically associated with Latin American writers of the twentieth century. The style is characterized by magical or supernatural elements subtly incorporated into an otherwise realistic plot. Other traits include a clash of cultures typical of postcolonial literature (literature written in countries formerly colonized by another) and an unquestioning or matter-of-fact authorial voice. The latter trait contributes to the credibility of the magical plot elements. The style was immensely popular, launching Latin American literature into the international spotlight. The tradition has since become much imitated, and it can be found in numerous works of literature, Latin American and otherwise. Magical realism emerged predominantly from the French surrealists and was at its strongest during the 1950s and 1960s. Those at the forefront of the movement were Carlos Fuentes, Corta´zar, and Gabriel Garcı´ a Marquez. The style remained
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popular well into the 1980s; a later figurehead of the movement, for example, is Isabel Allende. Authors outside the Latin American tradition who are also considered magical realists are Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, and Milan Kundera.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW For the most part, critics have applauded ‘‘House Taken Over.’’ Reviewers predominantly comment on the story’s subtle use of fantasy, as well as the underlying themes therein. For instance, Marta Morello-Frosch, writing in Books Abroad, observes that ‘‘Corta´zar’s success lies in the effortless ways in which the real and unreal levels of reality coincide.’’ Explicating the theme in Neophilologus, Amanda Holmes remarks: ‘‘Walls of architecture, language and personhood are deconstructed . . . and replaced by unstable barriers that can be moved and penetrated, shifted and destroyed.’’ The mysterious ‘‘they’’ in the story become an ‘‘Other [that] penetrates, controls and oppresses the Self . . . as the characters
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attempt to protect themselves by familiar walls and barriers.’’ International Fiction Review contributor Pamela McNab also seizes upon the use of spatial markers in the story. She notes that ‘‘House Taken Over’’ is ‘‘the story which perhaps most dramatically demonstrates the crucial link between space and motion’’ in Corta´zar’s work. She goes on to note that the story’s ‘‘tragic’’ conclusion is ‘‘closely tied to the characters’ movements within specifically defined settings.’’ Commenting on Corta´zar’s work in general, McNab notes that his ‘‘stories defy any type of classification that would ultimately diminish our appreciation of his literary gift.’’ Discussing Bestiario (the collection in which ‘‘House Taken Over’’ first appeared) in the Antigonish Review, Amaryll B. Chanady states that ‘‘these carefully structured and polished narratives introduce two themes that reappear in his later work—the presence of the mysterious and unusual in our everyday world, and the stifling force of convention.’’ She notes that ‘‘in all these narratives, the supernatural and the extraordinary appear as an integral part of life. They are neither questioned nor rejected as implausible by the narrator or the characters, and are seen by the reader as a forceful expression of hidden impulses and social tensions.’’
CRITICISM Leah Tieger Tieger is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she presents an overview of the numerous possible meanings in and interpretations of ‘‘House Taken Over.’’ Julio Corta´zar’s ‘‘House Taken Over’’ is a brief but carefully constructed tale. It is particularly noteworthy for what it does and does not reveal. The narrator’s attention to mundane detail is astounding, particularly when seen as a contrast to the details that remain unaddressed. This lack of seemingly important description lends the story an ambiguity that allows for numerous interpretations. In this sense, the story itself becomes as spacious as the house in which it is set. Certainly, despite its brevity, the plethora of critical interpretations of ‘‘House Taken Over’’ illustrates that it is a story potentially filled with ideas. For instance, Neophilologus contributor Amanda Holmes notes in her explication that ‘‘some of the most prominent
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THE SIBLINGS BEGIN TO HAVE TROUBLE SLEEPING. THIS SMALL DETAIL SEEMS TO INDICATE THAT THINGS ARE NOT QUITE AS NORMAL AS THE CHARACTERS PRETEND.’’
analyses of this story by literary scholars see the experience of Corta´zar’s characters as similar to that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden . . . a baby in the mother’s womb . . . excrement in the intestines of the body . . . or the bourgeois elite in Peronist Argentina.’’ The more allegorical interpretations, such as those listed above, tend to focus on the final act of expulsion as it occurs in the story. More involved readings, though, focus on the conditions that bring the expulsion about. Namely, those conditions are the siblings’ malaise and isolation. The siblings repeat the same day over and over: waking at the same time, cleaning the house, eating lunch at noon, and then spending their respective leisure times reading old books or pointlessly knitting. Even the siblings’ chaste marriage is a fruitless endeavor. To most, it would seem that Irene and the narrator are living in a self-constructed purgatory, yet they are perfectly content. As Malva E. Filer states in Books Abroad: ‘‘In Corta´zar’s fictional world this kind of routine life is the great scandal against which every individual must rebel with all his strength. And if he is not able or willing to do so, extraordinary elements are usually summoned to force him out of this despicable and abject comfort.’’ Certainly, this is the case in ‘‘House Taken Over,’’ as the mysterious ‘‘they’’ drive the siblings away. Marta Morello-Frosch, also writing in Books Abroad, discusses the adept use of understatement that pervades the story. For example, she finds that ‘‘there is no editorial comment on the events narrated . . . no matter how bizarre they may be.’’ While this remarkable reticence leaves the reader to speculation, it is also a hallmark of the magical realist style. Still, the narrator’s and Irene’s reticence is germane. Not only do they avoid commenting on their situation, they also avoid acting on it. Morello-Frosch adds that ‘‘there is often a great effort on the part of the characters toward trivializing the extraordinary or bestial events they
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
Julio Corta´zar’s most famous novel is Rayuela (Hopscotch), which was first published in Spanish in 1963 and in an English translation in 1967. This experimental novel contains instructions on how to read it, presenting a nonlinear narrative in which the reader jumps between nonconsecutive chapters. The protagonist, Horacio Oliveira, is an Argentine expatriate living in Paris who ultimately returns to Buenos Aires.
A classic young-adult book is Sandra Cisneros’s 1984 House on Mango Street. It is also an example of Latin American literature that contains some aspects of magical realism. The book is comprised of vignettes (brief short stories) similar in style to ‘‘House Taken Over.’’
Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology, edited by David Young and Keith Hollaman, was published in 1984. The anthology is so comprehensive that it remained in print as of 2009. The work of such notable magical realist authors as Gabriel Garcı´ a Marquez is included. The volume also includes work from international authors such as Italo Calvino. Authors considered to have been predecessors of the movement, such as Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, and Virginia Woolf, are also featured.
One of Argentina’s most famous writers of the twentieth century is Jorge Luis Borges. Borges was also Corta´zar’s literary benefactor and a father of the magical realism movement. He was a major international literary figure both during and after his lifetime. A great introduction to his short prose is The Aleph and Other Stories. Published in 2004, this Englishlanguage translation collection features such notable works as ‘‘The Labyrinth.’’
Carlos Fuentes is another major figure in the magical realism movement. His 1975 novel Terra Nostra was translated into English in 1976. This epic work spans the period from the first century of the common era to 1999. The story features more than eighty characters, many of whom act as first-person or second-person narrators. The work is a fictional history of Latin America that contains both surreal and satirical elements.
For a multidisciplinary approach to the country of Corta´zar’s birth, read The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics by Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo. This 2003 volume presents a comprehensive overview of Argentine history and culture.
are called upon to endure.’’ In addition, Irene and the narrator continue their lives as if nothing has happened. Certainly, as Morello-Frosch comments, ‘‘they insist on trying to keep up an appearance of routine in the presence of ‘the beast’ which may lie within them or haunt them without even making itself visible.’’ Even the narrator seems to indicate as much when he declares, ‘‘We were fine, and little by little we stopped thinking. You can live without thinking.’’ The siblings begin to have trouble sleeping. This small detail seems to indicate that things are not quite as normal as the characters pretend.
Yet another interpretation describes ‘‘House Taken Over’’ as a work of metafiction, that is, a fictional story about fiction. Holmes finds this to be the case given the mysterious elusiveness of the invasive ‘‘they.’’ For instance, she states: ‘‘These unidentified subjects represent Corta´zar’s perception of fiction as a language that reaches beyond conventional communication.’’ She adds, ‘‘Without a specific referent, the ‘they’ or the ‘he/it’ remain in the realm of the language of fiction for the reader. Corta´zar creates a sense of the unnamed entities for the reader, ushering in an uneasy aura surrounding them. The reader empathizes with the characters
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who obviously fear . . . these beings without stable referents.’’ A metafictional interpretation here is entirely apt given the work’s literary/historical context. Corta´zar’s literary benefactor, Jorge Luis Borges, was a metafictional writer. In addition, aspects of magical realism owe their heritage to the style. Returning to the idea of the narrator’s and Irene’s self-constructed purgatory, Holmes finds that the siblings’ expulsion can be traced in terms of the clash between the colonial and postcolonial world. For instance, the siblings insist on living in a colonial world despite the fact that Argentina is a postcolonial country. The house itself is a strong indicator of this. It is European in construction: a large sprawling manor with numerous wings. However, it is also antiquated. Too big for its purpose, it stands mainly to oversee the final days of the family line. As the narrator points out, the home is such an antique that the parts are worth more than the whole. Most of the other buildings like it have been broken apart and sold piece by piece for their architectural embellishments. In Holmes’s interpretation, then, the narrator’s abundant descriptions of the house (and the work conducted to maintain it) seem far more significant than they initially seem. Holmes remarks: ‘‘As the vehicle for nostalgia, the architectural styles of the fictional buildings come to represent divisions between past and present, as well as between private and public space. The imposition . . . of some inexplicable Other on the individual residence probes the concept of home . . . underscoring the inescapability of the city’s impact on the lives of its inhabitants and questioning the nature of the walls, both architectural and linguistic, that separate Self from Other.’’ In other words, the house (representing the past) separates the siblings from the city (representing the present). Holmes goes on to state exactly that, finding that ‘‘although at home in this limited space, the siblings seclude themselves from the contemporary experience of the city. As a result, they live as outsiders surrounded by a city that understands a modern reality very different from theirs.’’ Thus, ‘‘it is this city that finally expels them from their home.’’ This thematic interpretation is one of the more salient, particularly when one examines key textual clues, such as the architectural style of the home, its location, and the direction from which the mysterious ‘‘they’’ overtake the house. For instance, ‘‘the connection between the fictional architecture of the home
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and that of the real Buenos Aires of the timeperiod, as well as the location of the home in the city create a caricature of the contemporary urban political scene,’’ Holmes finds. She also states that ‘‘the authority that controls the siblings supernaturally haunts their private space, scaring away the unproductive urban elite. As this scenario parodies a Peronist Buenos Aires, it also underscores Latin American debates concerning the role of Europe in post-colonial space.’’ Put simply, the siblings’ leisurely lives, financed by the labors of tenant farmers on their land holdings, are part of a colonial lifestyle that has since grown antiquated. Like the house, the siblings’ very lives are relics. Modernity and progress will ultimately overtake them. This, then, is another aspect of the mysterious voices that force the siblings from their home. As previously mentioned, the actual location of the house is also important. The narrator notes that the library abuts the Rodrı´ guez Pen˜a, an actual street in Buenos Aires. Holmes writes that ‘‘the named street runs behind the house, as if the building sought to conceal its actual location, for the reader never discovers the name of the street that would give the house its official address.’’ The detail does place the house in a fairly concrete geographical location. More importantly, it also places the house’s location in a historical context that adds further meaning to the story’s events. The street’s namesake was a soldier who fought for Argentina’s independence from Britain. This detail further underscores the postcolonial implications in ‘‘House Taken Over.’’ The street’s location at the back of the house is also remarkable given that, as Holmes points out, ‘‘the invading Other moves from the back to the front of the house, or from the section that locates the story in the ‘real’ Buenos Aires outside the text to the part that remains anonymous and must be imagined without any ‘real’ referent.’’ ‘‘Buenos Aires intrudes into the siblings’ Europeanized [not to mention fictionalized] haven.’’
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Source: Leah Tieger, Critical Essay on ‘‘House Taken Over,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Ilan Stavans In the following excerpt, Stavans summarizes Corta´zar’s plots as restricted, bizarre, and unexplained, with a political message intermingled. The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. —Ludwig Wittgenstein
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USING TRADITIONAL GENRES WASN’T ENOUGH ANY MORE; HE NEEDED TO SURMOUNT BARRIERS, TO WRITE PROSE POEMS, ESSAYIST STORIES, NON-FICTION NOVELS—TO INTERTWINE SEPARATE STRUCTURES, IMPOSING CHAOS.’’
Haunted house (Image copyright Patricia Malina, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
‘‘Anybody who doesn’t read Julio Cortazar is doomed,’’ the Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda once said and, at least on this particular issue, he wasn’t off target. The Argentine (1914– 1984), a colossus of Latin American letters, is responsible for one of the continent’s two twentieth-century masterpieces: Hopscotch, published in 1963 (the other one is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude). But he is also responsible for catapulting the region into an intellectual coming of age: his artistic talent and his political views amazed and infuriated many, and forced the post-World War II Latin American intelligentsia to become part of the banquet of Western Civilization.
explorer born in Brussels and exiled in Europe since 1951 but a fervent Argentine from head to toe, Cortazar would trot the globe denouncing human rights violations and would spend hours in front of the typewriter professing to own a unique method of writing short stories, essays and novels not unlike those developed by the French surrealist Andre Breton and the American beatnik Jack Kerouac: a story, he would claim, is born in a sparkle, a thunderous strike of inspiration, and requires very little by way of processing. A decisive impulse, the necessary concentration— and it’s ready. He perfected the technique known as ‘‘automatic writing,’’ in which the writer, much like Samuel Taylor Coleridge when drafting Kubla Khan after an opium-induced dream, must learn to trust his guts: almost no rewritings and virtually no additional editing are needed once the text appears on the page; as if literature were only the product of a supernatural Spirit dictating its craft to scribes everywhere on the globe. He wrote a handful of tales that are among the best this century has delivered.
To read Cortazar at the peak of his international reputation was to submerge oneself in the art of improvisational, empirical narrative. He perceived fiction as an indispensable tool in the understanding of history and philosophy. An unconventional man of letters and a philosophical
Novels, on the other hand, were for Cortazar the result of accumulation and a cut-and-paste development. His plots were often restricted to the bizarre and unexplained, even when a political message was intermingled. Although his fantastic tales deal with themes typical of two major influential writers on his work, Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges, such as the double, the labyrinth, transformations of humans into beasts, he injected in them a dreamlike, surrealistic cadence. He described Anton Chekhov’s style as directed toward explaining, in minute detail, a man’s routine, while his own approach to literature, following the rhythm of chance, was interested in exceptions to a rule—not the investigation of senseless repetitions of an act but the sudden abolition of a habit.
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Energetic, outspoken, incredibly prolific, Cortazar probably died of AIDS (although his friends deny it) just as the epidemic was gaining world attention. His unconventional style, his interest in drugs and in altered states of consciousness, his love of jazz and his passion for experimentalism, make him a contemporary of the Beat Generation and Alain Robbe-Grillet, who in 1956 inaugurated a new trend in French novel writing subscribed to by Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Nathalie Sarraute. And yet, since his death his work has fallen out of fashion—a casualty of our changing ideological mood. It is seldom read beyond limited college courses; his style and voice are seen as the legacy of an era long gone and buried, one that took jazz out of the nightclub and into the concert hall, and was obsessively involved in experimenting with drugs to reach alternative levels of consciousness. . . . He and his sister Ofelia, one year his junior and his only sibling, were raised by his mother and by an aunt in a larger-than-usual house with a backyard, one with numerous rooms and obscure, empty corners that became the model of ‘‘House Taken Over.’’ Cortazar and his sister developed a complicated fraternal relationship with incestuous undertones, one he also often refused to discuss in interviews. Cortazar acknowledged having had a recurrent dream of sleeping in the same bed with Ofelia. One should remember that non-incestuous fraternal relationships also abound in his oeuvre. Life in Banfield was intriguing: Cortazar was curious and bookish, always intellectually driven, with an unconventional point of view, which often scared young friends and made him a loner, a sort-of-pariah and pushing him to the fringes of society. The neighborhood was the playground where he tasted the sweet innocence of childhood. In its landscape he discovered insects (ants, spiders, flies, bees), a quintessential presence in his short fiction, and where his first encounters with death and romantic disillusionment took place. When, in 1937 a doctor recommended to Cortazar’s mother that the child, an avid reader and frequent dreamer, stay away from books since they could affect his health, he happily ignored the prescription. He loved radio, commercial films, and Greek mythology. He especially enjoyed reading about adventurous heroes traveling to a distant geography. Not surprisingly, his favorite writer was Jules Verne, and he is said to have read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a romance about submarines with Captain Nemo as its villain, several times.
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He wanted to be a sailor and navigate distant seas. ‘‘I will always be a child in many ways,’’ he once wrote, ‘‘but one of those children who from the beginning carries within an adult, so when the little monster becomes an adult he carries in turn a child inside and, nel mezzo del cammino, yields to the seldom peaceful coexistence of at least two outlooks onto the world. . . . ’’ During the 1970s, Cortazar explored in esthetic terms what I call the art of literary promiscuity. After All Fires the Fire, he published two playful, amorphous texts, called ‘‘collage books’’: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds and Last Round; and in between, 62, A Model Kit, a sequel to Hopscotch, published in 1968 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, about vampires and city landscapes, a theme he began treating in La otra orilla. Using traditional genres wasn’t enough any more; he needed to surmount barriers, to write prose poems, essayist stories, non-fiction novels—to intertwine separate structures, imposing chaos. This non-conventional drive went even further. In 1975 came another rare experiment: Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales. Una utopia realizable, an out-of-print ‘‘socialist’’ comic-strip that used a famous dime-novel character placed in an ideological war against aggressive capitalist forces. Just before Cortazar put together his second poetry collection, Pameos and Meopas; and published what, according to Ferre, is his most important work: Observatory Prose, a volume of illustrated essays. He also wrote another novel, A Manual for Manuel, his most politically outspoken to date, and traveled to Argentina with short visits to Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, lectured at the University of Oklahoma, participated in the PEN-sponsored Translation Conference in New York City, and wrote an important introduction to Felisberto Hernandez’s Sunk House and Other Stories and assessment of Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt. Indeed, it was obvious at this point in his career that, aside from Borges, Hernandez, Arlt, and Horacio Quiroga had exercised a great influence on Cortazar’s short stories. Over the decades, in Hernandez, whom the Argentine first read in his thirties, he had found inspiration for stories such as ‘‘House Taken Over’’ and ‘‘End of Game,’’ which resemble ‘‘Inundated House’’ and ‘‘Las hortensias.’’ (Curiously, Hernandez and Cortazar lived in Chivilcoy at the same time, in 1939, but apparently they never met). He got from him the capacity to find ‘‘the most subtle relationship between things, that eyeless dance of the most ancient elements;
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untouchable smoke and fire; the high cupola of a cloud and the random message of a simple herb; everything that is marvelous and obscure in the world.’’ Arlt he had read in his twenties. He had admired his ‘‘styleless,’’ chaotic street language, ‘‘weak’’ prose, the urgency and anarchy of his plots. He found him to be a great writer who looked for knowledge through the avalanche of darkness and his own artistic power in his infinite weakness. And in Quiroga he had found the raw explorer of the South American jungle, both in the concrete and the imaginary sense, the writer as muscle-man, a la Hemingway—the pathfinder, the pioneer, the trailblazer who would go penetrate inhospitable habitats and return to write a magical story about man’s struggle with nature. A decade before his death, Cortazar, through evocative essays and introductions, established genealogical lines between himself and those he recognized as his precursors, making sure his oeuvre would be appreciated in the correct literary tradition. . . . Like few others, he seems to embody the refreshing spirit of renewal and innovation that prevailed in the Woodstock generation: art as liberator, art as excuse to innovate and unstabilize, to establish a bridge between and highbrow and pop culture. His name brings back memories of the Vietnam War and Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, an idol of the drugs-for-all fever that characterized the 1960s. But he was also an incredibly concentrated storyteller, one with a distinct world view, his oeuvre a masterful cornerstone in contemporary Latin American literature that led the Hispanic intelligentsia to new heights. So justice to his talents: The post-World War II novelistic and shortstory genres written in Spanish, and the renewal of the novel on an international scale, would simply be impossible without Julio Cortazar. Source: Ilan Stavans, ‘‘Justice to Julio Corta´zar,’’ in Southwest Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, Spring 1996.
Marian Zwerling Sugano In the following excerpt, Sugano demonstrates Corta´zar’s ability to create a photographic imagery to text in his writings. Does not the photographer—descendent of augurers and haruspices—uncover guilt in his pictures? (Walter Benjamin, ‘‘A Short History of Photography’’) Photography is a sort of a literature of objects. (Julio Cortazar)
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WHAT SEEMS TO FASCINATE CORTAZAR MOST IS THE CONJUNCTION OF THE MECHANICAL/ TECHNOLOGICAL WITH THE MAGICAL/RITUALISTIC: WHERE THE CAMERA AND TYPEWRITER MEET AND ACT AS A CONCRETIZING MEDIUM FOR THE QUASI-RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF WRITING OR ART.’’
In reading Julio Cortazar’s two major statements on the short story, ‘‘Some Aspects of the Short Story’’ (1963) and ‘‘On the Short Short Story and its Environs’’ (1969), one cannot but be struck by the multitude of analogies summoned to describe the art of that elusive prose-fiction genre. Unlike the critical essays of other well-known short-story writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Frank O’Connor, Eudora Welty, or Nadine Gordimer (four of those gathered in Charles May’s 1976 collection of Short Story Theories, for example), Cortazar’s essays seek to define this genre through a proliferation of metaphors drawn from widely disparate fields. Indeed, in addition to the photographic analogy, which I shall shortly be exploring in detail, in the brief space of the 1963 essay Cortazar likens the short story to a boxing match between the text and its reader (‘‘Some Aspects’’ 28); to a transgression of limits, an ‘‘explosion of spiritual energy,’’ a ‘‘bursting forth’’ or a ‘‘breakaway from the everyday’’ (29); to a macrocosmic galactic system (‘‘a good theme is like a good sun, a star with an orbiting planetary system, that, often, goes unnoticed till the writer, an astronomer of words, reveals to us its existence’’ [30]); to a microcosmic atomic system (‘‘a good theme is somehow atomic, like a nucleus with its orbiting electrons’’ [30]); and to the proverbial acorn (‘‘every enduring story is like the seed in which the giant tree lies sleeping. That tree will grow in us, will cast its shadow across our memory’’ [30]). In the 1969 essay Cortazar invokes a new panoply of metaphors. He refers to the necessary ‘‘spherity’’ of the short story’s closed form (‘‘Short Short Story’’ 34); to the advantages of the firstperson narrator (‘‘he’s inside the bubble and not behind the bubble-blower’’ [34]); to the writing of the short story as a kind of ‘‘exorcism’’ (35); and to
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its production as an extraction from a ‘‘looming mass,’’ from ‘‘the abominable glob you had to tear free of with words’’ (36). Although Cortazar also would contrast the short story with the novel and compare its genesis to poetry, here and in numerous theoretical statements in other essays, in countless interviews, and in the practice of the short story itself, Cortazar paradoxically attempts to move toward the essentials of the short story by moving away from the field of literature. Although the most cogent of Cortazar’s analogies for describing the impact of the short story may have been boxing (‘‘the novel always wins by points, whereas the short story has to win by a knockout’’ [‘‘Some Aspects’’ 28; translation modified]), his most extended metaphor for the art of short-story composition is photography. Other writers have employed this same interarts comparison. I am thinking of Robbe Grillet’s 1962 collection of stories entitled Instantanes (Snapshots), and Ionesco’s 1962 La photo du colonel (The Colonel’s Photo), but none have so thoroughly elaborated the equation of short-story writing to the practice of photography. In this essay I shall trace Cortazar’s use of the photographic analogy from his critical writings through his collage texts to the metatextual aspects of his stories themselves. I am interested in exploring the connections he makes between the cultural implications of the practice of photography and of the practice of literature and the way in which two stories in particular, ‘‘Blowup’’ (Las armas secretas [1958] translated as Secret Weapons) and ‘‘Apocalypse at Solentiname’’ (Alguien que anda por ahi [1977] translated as A Change of Light) probe the question of the writer’s engagement with society through themes that problematize photographic representation. In ‘‘Some Aspects of the Short Story’’ Cortazar opens his discussion of the ‘‘unique character of the short story’’ with what some theorists of the genre have considered its nemesis, its inevitable but ultimately defrauding comparison to the novel. But rather than simply contrasting the two narrative forms, Cortazar’s restructures the argument as a four-part homology using photography and cinema as the pivotal terms: The novel and the short story may be compared, using an analogy to cinema and photography, in that a film is in principle ‘‘openended,’’ like a novel, while a good photograph presupposes a strict delimitation beforehand, imposed in part by the narrow field the camera covers and the esthetic use the photographer makes of this limitation. (28)
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His argument is predicated on the structural equivalence of photo and short story, which he extends to liken critical discourse about photography to discourse about the story, mentioning the work of two major contemporary European photographers as representative: I don’t know whether you’ve heard a professional photographer talk about his art; I’m always surprised that it sounds so much as if it could be a short-story writer talking. Photographs as fine as Cartier-Bresson’s or Brassai’s define their art as an apparent paradox: that of cutting out a piece of reality, setting certain limits, but so that this piece will work as an explosion to fling open a much wider reality, like a dynamic vision that spiritually transcends the camera’s field of vision. (28)
Here the so highly vaunted ‘‘reality’’ of the photograph and, consequently, of the short story, is nothing but a given that will be immediately transgressed. The simple visual or literary anecdote is merely the pretext for an opening onto a greater reality. Unlike the director or the novelist, whose work is accumulative and synthetic, the photographer or writer has to choose and delimit an image or event that’s significant, not just in and of itself, but able to work upon the viewer or reader as a sort of opening, a fermentation that moves intelligence and sensibility out toward something far beyond the visual or literary anecdote the photo or story contains. (28)
Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria interprets this to mean that ‘‘the plot . . . is not the whole story; the story is encased within a situation that is charged with potential meaning in itself. . . . The situation, then, works as a sign, charged with multiple potential meanings that emerge in the telling of the story, the ‘utterance’ of that sign’’ (134). Gonzalez Echevarria quotes from an early (1947) review by Cortazar that states that most short stories are forgotten precisely because their ‘‘small universe’’ has a ‘‘cosmic deficiency’’ that prevents this essential ‘‘opening’’ onto a greater reality (138). For Cortazar, as Gonzalez Echevarria so aptly notes, the ‘‘enclosure device is not merely one mode of short-story writing but an ontological characteristic of the genre’’ (138). The analogy with the photograph, therefore, depends on the essential aspect of the frame as limit. In his lectures in 1980 at Berkeley, Cortazar once again invoked the photograph-short-story analogy, stating that ‘‘el encuadre tiene algo de fatal’’ (‘‘the framing has something fatal about it’’); it projects out of itself, as ‘‘with a shadow of another person that leads out of a photo.’’ The frame is at once
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that which defines the autonomous world of the photograph or short story and that which enables its necessary transgression, its explosive opening beyond that world. Indeed, variations on the words for ‘‘hole’’ or ‘‘opening’’ (‘‘agujero,’’ ‘‘abertura’’ or ‘‘apertura’’) recur repeatedly throughout Cortazar’s writings on the short story. In the essay that precedes his translation of Poe’s tales, Cortazar remarks on Poe’s ‘‘poetic’’ method, a total elimination of transitional material: ‘‘Poe is never a chronicler: his best stories are windows, openings of words’’ (‘‘agujeros de palabras’’) (qtd. in Mac Adam 21). In Cortazar’s own stories the fantastic is the vehicle of this opening, which in ‘‘On the Short Short Story and its Environs’’ he dramatizes as ‘‘the moment when the door—that before and after went to the vestibule—slowly draws open to let us see a meadow where a unicorn is whinnying’’ (37). For Cortazar, the ‘‘apparent paradox’’ of the photograph and the short story is precisely the conception of their space of representation at once as closed sphere and as ‘‘apertura.’’ Although Cortazar does not explicitly repeat the analogy between the short story and photography six years later in his essay ‘‘On the Short Short Story and its Environs,’’ the photographic metaphor nevertheless asserts itself, this time shifting from the scene of writing or the taking of the photograph (cutting a piece of reality, setting certain limits) to the moment of developing the photo or story. Cortazar’s description of the genesis of his tales is remarkably similar to the experience of a photographer watching a print develop before his eyes in the chemical solution in a darkroom: ‘‘There is the looming mass that’s the story. . . . And then the black tangle clears up as it moves forward; incredibly, things are extremely easy as if the story were already written in pressure sensitive ink and all you had to do was trace over it for the writing to flower to the surface’’ (36). What seems to fascinate Cortazar most is the conjunction of the mechanical/technological with the magical/ritualistic: where the camera and typewriter meet and act as a concretizing medium for the quasi-religious experience of writing or art.
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Cortazar’s statements, but rather in elaborating a kind of intertextuality that Cortazar himself sought in his collage books, an intersection of voices that will help us better articulate the relationship between photography and short-story writing. For both Cartier-Bresson and Brassai, what Cortazar called the ‘‘apparent paradox’’ of both limiting and transcending a ‘‘piece of reality’’ was central. CartierBresson claimed: ‘‘What I am desperately seeking is the one photograph that is self-sufficient in its rigour—but without claiming to be art, psychoanalysis or sociology—and in its intensity, and whose subject goes beyond the anecdotal’’ (qtd. in Bourdieu 142). Brassai compared his work to that of a novelist, stressing economy, the suppression of the superfluous, and the evocation of a ‘‘hidden life behind’’ the anecdotal facade: For me the photograph must suggest rather than insist or explain; just as a novelist offers his readers only a part of his creation—in leaving certain aspects unexpressed—so I think the photograph shouldn’t provide superfluous explanations of its subject. I’m thinking for example of certain facades of old houses, pierced with windows which no human presence could ever bring alive. Without knowing more about it I can imagine the sort of existence human beings lead behind walls like these. But better still, I should be able, by photographing it in a certain way to render completely tangible the hidden life behind. (qtd. in Durrell 13)
In a curious way, then, it would appear that both the photograph and the short story are at the height of their expressive function precisely when and as they move away from their ostensible subjects, when thematic content is displaced by a difficult to define ‘‘other.’’ For Cartier-Bresson, this displaced ‘‘greater reality’’ is approached when the photographer captures the ‘‘decisive moment,’’ the exact instant when action and composition coalesce to produce the most revealing arrangement. His theory of the ‘‘decisive moment’’ was to influence the entire generation of photographers that followed him: We work in unison with movement as though it were a presentiment of the way in which life itself unfolds. But inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. . . . If the shutter was released at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless. (47)
Following Cortazar’s invitation, I’d like to explore some of the key aspects of his photographyshort story analogy by juxtaposing his notions of the story with theoretical statements made by Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908) and Brassai (1899–1984), statements that Cortazar echoes in almost uncanny ways. In doing so I am of course not interested in establishing the photographers as sources for
. . . As Cortazar admitted in an interview with Evelyn Picon Garfield when questioned about
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photography’s relationship to his writing: ‘‘The idea of collage—photo and text—fascinates me. If I had technical means to print my own books, I believe I would keep on making collage-books’’ (12). Indeed, Cortazar’s collage books all combine texts and photos, and La vuelta al dia and Ultimo round include as well drawings, collage pages of posters, graffiti, and quotations; advertisements, poems, critical essays, stories, and prose writings of ambiguous generic categories and varying levels of linguistic formality, all presented in an unusual page format that incorporates the cover as part of the book, uses different typographies, and experiments with the possible recombinations of the page format. No longer do we read inexorably top to bottom, left to right, but the eye is free to dart across the page, randomly. By exploiting a vast array of techniques of juxtaposition, he breaks definitively with conventional notions of the original, single-voiced ‘‘authority’’ of the author, providing no guideposts for a ‘‘proper’’ order of the work, inviting his readers to participate fully in constructing the text. Cortazar, of course, developed this participatory esthetic throughout his works especially in the metacritical comments of the fictional author Morelli. In Territorios, in the introduction to the section on his experimental ‘‘poesia permutante,’’ he comments that every reader can be a player, and the result will always be a product of chance in those hands that give it its maximum opening or breadth (‘‘todo lector puede ser un jugador, el resultado sera siempre producto del azar en aquellas manos que le den su maxima apertura’’ [128]). He reads his own work as a collage of quotations in which he gathers his friends together, quoting Robert Lebel, who, he claims, described Vuelta perfectly when he said: ‘‘Everything you see in this room, or in fact in this building, was left here by the previous tenants. So you won’t find much that pertains to me, yet I prefer these random appurtenances. Their diversity keeps me from being limited to a single mode of reflection’’ (‘‘This Is the Way It Begins,’’Around the Day 5).
focus on the way in which photography as a metaphor for the short story is transformed into its basis, subject, theme, and critique. Both stories equate literature and photography as forms of representation that become increasingly problematic, revealing at once their utter inadequacy to capture the world and their unique status as vehicles to take us beyond what meets the eye. Both explode the myth of photography’s ability to register the direct, unmediated representation of experience by emphasizing the perfidious role of the machine (Contax camera or typewriter, Polaroid camera or slide projector) in the production of image or text. . . .
. . . Although Cortazar treats photography or cinematography in a number of his short stories such as ‘‘We Love Glenda So Much,’’ ‘‘Stopping Place,’’ ‘‘Press Clippings,’’ ‘‘Bad Timing,’’ and ‘‘Epilogue to a Story,’’ to name those in which the issues are raised with the greatest degree of complexity, he gives what I consider his finest and most complete statement about the relationship between the art of the short story and photography in ‘‘Blow-up’’ and ‘‘Apocalypse at Solentiname.’’ In my analysis I will
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Source: Marian Zwerling Sugano, ‘‘Beyond What Meets The Eye: The Photographic Analogy in Corta´zar’s Short Stories,’’ in Style, Vol. 27, No. 3, Fall 1993.
Calum Wise In the following review, Wise describes Corta´zar as an experimenter in the vein of James Joyce. ‘‘There was a time when I thought a lot about axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium of the Botanical Garden and spent hours just looking at them, watching their immobility, their obscure movements. And now I am an axolotl.’’ This short paragraph, the opening passage of one of Julio Cortazar’s best-known short stories, beautifully captures their narrative flow, in the course of which a transition occurs, concealed by subtle shifts of language, from one world to another. From a starting point firmly set within a familiar context, the reader is irresistibly drawn, by a sequence of commonplace details that accumulate until they gradually change the original setting, towards some completely different destination along an apparently uneventful route. It is rather as if, setting off from home in a precise direction and with a particular goal in view, you arrive in a totally unfamiliar place. But to discuss Cortazar’s work only in terms of transgressing the rules of narrative and scrapping the conventions would be to overlook this author’s greatest achievement: the creation of a multidimensional universe in which all the barriers are down, where there are only influences and gentle transitions, from life to death, from childhood to maturity, from bachelorhood to marriage—all of them cleavages that, in our everyday world, demand complex rites of passage but which Cortazar condenses to a few gentle and terribly intelligent words.
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Born in Brussels in 1914, a school teacher in Argentina, settled in Paris 1952, naturalized French 1981, translator for UNESCO, admirer of the French surrealist writer Alfred Jarry, died 1984—these are the bald facts. The rest is literature—in other words, immersion in a universe where the geometry of time and of the way the world is organized obeys much more complex, flexible and shifting laws than those that govern our daily life. This weighty 1,000-page volume—in which all Cortazar’s stories are gathered together between the same covers for the first time—includes, besides some novellas hitherto unpublished in French from a collection called Final del Juego, (1956; 1964), a collection of short stories unpublished even in Spanish, La otra orilla. These twelve stories, written between the end of the 1930s and 1945, are pure as the icy peaks of the Andes and scalpel-sharp. A few will remind some readers of certain early episodes in the US television series Twilight Zone, and all of them carry the emotional overload that was to make all his later writings so powerful. Over time, Cortazar’s texts became more complex. The narrative structures pile up and intermingle. Some could serve as the literary embodiments of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher’s visual paradoxes (‘‘Sobremesa’’ for example). Cortazar’s humour, present just below the surface, fluctuates between irony, the absurd, and a casual cynicism that he handles rather in the manner of Dino Risi (in Historias de cronopios y defamas, 1962, for example). Sometimes, however, it blows up into a storm of frightening and devastating force, like some wild scene carefully constructed by Fellini and Pasolini together, as in Los menades, which describes a concert of classical music where, in essence, nothing happens beyond what the reader is capable of imagining.
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instant and half-admits that his gigantic scheme is nothing less than that of demolishing reality. With a nuanced style and sensitivity much more subtle than the science-fiction of Philip Dick but showing the same keen intelligence (born of a hyper-acute awareness of the surrounding world) so keen that it can sometimes transfix us without our noticing, he pierces the flesh of the West at certain sensitive points in a kind of literary acupuncture of modern mythology, opening up intriguing and dizzying perspectives on the flaws in our universe. In metaphysics as in syntax, in the writing as in the subject matter, Cortazar is an experimenter. This relationship between author and text, which has the effect of placing the reader on the stage while the writer remains in the wings, is neatly and precisely illustrated in a very short story called ‘‘Continuidad de los parques,’’ a flamboyant—and, to the protagonist, fatal—demonstration of Cortazar’s ability to twist a story around on itself, to wring the neck of all logical reasoning and to replace it by an apparent irrationality. In this trompel’oeil of a tale the reader passes at lightning speed from the story proper into the story within the story, which finally replaces the story and thus becomes defacto the story itself.
The French critic Jacqueline Outin has written that ‘‘one of the problems that most preoccupies Cortazar is that of time: he wants to destroy conventional notions about it. . . . ’’ The best example of this occurs in ‘‘The Man Who Lies in Wait,’’ an internalized account of the downfall of a diabolically gifted cannabis-smoking jazz saxophonist, who breaks off in the middle of the best recording sessions to accuse the other musicians of playing something that he ‘‘has already played tomorrow.’’ More than merely exploring a theme or a problem, Cortazar here shows his writer’s hand for an
This entire volume has about it a terrible feeling of latent anguish, an elusive undercurrent running through every story—the muffled and ceaseless murmur of a nearby river from which the damp can be felt rising yet which remains always out of sight, hidden by exuberant literary vegetation. In ‘‘Relato con un fondo de agua,’’ the vision the narrator has of his own corpse drifting gently by under the sparkling radiance of tropical moonlight is very revealing of the writer’s fears of an underlying despair that, like the thinner used in tempera painting, tinges all his work. Even more revealing is his highly ambiguous way of dealing with childhood, a recurrent theme in Cortazar and one which, of all his themes, undoubtedly benefits the most from his peerless style. Mario Vargas Llosa has described that style as follows: ‘‘A style which marvelously imitates the spoken word, the fluid casualness of daily conversation, the spontaneous expression, without embellishment or pretension, of the man in the street. Of course, it’s all an illusion. . . . The language of Cortazar is itself a fiction, magnificently wrought, an artifice so effective that it seems natural, a way of speaking that is drawn from life. . . . ’’
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To enter the world of Cortazar is what it must be like to travel weightless in space so radically are one’s perceptions overturned that one is left for a while disoriented. He and James Joyce must be the only writers who could spurn the structural limits of language and thus convey to the reader the vision of a certain field of literary and human expression where the rational becomes no more than a special aspect of the fantastic. Source: Calum Wise, ‘‘Julio Corta´zar, a Literary Acupuncturist,’’ in UNESCO Courier, Vol. 46, No. 10, October 1993.
Amaryll B. Chanaday In the following excerpt, Chanaday discusses the themes of the supernatural, escape from convention, and the quest for the absolute prevalent in Corta´zar’s work. . . . Nevertheless he had been assiduously writing short stories for some time. In that year, he published his first collection of stories, Bestiario, which contains some of his best-known short prose. These carefully structured and polished narratives introduce two themes that reappear in his later work—the presence of the mysterious and unusual in our everyday world, and the stifling force of convention. In ‘‘Omnibus,’’ a young girl boards a bus in which all the passengers are carrying flowers on the way to the cemetery. Since the girl, Clara, and a young stranger who sits beside her are the only people without flowers, all the other travellers stare at them with hostility. After all the passengers with flowers have left the bus, Clara and her companion are physically threatened by the driver at every stop until they escape at their destination. There they immediately buy flowers and are happy that they are like everyone else again. Read on a literal level, the story is a suspenseful narrative about an extraordinary and frightening experience, but on the symbolic level, it illustrates people’s intolerance towards what is different, and depicts the distress of the outsider. ‘‘Carta a una sen˜orita en Parı´ s’’ can also be read on this double level. More than just a fantastic story about a man’s stay in an apartment that is progressively destroyed by the rabbits he vomits at regular intervals, it is also a symbolic account of rebellion against the fastidiously tidy and well-furnished home of a financially successful friend. It is not a liberating rebellion, but one that leads to the protagonist’s insanity and suicide. In ‘‘Lejana’’ (‘‘The Distances’’), a young and wealthy Buenos Aires socialite, Alina Reyes, feels that she is being suffocated by an endless
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round of parties and cocktails with their superficial conversations and conventional rituals. She imagines she has a double in Budapest, a beggar who shivers in the cold and leads the authentic life that is denied to the materially comfortable Alina Reyes. On a subsequent trip to Budapest, Alina meets her double, exchanges identities and casts off her former self to become the beggar. ‘‘Bestiario’’ is the story of a family that inexplicably keeps a tiger roaming freely through the house, while the inhabitants are careful to stay out of its way. A young relative who comes for a visit upsets this order when she lies to the family about the tiger’s location and thus causes the death of her uncle. Another well-known story in the 1951 collection is ‘‘Casa tomada’’ (‘‘House Taken Over’’) in which an elderly couple is driven out of their home by mysterious noises. In all these narratives, the supernatural and the extraordinary appear as an integral part of life. They are neither questioned nor rejected as implausible by the narrator or the characters, and are seen by the reader as a forceful expression of hidden impulses and social tensions. In his next volume of short stories, Final del juego (1956), Corta´zar continues to juxtapose the natural and the supernatural. ‘‘Axolotl’’ is the story of a man who pays daily visits to an aquarium in order to stare with fascination at the axolotl, a type of larval salamander, until he himself is transformed into one. In ‘‘El idolo de las Cı´ cladas’’ (‘‘The Idol of the Cyclades’’), two men are mysteriously coerced by the statue of a pagan goddess to commit human sacrifice. In this anthology, we also see the emergence of a theme that reappears frequently in Corta´zar’s fiction—that of the figure. According to the Argentinian author, people and events are united in ‘‘constellations’’ or ‘‘figures,’’ that are often unknown to the individuals. A figure may be created by the resemblances between two strangers, the relationship between a man and a woman, or the meeting of a group of people. In ‘‘Una flor amarilla’’ (‘‘A Yellow Flower’’), a middle-aged man recognizes his double in the fourteen-year-old Luc, and realizes that instead of dying, he will be reincarnated in an infinite series ‘‘of poor devils repeating the figure without knowing it, convinced of their liberty and free will.’’ When Luc dies, the protagonist is happy that his unsuccessful life will not be continued by subsequent doubles. But the sight of a yellow flower suddenly reminds him of the horrible threat of nothingness, since he knows that after his death there will be no reincarnated double to appreciate the beauty of flowers. ‘‘La noche boca arriba’’
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(‘‘The Night Face Up’’) also depicts a figure, that of the resemblance between an injured man on a twentieth-century operating table and a sacrificial victim of the Aztecs many centuries earlier. After alternating presentations of both scenes, the modern protagonist is finally described as the sacrificial victim. . . . Source: Amaryll B. Chanaday, ‘‘Julio Corta´zar’s Fiction: The Unfinished Quest,’’ in Antigonish Review, No. 57, Spring 1984, pp. 45–53.
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MY IDEA WAS TO MAKE THE ACTION PROGRESS AND TO STOP IT EXACTLY AT THE MOMENT IN WHICH THE READER WOULD BE TRAPPED, IN ORDER TO THEN GIVE HIM A KICK SO AS TO MAKE HIM RETURN OBJECTIVELY TO VIEW THE BOOK FROM THE OUTSIDE, FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION.’’
Evelyn Picon Garfield In the following interview, Corta´zar discusses his novels’ themes, their appeal to younger readers, and their place in Latin American literature. [Garfield]: With Historia de cronopios y de famas (Cronopios and Famas) and Rayuela, you begin to alter reality, to search for authenticity in life and literature, utilizing a good dose of humor and optimism. [Corta´zar]: In the case of my books, altering reality is a desire, a hope. But it seems important to point out that my books are not written nor were experienced or conceived under the pretense of changing reality. There are people who write as a contribution to the modification of reality. I know that modifying reality is an infinitely slow and difficult undertaking. My books do not function in that sense. A philosopher develops a philosophical system convinced that it is the truth and will modify reality because he supposes he’s right. A sociologist establishes a theory. A politician also pretends to change the world. My case is much more modest. Let’s say Oliveira is speaking: let’s return to one of the constant themes in Rayuela. I am firmly convinced, each day more profoundly, that we are embarked on the wrong road. That is to say that humanity took the wrong path. I’m speaking, above all, of Western man because I know little about the Orient. We have taken an historically false road that is carrying us directly into a definite catastrophe, annihilation by whatever means—war, air pollution, contamination, fatigue, universal suicide, whatever you please. So in Rayuela, above all, there is that continuous feeling of existing in a world that is not what it should be. Here let me make an important parenthetical statement. There have been critics who have thought Rayuela to be a profoundly pessimistic book in the sense that it only laments the state of affairs. I believe it is a profoundly optimistic book because Oliveira, despite his quarrelsome nature, as we Argentinians say, his fits of anger, his mental
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mediocrity, his incapacity to reach beyond certain limits, is a man who knocks himself against the wall, the wall of love, of daily life, of philosophical systems, of politics. He hits his head against all that because he is essentially an optimist, because he believes that one day, not for him but for others, that wall will fall and on the other side will be the kibbutz of desire, the millennium, authentic man, the humanity he’s dreamt of but which had not been a reality until that moment. Rayuela was written before my political and ideological stand, before my first trip to Cuba. I realized many years later that Oliveira is a little like Lenin, and don’t take this as a pretense. It is an analogy in the sense that both are optimists, each in his own way. Lenin would not have fought so if he had not believed in man. One must believe in man. Lenin is profoundly optimistic, the same as Trotsky. Just as Stalin is a pessimist, Lenin and Trotsky are optimists. And Oliveira in his small, mediocre way is also. Because the alternative is to shoot oneself or simply keep on living and accepting all that is good in life. The Western world has many good things. So the general idea in Rayuela is the realization of failure and the hope to triumph. The book proposes no solutions; it limits itself simply to showing the possible ways of knocking down the wall to see what’s on the other side. You’ve said that in Rayuela there is no theory or philosophy that attempts to change reality; nevertheless, one of the ways to do just that is not with philosophy but by means of the experience of an anguished man who doesn’t accept reality as it is. That serves much more as a model for youth than a textbook in philosophy. I’m going to tell you something I’ve already said to others. When I wrote Rayuela I thought I’d written a book for people my age, of my generation.
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When the book was published in Buenos Aires and read in Latin America, I was surprised to receive letters, hundreds of letters, and of each one hundred, ninety-eight were from very young people, even from adolescents in some cases, who didn’t understand the whole book. At any rate, they had reacted to the book in a way I’d never imagined when I wrote it. The great surprise for me was that people of my age, my generation, did not understand anything. The first criticism of Rayuela was indignant. They didn’t understand Historia de Cronopios y de famas either. Of course, not at all. But Rayuela means more to me, in a certain sense, than the cronopios. The cronopios are a great game for me, my pleasure. Rayuela is not; it was a sort of metaphysical commitment, a kind of personal probe, besides. And then I discovered that Rayuela was destined for youth and not men of my age. I never would have imagined that when I wrote it. Why? Why was it the young who found something that impressed them, that made an impact on them? I believe it’s because there is no lesson in Rayuela. Young people don’t like to be given lessons. Adults accept certain ones; youngsters don’t. There they found their own questions, the everyday anguish of adolescence and early youth, the fact that they don’t feel comfortable in the world they live in, their parents’ world. And notice, that when Rayuela was published, there were no hippies yet, no ‘‘angry young men.’’ At that moment Osborne’s book appeared. But there was a generation that began to look at their parents and say to them, ‘‘You’re not right. You’re not giving us what we want. You are passing on an inheritance we don’t accept.’’ Rayuela only had a repertory of questions, issues, and anguish that youth felt in an amorphous fashion because it was not intellectually equipped to write about them or think of them and it found a book that contained them all. Rayuela contained that whole world of dissatisfaction, of a search for the ‘‘kibbutz of desire,’’ to use Oliveira’s metaphor. That explains how the book was important to the young people rather than to the old. It is for that very reason that the book acts as a ‘‘traveling companion,’’ a kindred soul. That’s why it seems so optimistic to me. Of course, I also feel that way, although there are those who see only negative aspects in it. Oliveira is very negative, but he is so because deep down he’s searching for the kibbutz.
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The book is not negative. There is no way that Oliveira can leap from the window onto the hopscotch board. He doesn’t leap. No, no. I’m sure he doesn’t. Me, too. Of course, completely sure. Knowing that, how can one say the book is pessimistic? But there are critics who have said that the book ‘‘ends finally with the suicide of the protagonist.’’ Oliveira does not commit suicide. He is not capable of doing that, but he is capable of living. He ends up discovering to what extent Traveler and Talita love him. He cannot kill himself after that. He was waiting for Traveler because he thought Traveler was coming to kill him. But the conversation they have proves to him that it isn’t so. Besides, Talita is downstairs. The enemies are the other stupid ones like the hospital director. Oliveira doesn’t jump, he remains at the window thinking that all that’s left is to simply jump, but I know he does not do it. But I couldn’t say it, Evie. No, to say it would destroy the book. Destroy everything. To say he doesn’t kill himself is to destroy the book. The idea is that you or any other reader must decide. So you decide, the same as I, that Oliveira does not commit suicide. But there are readers who decide he does. Well, too bad for them. The reader is the accomplice, he has to decide. Of course, it is a very optimistic book. Yes. . . . Contrary to what some novelists experience, it seems the final pages of a novel are not difficult for you to write. Only the beginning is difficult for me, very difficult. Proof of the matter is that some of my books didn’t really begin where they finally do for the reader. Rayuela, for example, began in the middle. The first chapter I wrote was about Talita aloft on the boards. I hadn’t the least idea of what I’d write before or after that section. The beginning of a book is always very difficult for me. For example, I began 62: modelo para armar (62: A Model Kit) three times. It was the hardest book for me to write because the rules of the game were very tough and I wanted to respect them. I didn’t have much freedom in that book. I had another kind of liberty that appeared later on, but not at the beginning. I must have mentioned what happened with ‘‘El perseguidor’’ (‘‘The Pursuer’’). It was
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practically a miracle that story was written. It would have been finally logical for it to have been lost forever. I’ll tell you the story. In Paris, when I read the news of Charlie Parker’s death, I discovered that he was the character I’d been looking for. I’d thought of a painter, a writer, but that wasn’t appropriate because I wanted the character of the pursuer to have a very limited intelligence, a little like Oliveira also, that is an average man, even a mediocre man, but down deep not really mediocre because he has a kind of personal grandeur or genius. An intellectual character starts at once to think brilliantly, like a Thomas Mann character. When Charlie Parker died, I realized (knowing about many aspects of his life) that he was my character, a man of limited mental capacity but with a sort of genius for something, in this case, music. I invented his metaphysical search. So I sat down at the typewriter to write and turned out the whole part that begins when Bruno goes one night to the hotel to talk with Johnny. Then I had a mental block. I didn’t know what to do. So those fifteen or twenty pages remained shoved away in a drawer for months. I went to Geneva to work for the United Nations, and those pages were among the papers I took with me. All alone in a pension one Sunday, bored, I began to look at those papers. ‘‘What the hell is this?’’ I said to myself. I reread those fifteen or twenty pages all at once, sat down at the typewriter, and in two days I finished the story. But I could have lost those pages. That should answer your question a little about beginnings and endings. The endings are not difficult for me; they almost write themselves. There’s a kind of pace. The whole ending of Rayuela that takes place in the insane asylum was written in forty-eight hours in an almost hallucinatory state—if I must say so myself. . . . When you write, how do you choose the genre? I don’t. Before I begin, I have a general idea of what I want and I know automatically it has to be a short story. Or I know it is the first step towards a novel. But I don’t deliberate over it. The idea from which the short story is to be born already has the shape of a short story, its limits. Even long stories like ‘‘Reunio´n’’ (‘‘Meeting’’) or ‘‘Las babas del diablo.’’ I knew they were not novels but short stories. On the other hand, I sense at times that some elements begin to coalesce: they are much broader and more complex and require the novelistic form. 62 is a good example of that case. At first I began with a few very confused notions: the
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idea of that psychic vampirism that is later translated into the character of Helene. The idea of Juan as a character. Immediately, I understood that that was not a story, that it had to be developed as an extended novel. And that’s when I thought of chapter 62 in Rayuela and said to myself that this was the opportunity to try to apply it in practice to see if it could work. To try to write a novel in which psychological elements did not occupy center stage but rather the characters would be dominated by what I called a ‘‘figure’’ or a constellation. And they would react by doing things without knowing they were moved by other forces. If you could save only five books from a fire that would consume all other books in the world, which ones would you pick? That’s the kind of question you cannot answer while the tape recorder is on. Should we turn it off? No, because then the answer will be too pat, too well thought out. You say books, I don’t know; I think, for example, that one of the five works that I would like to save is a poem, a poem by Keats. Do you understand? Yes. One of them. Which one? Any one of the ones I love, the great odes: ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’ or ‘‘Ode to Nightingale’’ or ‘‘To-Autumn,’’ the great moments of Keats’s maturity. And while we’re talking about poetry, I’d like to save the Duino Elegies by Rilke. But five is an absurd number. I know it’s an absurd number and it’s very difficult, but I’d like to know now, right now. OK. There’s a book of prose that I’d save, Ulysses. I think Ulysses is somehow the sum of universal literature. That would be one of the five books. I really should have punished you for this kind of question. Do you know how Oscar Wilde answered? They were more generous with him. They asked which ten books he would save. And Oscar Wilde answered, ‘‘Look, up till now I have only written six.’’ You’re very humble to have not included any of your books. I don’t have to, I always carry them within me. And what about Marx?
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I was thinking of literature. Of course, when you said books, I should have thought, from the historic point of view, of course, Marx and Plato’s dialogues. You already have four of five. And now I’m almost ashamed to ask if you would have chosen the same books ten years ago when you wrote Rayuela? Yes, except perhaps for Marx. Because when I wrote Rayuela, problems of an ideological or political nature didn’t interest me as they did afterwards. Perhaps the only exception would be Marx. . . . Many consider Rayuela to be the height of your work and that after such a book it would not be possible to achieve anything better. Now, after having written more works and after about ten years, what would you say about that comment? It’s not the kind of comment I like very much, because deep down, everything is a question of perspective. Ten years from the time when Rayuela was published (today makes exactly ten years), it is already a big boy. I agree with the critics. If you were to ask me, ‘‘Which of your books has meant more to you?’’ I would answer Rayuela. But the world is moving along at a vertiginous pace and I would like to know if twenty years from now literature will still be written on this planet or if it will be substituted by some audio-visual system. I don’t know. I’d like to know what the perspective will be twenty years from now. I’ve read a lot of comparative literature from years ago and I’ve seen to what extent the critics have erred in their assessment of books by certain authors. Five or ten years after the publication of a book, they thought book H was a masterpiece and all the others by that author were inferior. But twenty-five years later, book H went downhill and another, by that same author, that seemed less important, suddenly took on new significance. So there is relativity and a changing perspective. But, now, ten years after, yes, I believe Rayuela is the best. If I had to take one of my books with me to the desert island, I’d take along Rayuela. Rayuela rather than the short stories? Yes, yes. Well, if you take the short stories in their entirety as a sort of a great cycle . . . no, I’d take Rayuela! You’re less fantastic than I had thought, Don’t comment on that! No. No comment.
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What influence has Rayuela had on Latin American writers? I’m not afraid to say things that many of my fellow writers will immediately interpret as proof of my vanity because in Latin America one of the many taboos that still must be conquered is false modesty. It’s supposed to be good manners to be modest, and of course, to refrain from saying certain things clearly. I’m not modest nor am I vain. But I have a good idea of who I am and of what I’ve accomplished. So I can say that Rayuela has profoundly altered a good part of Latin American fiction in the last ten years. The impact was enormous on the young people who began to write in those years. The influence has been good and bad. The negative repercussions were like those from the Borges’ imitators. Many little ‘‘rayuelas’’ have been published all over the place, consciously or unconsciously, using procedures like those in Rayuela. Most of it is very mediocre. On the other hand, there was another kind of influence, a sort of liberation from prejudices, from taboos on the level of language. Adan Buenosayres by Leopoldo Marechal had already been a great liberator of the Argentinian language. I feel that Rayuela has also contributed a lot to that. It has made people take off their tie to write. It has also been mentioned that the best parts of Rayuela are found in specific episodes that are almost like short stories. I call them ‘‘happenings’’ in my book about you and surrealism. They are the chapters like the one about Rocamadour’s death. Do you think your long apprenticeship as a shortstory writer served you well in these scenes or is there another reason for their success? Probably my profession as a short-story writer was valuable in the sense that it enabled me to narrate a long episode that had certain unity. But contrary to the many readers who have a passion for these chapters in Rayuela and who remember them most, I like them least, because Rayuela was purposely designed to destroy that notion of the hypnotic story. I wanted a reader to be free, as free as possible. Morelli says it all the time, that the reader has to be an accomplice and not a passive reader (‘‘lector hembra’’). In those chapters I allowed myself to be carried away a little by the drama, by the narration; I betrayed myself. I realized later on that the readers had become hypnotized by the intensity of those episodes. I would prefer those chapters didn’t exist in that way. My idea was to make the action progress and to stop it exactly at the moment in which the reader would be
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trapped, in order to then give him a kick so as to make him return objectively to view the book from the outside, from another dimension. That was the plan. Evidently I was not totally successful. But from that point of view, I like those chapters the least.
Corta´zar, Julio, ‘‘House Taken Over,’’ in Blow-Up and Other Stories, translated by Paul Blackburn, Collier Books, 1968; originally published in End Game and Other Stories, Pantheon, 1967.
Nevertheless, you told me that the chapter about Talita balancing on the boards was the first one that you wrote.
Filer, Malva E., ‘‘The Ambivalence of the Hand in Corta´zar’s Fiction,’’ in Books Abroad, Vol. 50, No. 3, Summer 1976, pp. 595–99.
Of course, and the explanation is quite simple. It was the first one because at that moment I hadn’t the slightest idea yet of what the book would be like later on nor what my intentions would be. Morelli had not yet been born. He arrived later. Then I began to write a novel. Now that you’ve mentioned the ‘‘lector hembra,’’ the passive reader, would you like to repeat what you told me last night? Yes, I ask you women to forgive me for having used such a ‘‘machista’’ expression so typical of Latin American underdevelopment. And you ought to put that in your interview. I did it innocently and I have no excuses; but when I began to hear opinions of my friends who are women readers, who insulted me cordially, I realized that I had done something stupid. I should have written ‘‘passive reader’’ and not ‘‘female reader,’’ because a woman doesn’t have to be continually passive; she is in certain circumstances, but not in others, the same as a ‘‘macho.’’ Source: Evelyn Picon Garfield, ‘‘An Interview with Julio Corta´zar,’’ in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall 1983, pp. 5–21.
Crassweller, Robert, Pero´n and the Enigmas of Argentina, W. W. Norton, 1988.
Holmes, Amanda, ‘‘Residential Unhomes in Short Stories by Julio Corta´zar and Ilse Aichinger,’’ in Short Story Criticism, Vol. 76, edited by Joseph Palmisano, Thomson Gale, 2005, pp. 246–64, originally published in Neophilologus, Vol. 87, No. 2, April 2003, pp. 246–64. Lewis, Daniel K., The History of Argentina, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Linguanti, Elsa, Francesco Casotti, and Carmen Concilio, eds., Coterminous Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English, Rodopi, 1999. McNab, Pamela, ‘‘Julio Corta´zar’s Axolotl: Literary Archaeology of the Unreal,’’ in Short Story Criticism, Vol. 76, edited by Joseph Palmisano, Thomson Gale, 2005, pp. 12–22; originally published in International Fiction Review, Vol. 24, Nos. 1–2, 1997, pp. 12–22. Morello-Frosch, Marta, ‘‘From Beasts to Bolts,’’ in Books Abroad, Vol. 44, No. 1, Winter 1970, pp. 22–25. Standish, Peter, Understanding Julio Corta´zar, University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Turner, Frederick C., and Jose Enrique Miguens, Juan Pero´n and the Reshaping of Argentina, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Varona-Lacey, Gladys, Contemporary Latin American Literature: Original Selections from the Literary Giants for Intermediate and Advanced Students, McGraw-Hill, 2001.
FURTHER READING SOURCES Angulo, Marı´ a-Elena, Magic Realism: Social Context and Discourse, illustrated ed., Routledge, 1995. ‘‘Argentina,’’ in CIA World Fact Book, https://www.cia.gov/ library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ar.html (accessed August 31, 2009). Boldy, Steven, ‘‘Julio Corta´zar,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 113, Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers, First Series, edited by William Luis, Gale Research, 1992, pp. 119–33. Chanady, Amaryll B., ‘‘Julio Corta´zar’s Fiction: The Unfinished Quest,’’ in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 34, edited by Sharon K. Hall, Vol. 34, Gale Research, 1985, pp. 45–53; originally published in Antigonish Review, Spring 1984, pp. 45–53.
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Foss, Clive, Juan and Eva Pero´n, History Press, new ed., 2006. Foss presents an in-depth biography of the couple who forever changed the social and political landscape of twentieth-century Argentina. He traces their simultaneous rise to power and the controversy they stirred. Foss also discusses Eva’s pivotal role in her husband’s success. Garcı´ a Marquez, Gabriel, Love in the Time of Cholera, Knopf, 1988. An iconic novel by an iconic magical realist, Love in the Time of Cholera tells the story of Florentino Ariza and his lifelong, mostly onesided love affair with Fermina Daza. Plascencia, Salvador, The People of Paper, Mariner Books, 2006.
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This novel is an example of contemporary magical realism, featuring a lyrical approach to the creation of art fueled by a sense of loss. Examples of magical realist imagery are frequent. For instance, a woman made of paper is brought to life, and a dead cat is resurrected by a transplant of paper organs. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Duke University Press, 1995.
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This accessible introduction to magical realism examines the literary style beyond its Latin American roots. The editors find magical realism to be a worldwide phenomenon, and they explore fictional and critical literature in support of their claims. Works from North America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and Australia are analyzed at length. The overarching view places magical realism in a vast literary context and continuum of styles.
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How Much Land Does a Man Need? ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ is a short story by Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1886. It was first translated into English by Aline Delano as ‘‘How Much Land a Man Needs’’ in In the Pursuit of Happiness (1887). A translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude appeared in Twenty-three Tales in 1906 and was reprinted many times. The story can also be found in How Much Land Does a Man Need? and Other Stories (1994), edited by A. N. Wilson in the Penguin Classics series. An abridged (and less effective) version of the story appears in The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, edited by William J. Bennett (1993).
LEO TOLSTOY 1886
‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ is Tolstoy’s retelling of a Russian folktale about one peasant’s greed for land. It is one of about twenty short stories that Tolstoy wrote in the 1880s. These stories were published in cheap editions, as Tolstoy intended them to be read and enjoyed by the common people. He also believed that literature should teach people how to live; it should contain a moral lesson. This didactic purpose is clear in ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?,’’ but the story is more than a moral parable. It is also a compelling, tightly organized short story by a literary master that moves inexorably to its chilling conclusion.
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in a marriage that was happy at first but later turned sour. Tolstoy began working on his masterpiece, the novel War and Peace, in 1863. The first part was published in 1865, with the final volumes appearing in 1869. This novel, set in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, established Tolstoy as one of the world’s great writers. In 1873 he began work on what would become his second great novel, Anna Karenina, which was published between 1875 and 1877. Not long after this, Tolstoy went through a spiritual crisis in which he looked for a meaning to life. His long essay A Confession (distributed in 1882) chronicles the state of despair into which he sank, in which he even contemplated suicide. He recovered by embracing religious faith, although he soon grew disillusioned with the dogmas of the Orthodox Church. A number of his nonfiction works from this period, including What I Believe (written in 1883, but published in 1884), were banned by the authorities. In 1884, Tolstoy cofounded his own publishing company, The Intermediary, to produce edifying literature for the masses. ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ was one of the short stories published by Intermediary in 1886, the same year that another notable story by Tolstoy, ‘‘The Death of Ivan Ilych,’’ appeared.
Leo Tolstoy (The Library of Congress)
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Leo Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828, at Yasnaya Polyana, an estate in Tula province, Russia. Both his parents died before he was nine years old. The young Tolstoy was not a good student, failing his entrance examinations at Kazan University in 1844 but passing them some months later. He decided to study law, but dropped out of the university’s law school in 1847. As a young man he led a rather wild life, accumulating heavy gambling debts in Moscow and St. Petersburg. But he did make efforts to improve the lives of the peasants on his estate and even started a school for their children. In 1852, Tolstoy’s first literary work, Childhood, was published. In that year, Tolstoy joined the army and served in the Caucasus, nearly getting killed by a grenade. He also fought in the Crimean War from 1853 to 1856. His Sevastopol Stories (1855–1856) made him a literary celebrity in Russia. Retiring from the army in 1856, he spent much of the remainder of the decade traveling in Europe.
Other important works from this late period in Tolstoy’s life include the story ‘‘Master and Man’’ (1895) and the novel Resurrection (1899). In 1901, Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church, but by this time he was a revered figure throughout the world not only for his literary achievements but also for his stance as a pacifist and proponent of progressive social reform. One of his last works was I Cannot Be Silent (1908), an essay opposing capital punishment. After years of increasing friction with his wife, Tolstoy left his home in late October 1910. He became ill and died in a railroad station at Astapovo, Russia, ten days later, on November 7, at the age of eighty-two.
In 1862, Tolstoy married eighteen-year-old Sofya Behrs; they were to produce thirteen children
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PLOT SUMMARY Part 1 ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ begins with one woman who lives in a city visiting her younger sister in the country. The elder sister is married to a successful tradesman, while the
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younger sister is married to a peasant in the village. The elder sister boasts about the advantages of living in the city: her family enjoys a very comfortable lifestyle. This annoys her sister, who insists that she would not want to live in a city with more money than she needs. She says that people in that situation often lose everything they have. In contrast, she says, although she and her husband will never get rich, they will always have enough to eat. The women continue to argue, and the younger sister says that in the town there are many temptations. The Devil may tempt her husband with gambling, drink, and women.
are forced to pay fines. The neighbors start to bear a grudge against him. After one peasant cuts down five of Pahom’s lime trees, Pahom is angry. He decides that a peasant named Simon is the culprit. He brings a complaint against Simon, but Simon is acquitted at the trial, since there is no evidence against him. Pahom accuses the judges of letting a thief go free, and he gets even more unpopular with his neighbors.
The younger sister’s husband, Pahom, listens to the argument. He thinks to himself that yes, the peasants work so hard they have no time for temptations. But there is one problem: the peasants do not have enough land. He thinks that if he had enough land, he would not even fear the Devil.
Pahom offers a meal and shelter to a visiting peasant, who tells him that many peasants from Pahom’s area have been moving to a place beyond the river Volga. They had each been granted twenty-five acres of good land by the commune (the village community of peasants), and they were flourishing.
The Devil, who had been sitting behind the stove and listening, knows what Pahom was thinking. He thinks to himself that he will have a contest with Pahom. He will give the peasant land but will through that means get Pahom in his power.
Pahom decides to investigate. That summer he makes the journey of hundreds of miles to the place the peasant spoke of. He finds that everything the peasant said was true. In the autumn he returns home and sells his land and cattle. In the spring, he heads off with his family for the new place.
He hears a rumor that many of the peasants are moving to a new area. He does not want to move and hopes to acquire more land where he is, since he has convinced himself that he does not have enough to be comfortable.
Part 2 Close to the village lives a lady who owns an estate of three hundred acres. She employs a steward who keeps fining the peasants when a horse or a cow strays onto the lady’s property. This upsets Pahom. One winter the lady wants to sell her land. The peasants get together and try to buy the land collectively, so that they all hold it in common. But they cannot agree on this plan and eventually decide to buy portions of the land individually, according to what each person can afford. Pahom uses his savings, sells some property, borrows some money, and manages to buy forty acres. He agrees to pay for half of it immediately, with the remainder due in two years. Pahom is now a landowner. He has good harvests and soon pays off his debt. He is happy.
Part 4
The only problem Pahom has is that the neighboring peasants trespass on his land with their cattle and horses. At first he tries to be understanding. He knows that the peasants do not have much land, and he refuses to prosecute them. But after a while he loses patience, and a few of the peasants
When he arrives he joins the peasant commune of a large village, and he and his sons are given 125 acres. He is ten times better off than before and has all he needs. But then he finds that he wants to grow more wheat on his share of the communal land than he is allowed to. He rents some land and grows more wheat, but the crop is ten miles from the village and Pahom finds this inconvenient. For three years he has good crops but he grows tired of having to rent land and having to compete with other peasants to get it. He decides to buy some land and is about to buy thirteen hundred acres from a peasant. But then a dealer stops by and tells Pahom that he has just returned from the land of the Bashkirs. The Bashkirs, a nomadic people, live a long way away. The dealer says he has bought thirteen thousand acres for a mere one thousand rubles. This is much less than Pahom was going to pay for a tenth of that amount of land in his current area. The dealer says that all he had to do was befriend the Bashkir chiefs and present them with some gifts, and in return he got all that
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excellent land at a very cheap price. Pahom expresses interest in purchasing land from the Bashkir.
Part 5 Pahom takes a servant with him and travels three hundred miles to the Bashkirs, who live in tents and seem to live an easy life. They do not work on the land but spend their days eating mutton and cheese and drinking kumys, made from cows’ milk. They are simple but good-natured folk and make Pahom feel welcome. He gives them some gifts and they are delighted. They ask him what he would like in return and he replies that he would like some land. The Bashkirs are happy to give him as much land as he wants.
Part 6 The Bashkir chief arrives, and Pahom offers him some gifts, which the chief accepts. The chief agrees to let Pahom take as much land as he wants. Pahom asks for a title deed so that he can be assured that the land will really be his and cannot be taken from him. The chief agrees, and then says that the price of the land will be one thousand rubles a day. This means that Pahom can have as much land as he can walk around in a day. The only condition is that if he does not return by sunset to the same place where he started, he will lose his money. The chief tells Pahom that he can mark the land he passes by digging a hole and piling up the turf. Pahom is pleased and agrees to mark out the land starting at sunrise the next day.
Part 7 During the night, Pahom plans to cover a circuit of thirty-five miles the following day. He is full of ideas of what he will do with all that land. He lies awake almost all night, but as he dozes off near dawn he has a dream. In the dream he hears someone outside laughing. He goes outside and finds the Bashkir chief laughing. But when Pahom asks him why he is laughing, he sees that it is not the chief but the dealer who first told him about the Bashkir land. Then he sees that it is not the dealer but the peasant who had come to him and told him about the region where he currently owned land. Then finally Pahom sees that the figure is in fact the Devil. In front of the Devil lies a dead man, and Pahom sees that the dead man is himself. He wakes up horrified, but it is nearly dawn and time to set off.
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Part 8 The Bashkirs and Pahom ride on horses and in carts to a small hill. The chief marks the spot with his cap, and Pahom puts his money on it. As the sun rises, Pahom sets off towards the east, digging holes and piling up turf every so often. After three miles it is getting warm. He takes his boots off and walks three more miles. Then he turns to the left and keeps on walking. By noon he is tired. He sits down to eat and drink and then starts off again. He feels hot and sleepy but carries on. When he turns once more and looks back to the hillock he sees it is very far away, and he decides to make the next side of his land shorter. But as the sun sinks he has still not walked two miles on this third side, and he still has ten miles to go. He decides to hurry back in a straight line.
Part 9 Pahom heads straight back to the hillock but he is tired and walks with difficulty. He wonders what will happen if he is late back. He walks faster and faster but is still far from the hillock where the Bashkirs are waiting for him. He starts to run, although his strength is failing him. He fears he may die from the strain. As he gets closer to the hill, he hears the Bashkirs shouting and waving to him, telling him to hurry up. Pahom remembers his dream and wonders whether he will survive. The sun disappears below the horizon and it grows dark. Pahom thinks he has failed, but then he realizes that since the Bashkirs are on a hillock, they will still be able to see the sun. He runs up to the hillock. As his legs give way he reaches the cap with his hands. The chief exclaims that Pahom has gained much land, but when Pahom’s servant rushes up to him he finds that Pahom is dead. The servant digs a grave and buries him. All the land that Pahom needs now is six feet.
CHARACTERS The Chief The chief is the leader of the Bashkirs. It is he who formally agrees to Pahom’s request to take some land, and he lays out the details of the agreement. Pahom dreams of the chief, seeing him sitting outside the tent laughing. Then when the exhausted Pahom nears the hillock where the chief and the other Bashkirs wait, he sees the chief sitting on the
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ground again laughing. It appears that he is laughing at Pahom’s folly in being too greedy for land.
The Dealer The dealer appears in part 4 of the story. He is the man who first tells Pahom about the Bashkirs and their land. He tells Pahom that he has just returned from the Bashkirs, from whom he bought a lot of land very cheaply. He explains to Pahom how he can acquire land for himself, almost for nothing.
The Devil The Devil sits behind the stove listening to the argument between Pahom’s wife and her sister. He also listens to Pahom’s boastful thought that if he had enough land he would not fear the Devil. The Devil resolves to get Pahom into his power. The Devil reappears in Pahom’s dream, complete with hoofs and horns, laughing as he sits looking at Pahom’s corpse.
Pahom Pahom is the central character, the only one whose thoughts and actions are presented in any detail. At the beginning he is a peasant who, unlike his wife, is not content with his lot. He believes that he, like all the peasants, does not have enough land. When a small landowner sells her land, Pahom makes sure that he buys some of it— forty acres, in fact. As a landowner, he cultivates the land and prospers. For a while he is contented but he soon becomes restless. He still believes that he does not have enough land. When a visiting peasant tells him of a distant place where he can acquire more land Pahom sets his heart on going there. When he gets there he acquires the land he desires and is much better off than before. Again, he is content for a while, but then gets restless. When a passing dealer tells him about the Bashkirs, who will give him as much land as he wants for almost nothing, he once again sets off to a distant land. Everything goes well for him in his negotiations with the Bashkirs, but when he goes on foot to mark out the land he wants he gets too greedy. He tries to cover too much ground and exhausts himself trying to get back before sunset to the place where he started. He falls down dead; his greed for more land has killed him.
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husband is a tradesman and the family is wealthy. They all wear fine clothes, eat well, and are able to visit the theater and other entertainments. She looks down on her sister because the younger woman has none of that city finery or refined manners. She tells her she will die poor, and so will her children.
Pahom’s Wife Pahom’s wife is happy with her lot, living in the country and being married to a peasant. When her older sister visits and sneers at her humble way of living, she defends herself vigorously. She says they may not have much but they are content. They do not have to worry about losing their wealth, since they have none. They may never be rich, but they expect to live a long life, nonetheless. They will always have enough for their needs.
The Peasant The peasant appears briefly in part 3 of the story. The peasant has been traveling, and Pahom allows him to stay the night at his house. The peasant then tells him about the land beyond the Volga River, where people who settle there are granted twenty-five acres of good-quality land. Immediately, Pahom conceives the desire to move there.
Simon Simon is the peasant whom Pahom blames for cutting down five of his lime trees at night. Simon never appears directly in the story, but he is one of only two characters identified by name. Simon appears to be innocent of the charge and he is acquitted after a trial, since there is no evidence against him.
THEMES Greed and Envy
Pahom’s sister-in-law comes to visit Pahom and his wife. She is the older of the two sisters, and she lives in a town rather than the country. Her
When viewed through its main theme, ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ is not a complex or subtle story. It is about the sins of greed and envy as they manifest in one particular man, the peasant Pahom. Unlike his wife, Pahom has not learned to be satisfied with what he has. He repeatedly convinces himself that he is not comfortable and needs more land, even though his wife tells her younger sister that they have enough for their needs. When he sees a neighbor acquiring land, he immediately becomes envious. It is not the
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Select a folktale that you enjoyed as a young child. Memorize it and tell it out loud to your class. After the recitation, talk about why you selected that particular tale and what you believe its theme or moral to be. Make a drawing or painting that illustrates the final scene of ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ as Pahom desperately tries to reach the waiting Bashkirs on a hillock as the sun sets.
Select another folktale or short story by Tolstoy and write an essay in which you compare it to ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ Possible stories for comparison are ‘‘God Sees the Truth, but Waits,’’ ‘‘What Men Live By,’’ ‘‘The Imp and the Crust,’’ or any other story by Tolstoy that appeals to you.
A number of folktales tell of how certain animals acquired their distinguishing characteristics. These are sometimes called ‘‘pourquoi tales.’’ Examples include how the Manx cat lost its tail, and why buzzards are bald. Some pourquoi tales explain certain phenomena in nature, such as why the sea is salty. Write your own pourquoi tale and share it with your class. Use your imagination to write an ingenious, perhaps even amusing tale. Be really creative and act it out, recording it on videotape or DVD to show to the class.
others—or at least trying to—he is in fact becoming enslaved to something irrational within himself that will have far more adverse consequences. On the contrary, his desire for more land seems very reasonable to him. No doubt if he were asked, he would describe himself as a prudent, sensible man, even a shrewd one. Having land is good, he might argue, therefore having more land is even better. But the truth is that Pahom is in the grip of greed. Being greedy is to want more and more in a way that is unrelated to actual need. He sees the acquisition of more land as a way of freeing himself from anxiety, but in fact, the more land he acquires, the more anxious and troubled he becomes. He quarrels with his neighbors and takes one of them to court, and this makes him even more unpopular. His neighbors threaten to burn his building down, which never happened before when he did not have much. His final state of anxiety, when he is on the brink of acquiring more land than he has ever had, is far worse than anything he has experienced before. Indeed, he is terrified, because he thinks the effort of getting back to the hillock before sunset will kill him—which may be the only time in the story that he sees things the way they really are. Pahom’s fate can perhaps be summed up in one sentence that occurs after he first hears about the place beyond the Volga where he can acquire much more land than he currently has: ‘‘Pahom’s heart kindled with desire.’’ Once that desire has been ignited, it grows and grows and nothing will stop it. Fulfilling one desire only leads to the birth of a greater desire, and so on, until finally Pahom’s reach exceeds his grasp and kills him.
hard work of the peasant’s life Pahom objects to, but the fact—as he sees it—that he does not have enough land. It is not as if he wants great wealth in order to spend it and live a lavish lifestyle. He just thinks that having more land is the answer to any problem he might have. He always has a reason for wanting more that is good enough to convince him he is right. For example, Pahom thinks that the more land he has the less dependent he will be on others; the less they will be able to restrict or control him or dictate to him in ways he finds irksome. He does not realize that in freeing himself from
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Temptation Although it appears to Pahom that he is being driven only by his perfectly natural desire for his affairs to prosper, he does in fact have an antagonist—the Devil. Pahom, however, does not know that the Devil is plotting against him, although the reader knows, since the narrator frames the story as a tale of temptation by the Devil. Pahom does not realize it, but his comment that if he had land he would not fear the Devil himself is taken by the Devil (who just happens to be within earshot, behind the stove) as a boast. The Devil then concocts a trap designed to place the peasant in his power. Pahom may think that he prospers by his own efforts and shrewdness, but in fact it is the Devil who is helping him to acquire more land, all the better to get power over him. Then in his dream near the end of the story, Pahom sees the Devil
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Land is a valuable, and sometimes deadly, investment. (Image copyright Yellowj, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
laughing as he looks at Pahom’s corpse that is stretched out in front of him.
‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ is Tolstoy’s retelling of a folktale. A folktale is a prose story usually of unknown authorship that is handed down from generation to generation by
word of mouth or in writing. Folktales are found in all human cultures. Many folktales contain the devil as a character who tempts or tricks the human characters; sometimes the devil succeeds (as in this story and in another of Tolstoy’s retold folktales, ‘‘The Imp and the Crust’’), but sometimes he is thwarted, as in Tolstoy’s ‘‘The Story of Ivan the Fool.’’ Folktales are sometimes developed by authors for retelling to a more sophisticated or cultivated audience. In the case of ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ the folktale elements can be seen in the fact that only one of the characters, Pahom, is individualized and given a name. The others are generic types: the peasant, the dealer, the elder and younger sister, the chief. There are no descriptions of what people look like. The basic folktale motif can also be seen in the repetitive simplicity of the plot. The same thing happens three times. At the beginning, Pahom is dissatisfied and wants more land (part 1). Pahom acquires more land, but gets dissatisfied (parts 2–3); he get more land and again gets dissatisfied (part 4); he gets even more land, which leads to the final catastrophe (parts 5–9). But Tolstoy also brings literary art
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The story is thus placed somewhat indirectly in the context of Christian theology and teaching, since in Christianity the devil, as the adversary of man, tempts man to sin. The greed and envy that seize hold of Pahom are in Christianity two of the traditional Seven Deadly Sins. The devil in popular literature is presented as he is in the story, with hoofs and horns (and usually a tail, too, although Tolstoy omits that detail). Seen in this light, the story becomes a variation on a theme alluded to by Christ in the gospels: ‘‘For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?’’ (Luke 9:25).
STYLE Folktale
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to the basic folktale in his detailed understanding of Pahom’s thought processes, which lead inexorably to the peasant’s doom. Tolstoy also injects humor and subtlety into the portrayal of the Bashkirs, who are not quite as simple as they appear and seem to know that Pahom is making a fool of himself in his quest for land.
Foreshadowing Foreshadowing in a literary work is the presentation of hints or clues that suggest to the alert reader how later events may turn out. Foreshadowing can be as simple as an image or simile. At the end of the story, for example, as Pahom desperately runs to get back to the place he started, he looks up and sees the sun ‘‘red as blood.’’ This simile foreshadows the blood that will soon flow from his mouth as he dies. Foreshadowing also occurs when Pahom stops every so often to dig a hole so he can mark his land. This ironically foreshadows the digging of his grave that will shortly occur.
Irony Irony has a number of different meanings when applied to a work of literature. It can refer to a situation in which there is an incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. An example from the story is at the beginning, when Pahom’s wife is talking to her sister. Responding to her sister’s criticism of peasant life, the woman says that men in cities ‘‘are surrounded by temptations; to-day all may be right, but to-morrow the Evil One may tempt your husband with cards, wine, or women, and all will go to ruin.’’ The irony of the situation is that it is Pahom the peasant, not his brother-in-law in the city, who is brought down as a result of the actions of the Devil.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature The nineteenth century is often known as the golden age of Russian literature. During this period Russia produced some of the greatest writers in the world. Early in the century, the nobleman Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) led the way. He is most famous for his poetry, including the verse-novel Evgeny Onegin (1833), first published in English as Eugene Onegin in 1881. He is also known for his play Boris Godunov (1825). One of Pushkin’s poetic themes was freedom, and for this
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he was as a young man banished from Moscow. Although the tsar later recalled him his work was still subject to censorship. Pushkin died young in somewhat tragic circumstances. He challenged his wife’s alleged lover to a duel, was shot, and died two days later. After Pushkin came the poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841). Lermontov was an aristocrat and a cavalry officer, and he wrote the novel A Hero of Our Time (1840), which some compare favorably to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, although it is on a much smaller scale. The hero of the novel is an autobiographical figure, Pechorin, an army officer given to ruthless selfexamination. Like Pushkin, Lermontov died young in a duel. The duel was with an army officer over a trivial incident. Another important figure was Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), a failed professor of history who turned instead to literature. Gogol left Russia in the mid-1830s and eventually settled in Rome. He published his masterpiece, the satirical novel Dead Souls, in 1842. Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) was the first major Russian writer of Tolstoy’s generation. He was also the first Russian writer to establish a reputation in Europe, where he lived and traveled frequently. His six novels are all set in Russia during the period from the 1830s to the 1870s, and they cover the social problems of Russia during these decades. His masterpiece was Fathers and Sons (1862). Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy says that Turgenev was an admirer of Tolstoy, and even though he disagreed with the direction Tolstoy’s work took after 1881, called him ‘‘without doubt, the most remarkable man in Russia today.’’ During Turgenev’s lifetime, Tolstoy was highly critical of his work, but after Turgenev died, Tolstoy reread his complete works and heaped praise on him. Along with Tolstoy, the greatest name in Russian literature is Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821– 1881). He was educated in Moscow and St. Petersburg and had begun to have success as a writer but in 1849 he was arrested and sentenced to death for being a member of a liberal intellectual group, the Petrashevsky Circle. He was reprieved and spent four years in prison in Siberia. Dostoyevsky’s greatest novels, in which he explored the darker aspects of the human condition, include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Gambler (1867), The Idiot (1868), The Possessed (1871– 72), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were literary rivals, although
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1880s: Tolstoy writes works on religion that bring him into conflict with the authorities in Tsarist Russia, where the church is an institution of the Russian state. In 1884, when he prints thirty copies of What I Believe, the police confiscate them all. Tolstoy’s play The Power of Darkness is banned.
million Bashkirs, 1.9 million Russians, and 280,000 Tatars.
Today: Having thrown off Communism, under which books were strictly censored, Russia has more freedom of the press than under former regimes. However, the authoritarian government still controls the major television channels and attempts to control the independent media through intimidation.
Today: Although Russia can boast no literary names as great as their illustrious nineteenthcentury predecessors, several outstanding writers make their mark on the Russian literary scene. These include Victor Pelevin, who embraces genre fiction in a successful attempt to reach a broader readership, as well as Valery Ronshin, Alexander Selin, and Alexander Pokrovsky.
1880s: The Bashkir lands are in the process of being colonized by Russia, as a mass migration of Russian peasants that began in the late eighteenth century continues. The Bashkir population is in decline. By 1897, the population in Bashkiriya consists of 1.3
they never met in person. Tolstoy, according to his biographer Henri Troyat, ‘‘disliked Dostoyevsky’s exaggeration, his implausibility, his ‘shapeless style,’ his grammatical errors, his mania for crowding the stage with epileptics, alcoholics and paranoics.’’ For his part, Dostoyevsky thought Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina ‘‘a boring book, by and large, and nothing out of the ordinary at all.’’
Today: The Republic of Bashkortostan or Bashkiriya is a democratic republic within the Russian Federation. 1880s: The great writers in Russia are Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoyevsky, and Ivan Turgenev. Also in this decade, Anton Chekhov, who will go on to become a celebrated dramatist in the 1890s and into the twentieth century, publishes many of his short stories.
of the commune. Each commune elected its own officials. This is the historical background for the incidents in the story in which (in part 2) the peasants try to arrange for the commune to buy the small landowner’s estate, and Pahom gets involved in disputes with the commune (parts 3 and 4).
The Emancipation of the Serfs When Tolstoy wrote ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ in 1886, Russia’s peasants had been free from serfdom for only twenty-five years. It was Tsar Alexander II who ordered the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Under its terms, the nobility no longer had any legal authority over their peasants. The peasants were not completely free, however. They were compelled to become members of a village commune, which exercised control over land held by individual peasants. No peasant could leave the commune, or the territory it controlled, without the permission
‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ is one of the better known of Tolstoy’s short stories based on folktales, and it has long had its admirers. In the early twentieth century, the Irish writer James Joyce even described it as ‘‘the greatest story that the literature of the world knows’’ (quoted by George R. Clay in his essay, ‘‘Tolstoy and the Twentieth Century’’). According to R. F. Christian, in Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction, the
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A spade in the ground symbolizes ownership of land. (Image copyright Scott Leman, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
story ‘‘has claims to be the most successful of Tolstoy’s popular tales. Its theme is the evil of acquisitiveness.’’ For William W. Rowe, in Leo Tolstoy, the story may be read as ‘‘a Tolstoyan condemnation of land ownership’’ and he also notes how ‘‘carefully crafted’’ it is. He notes that ‘‘the image of the sun . . . is particularly successful, as it races in its arching journey across the sky against the wide curve of Pakhom’s greed upon the ground.’’ For William J. Bennett, who included the story in his collection The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ ‘‘in its fundamental physical action is a marvelous metaphor for the need for us to set definite boundaries on our own appetites.’’ Jeff Love, in Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed, comments on Pahom’s (sometimes translated as Pakhom) final attempt to acquire land: ‘‘Pakhom’s quest for land can be wheeled out as a transparent allegory of life itself, this brief time that human beings have in the sun, where they seek to maximize their power before the sun goes down.’’
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CRITICISM Bryan Aubrey Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. In this essay, he discusses the biographical and historical context of ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ The origins of ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ lie in several developments in Tolstoy’s life that began in earnest about ten years before the publication of the story. In the late 1870s, when Tolstoy was about fifty years old, he entered a period of existential crisis and despair. He was the celebrated, world-renowned author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, as well as being a wealthy landowner with a large family. It might have appeared that he had everything a man might want and everything to live for. But Tolstoy was depressed. He no longer had a clear purpose, and life seemed pointless to him. What did all his achievements count for? Happiness was an illusion; there was nothing real in life other than suffering and the eventual fact of death and annihilation. For a while Tolstoy wanted to die, and he even entertained thoughts of suicide.
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
Russian Fairy Tales (1976), compiled by Aleksandr Afanasev, is a collection of nearly two hundred stories drawn from the oral folk tradition in Russia. The lively, actionfilled stories make entertaining reading for young and old readers alike.
Anton Chekhov’s short story ‘‘Gooseberries,’’ first published in 1898, comments directly on Tolstoy’s ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ The character Ivan tells the story of a complacent landowner who has no compassion for those who are unhappy. In Chekhov’s answer to Tolstoy’s question, Ivan states that man needs the freedom to roam the entire world and to express himself fully. The story can be found in Stories of Anton Chekhov (2000), translated by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear.
Favorite African Folktales (2004), edited by Nelson Mandela, is a collection of thirty-two African stories from the continent’s rich oral tradition of folktales. The stories were chosen by Mandela, one of the great figures of twentieth-century history and South Africa’s first democratically elected president.
The short, eerie novel The Double is a good introduction to the work of Tolstoy’s great contemporary Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in 1846. It tells the story of Golyadkin, a government bureaucrat who encounters his double, a man exactly like him. This mysterious man soon begins to take over Golyadkin’s life. The novel combines realism with fantastic, hallucinatory elements that make it a compelling, if somewhat nightmarish, read. A Dover Thrift edition was published in 1997.
He relentlessly asked himself what the purpose of human life might be, and how a man ought to live. He eventually recovered from this profound crisis by rediscovering his faith in God. He especially admired the simple faith of the peasants. They might be ignorant but they accepted their lot. Whatever hardships they endured—poverty, suffering, exploitation, death—they accepted them with a quiet resignation, sustained by their religious faith. For a few years, Tolstoy tried to
embrace the Russian Orthodox faith wholeheartedly, but he could not sustain it for long because he saw too much discrepancy between the dogmas taught by the church and what he thought was the message of Christ contained in the four gospels in the New Testament. He rejected the divinity of Christ, and developed his own Christian creed, based on the Sermon on the Mount and incorporating six moral requirements, some of them his own invention, including the commandment not
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One of Tolstoy’s most famous stories is ‘‘The Death of Ivan Ilych,’’ published in 1886, the same year as ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ In this story a sick man, Ivan, discovers just before he is about to die that his whole life has been a waste of time, a kind of death. He has lived only for himself and occupied himself in frivolous pursuits. Once he realizes how foolish his life has been, he is able to feel compassion for others before he dies. A modern edition of the story was published by Waking Lion Press in 2006. Although Tolstoy had harsh words to say about much of the literature of his day, which he regarded as frivolous and immoral, he singled out some of the works of Charles Dickens for praise. For example, he regarded A Tale of Two Cities, set during the French Revolution, as an example of the highest form of art, transmitting feelings of love of God and one’s neighbor. A Tale of Two Cities was first published in 1859; a 150th anniversary edition, with an introduction by Frederick Busch, is available in the Signet Classics series (1997).
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GLIMPSES ALSO ABOUND IN ‘HOW MUCH LAND DOES A MAN NEED?’ OF TOLSTOY’S SHEER POWER AS A WRITER—IN THE SUBTLETIES OF HIS OBSERVATIONS AND HIS PRESENTATION OF THE REAL STATE OF A MAN’S HEART AND SOUL.’’
to be angry. Tolstoy documented his spiritual crisis and the beliefs that arose from it in his autobiographical work A Confession (1882) and in What I Believe (1883), works that perhaps not surprisingly aroused the hostility of the Russian church and state. At the same time as he was experiencing this existential crisis, Tolstoy was also radically reevaluating the nature and purpose of art, music, and literature. He spent many years working on the tract that was eventually published as What Is Art? in 1897. In this polemical essay, Tolstoy rejects as bad art many of the great works of the Western cultural tradition, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He rejects the latter because it fails to convey ‘‘the highest religious feeling’’ and does not unite ‘‘all men in one common feeling,’’ which were Tolstoy’s criteria for accepting something as ‘‘Christian universal art.’’ For Tolstoy, art had to be useful to ordinary people. It ought to educate. It ought to be intelligible to the masses, not written only for the pleasure of the wealthy, educated classes. That kind of art was not really needed by anyone; it was a worthless, immoral, even harmful distraction, and Tolstoy would have nothing to do with it. Given this development of his aesthetic beliefs, Tolstoy was no longer interested in producing novels like War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The latter, in which the focus is on the life of an adulterous woman, was particularly troubling to Tolstoy, given the stern moralism that he was embracing at this point in his life. Determined to live up to his own principles, he decided that he wanted to write morally uplifting literature for the people—the peasants and uneducated folk. In this desire he was not alone. As Gary R. Jahn points out in his essay ‘‘Tolstoy as a Writer of Popular Literature,’’ there were a number of publishing enterprises in Russia during the 1870s that aimed
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to produce high-quality literature for the masses. Most failed because they did not have effective distribution networks. But Tolstoy was not put off by the difficulties. In 1884, one of his friends and disciples, an aristocrat and former army officer named Vladimir Chertkov, suggested that he and Tolstoy found their own publishing company that would produce small books of stories that could be sold very inexpensively to a mass reading public. The company was called the Intermediary, and Tolstoy supplied many of the stories for the books, including ‘‘God Sees the Truth, but Waits,’’ ‘‘What Men Live By,’’ ‘‘Two Old Men,’’ and ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ The Intermediary was a very successful enterprise. Over the next six years, twenty million copies of its booklets were printed. Tolstoy received no money for his efforts, nor did he want any. He was happy to supply the common people with reading matter that fulfilled his criteria of what art was and should do. Tolstoy wrote about twenty stories for the common folk, as well as two plays. Jahn sees in these stories, many of which consisted of a retelling of folktales, ‘‘a combination . . . of the use and adaptation of familiar popular forms as a stylistic foundation, the overtly didactic presentation of ethically significant thematic material, and the artistic skill and power of a great literary master.’’ Jahn makes the further point that in retelling these traditional stories, Tolstoy was recreating the medieval literary form of the exemplum, ‘‘a story told, usually as part of a homily or sermon, to illustrate a particular point of doctrine.’’ ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ illustrates the moral point that a man must know when enough is enough. He must not continually seek more and more material possessions, unrelated to his personal need. This is greed, pure and simple, and the story shows how the desire for more and more is a monster that will turn around and devour the desirer until he ends up with nothing at all—not even his life. Although the story is cast in the form of a simple moral tale, Tolstoy remains the writer who uses his life experience, including his travels, in his work as a means of communicating the truths he wants to convey. For example, Tolstoy knew the Bashkir people and their lands well, and there is some historical basis for at least some of the details of how they are presented in the story. In 1862, when Tolstoy was in his mid-thirties, he became ill and was sent by his doctor to live
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among the Bashkir nomads in their felt tents and drink kumys. As Tolstoy’s biographer Henri Troyat explains in Tolstoy, ‘‘Kumys—fermented and mildly carbonated mare’s milk—was highly esteemed in Russia as a tonic.’’ Consumed in large quantities, the drink ‘‘produced a mild and pleasant state of inebriation’’—which might explain why the Bashkirs in the story are so ‘‘merry.’’ Tolstoy told his friends that he planned to lie around in the sun, drink kumys and eat as much mutton as he wished—exactly as the Bashkirs do in the story he was later to write. After traveling hundreds of miles southeast from Moscow he stayed with the Bashkirs, living as they did, for several months. He seems to have found them (as in the story) a carefree and very hospitable people who did not need to grind themselves down through hard work. He enjoyed long talks with the Bashkir elders and participated in friendly athletic competition with the young men. The time passed quickly. Tolstoy returned to the Bashkirs nine years later, in 1871, for another kumys treatment. He liked the region so much he even bought property in the nearby district of Samara, and, like Pahom thinks he is going to do in the story, got it ‘‘dirt-cheap,’’ buying 6,700 acres of land for only twenty thousand rubles. Tolstoy described this to his wife (in the words of Troyat) as a ‘‘very good deal.’’ Two years later Tolstoy took his family out to enjoy the primitive living in this location on the steppes (plains), even bringing in a local Bashkir and his wives to give them all a kumys treatment. He returned again in 1875 and then every summer until 1883. In that year he had a long kumys treatment and believed that his health improved as a result. All these historically accurate elements of a way of life and a particular region found their way into Tolstoy’s simple tale of greed and its consequences. Of course, as an artist, he shaped the material in ways that suited his purpose. The dealer who informs Pahom about the availability of cheap Bashkir land says he bought thirteen thousand acres for a mere one thousand rubles— which makes Tolstoy’s ‘‘very good deal’’ look expensive by comparison. But the exaggeration helps to make the story work. Tolstoy also— surely—exaggerates the amiable, jovial nature of the Bashkirs and their apparent willingness to part with their land. To them, one piece of land is very much the same as another, and it does not matter who claims ownership of it. They do not even have the means of measuring
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it out, which is why they sell it ‘‘by the day’’ (as much as a man can walk around in a day). Tolstoy exaggerates because he wants to present the Bashkirs as a convincing foil (a foil in literature is a character who sets off another by contrast) for Pahom’s restless acquisitiveness. Whereas Pahom perpetually desires what he does not have, the Bashkirs are content; while he schemes and works, they relax and play. Glimpses also abound in ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ of Tolstoy’s sheer power as a writer—in the subtleties of his observations and his presentation of the real state of a man’s heart and soul. Here for example is the joy Pahom feels at the end of part 2, after he acquires land for the first time: The grass that grew and the flowers that bloomed there seemed to him unlike any that grew elsewhere. Formerly, when he had passed by that land, it had appeared the same as any other land, but now it seemed quite different.
Tolstoy here captures that strange metamorphosis that comes over people when they acquire personal possessions. Some might regard Pahom’s feelings simply as harmless, indeed desirable, pride of ownership, but Tolstoy sees in them something more—the seeds of acquisitiveness and the beginning of Pahom’s downfall. Another notable aspect of the story is Tolstoy’s description of Pahom’s last desperate moments. As Pahom measures out the land that he hopes to acquire, he gets hotter and hotter under the relentless sun; it is as if the fires of hell are prematurely burning in him. The bright sun acts as a metaphor not for enlightenment but for damnation, not as the bringer of life but as the harbinger of doom. There is a cruel irony in his attempt to force himself to go on: ‘‘An hour to suffer, a life-time to live,’’ he tells himself. In fact, it is the other way around: Pahom has an hour or so to live, and an eternity to suffer, for his soul is now in the clutches of the Devil. Tolstoy here presents a picture of a man who is already in hell. He is tortured mentally by self-reproach, fear of failure and the resultant ridicule, and by fear of death. He is also tortured physically: Pahom went on running, his soaking shirt and trousers stuck to him and his mouth was parched. His breast was working like a blacksmith’s bellows, his heart was beating like a hammer, and his legs were giving way as if they did not belong to him.
No wonder the Devil is laughing. This image of Pahom in distress under the beating of the
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THE MORAL DILEMMAS THAT CONFRONT TOLSTOY’S CHARACTERS, AS FAR AS THE ACTION OF THE NOVELS IS CONCERNED, ARE OF TWO MAIN KINDS, SOCIAL AND SEXUAL.’’
Greed results in death in ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ (Image copyright lofoto, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
sun’s rays vividly underscores the moral of Tolstoy’s grim tale: desire—greed—is a fire that will burn a man up; better accept what the Lord gives and not ask for more. Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Peter Caws In the following excerpt, Caws delves into the problem of moral perplexity in Tolstoy’s works and considers the solution as an exercise of moral experience. I
One of the utilitarian functions of literature is to enlarge the domain of our experience. Actual episodes, played out in ‘‘real time,’’ with all the preparation, uncertainty, movement, waiting, adjustment and fatigue that they involve, are massive entries in the book of a life, and the number any of us can undergo (or afford to undergo) is limited. With a novel, however, we can race through from inception to denouement, with all the appropriate emotions, in an evening—in the case of Tolstoy a rather long evening, say in St. Petersburg at midsummer when it might stretch into the following day. What happens in the novel might have happened to us (as Aristotle says of poetry, it describes a kind of thing that might happen), but, fortunately or unfortunately for us, it didn’t.
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In this use literature exploits the function of language that I call ‘‘theory construction,’’ the other main exponent of which is science. Scientific theories enable us to simulate and test physical or sometimes social objects and events, changing the variables and doing other ‘‘thought experiments’’ so as to anticipate and avoid (or more efficiently seek) the consequences of real actions. If in theory the bridge collapses then in practice we’d better not build it until the design has been modified. Literature has these capacities too, but with some differences. In the scientific case the ideal is to have laws that are experimentally confirmed, perhaps in the laboratory, and to base explanations and predictions upon them, but the laws of complex human behavior are not easy to establish, in or out of laboratories (whatever form these might be thought of as taking), and in any case the literary interest of making fictional actions conform to them exactly would be minimal. Also scientific explanation characteristically deals with only one aspect of the phenomenon under study, abstracting it from all the rest, whereas literary representation renders phenomena with some degree of fullness. Nevertheless it is worth remembering that these differences of degree do not prevent us from thinking of literature and science as belonging on the same continuum, widely separated as they may be, as exercising similar powers of the imagination and as sparing us in comparable ways the risk of tentative and uncertain action in the real world. A special case of the kind of vicarious experience literature, and especially fiction, offers is the confrontation of moral difficulties. There but for the grace of God, we think, as awful temptations or perplexities or responsibilities overwhelm the characters. What would we have done? What ought they to have done? What ought one to do? ‘‘What ought I to do?’’ was one of the four questions that Kant thought philosophically
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fundamental. It was also the one to which he offered a categorical answer, although not a particularly helpful answer. In fact it seems odd to ask the question out of context, as though there were a sort of floating state of obligation accompanying the ‘‘I think’’ in all its manifestations (to adapt a formula from another Kantian text), independently of the practical conditions in which it may find itself. Yet just such an uneasy sense of non-specific moral requirement is a familiar ingredient of modern life, especially in the Christian West. Pietists like Kant have been especially liable to it. Tolstoy is another obvious case. In this article I want to look at the problem of moral perplexity in the three major novels, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, and to consider Tolstoy’s solution to it as an exercise in a theory of literature as (among other things) a source of vicarious moral experience. In each of these novels there is one leading character—Pierre Bezuhov, Levin, and Nekhlyudov respectively—who bears an obvious relation to the novelist himself. Their trademark is on the one hand a kind of perplexed serenity, a state of calm surprise, sometimes bewildered, sometimes amused, at the oddity or outrage of the ways of the world—and on the other a periodical and progressive experience of moral certainty, which comes to them from circumstances to be sure but with the mark of revelation. My main purpose here is not to insist on the question of Tolstoy’s own moral experience (of which he has given, in Confession, an account up to the crisis that followed the completion of Anna Karenina); it is rather to invite the participation of the reader as the (temporary) embodiment of Tolstoy’s characters and the animator of their moral reflection.
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subsequent question is whether either theory is a theory worth holding. It is tempting in the case of Tolstoy to begin with the last question, since he was so openly and persistently theoretical in and out of his novels. I shall resist this temptation but at the same time take the opportunity it offers to acknowledge Isaiah Berlin’s well-known characterization of Tolstoy as theoretician, although of history rather than of morality, in ‘‘The Hedgehog and the Fox.’’ Berlin as everyone knows takes the text of Archilocus, ‘‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,’’ as the starting-point of a brilliant essay on types of ` authors, the foxes (like Shakespeare, Moliere, Balzac, etc.) representing scope and variety, a lively interest in many kinds of things and people, and the hedgehogs (like Dante, Ibsen, Proust, etc.) representing depth and unity, a single-minded concentration on a limited object, whether a type of character, a society, or an epoch. He introduces this classification at the beginning of an essay on Tolstoy in order to make the point that Tolstoy will not fit into it; he was, Berlin says, a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. My own view is that Tolstoy was as good a hedgehog as any of them, but I will qualify it with an aphoristic claim that I hope to make plausible by the end of this article: Foxes make the best hedgehogs. II
I have suggested elsewhere that subjectivity as the animation of structure borrows the latter where it can, finding in literature the richest deposits of what I call the ‘‘signiferous.’’ I want to suggest here that in the case of the greatest literature this borrowing can generate experiences no different in kind, and frequently close in degree, to those the subject finds in its own world, especially when those experiences are moral ones. If this is the case, then an obvious next question is what moral theory best throws explanatory light on the experiences. An obvious further question is whether that theory is in fact the one the author meant to exemplify, assuming (as is manifestly the case with Tolstoy) that he or she actually held such a theory. And an obvious
The moral dilemmas that confront Tolstoy’s characters, as far as the action of the novels is concerned, are of two main kinds, social and sexual. There are problematic relations between the nobility and the peasants (and in War and Peace also between officers and soldiers, as well as between Russia and Napoleon, although I shall not be much concerned with these) and between men and women. The only interesting case of the latter occurs in Resurrection, where Nekhlyudov confronts his responsibility to the fallen Maslova. The reason for the comparative lack of moral interest in this most notorious of moral domains is just that the issues are so clear, so that the good characters, the ones who are rewarded with certainty in the end—Prince Andrei, Pierre, Levin—are never in doubt about them and behave like gentlemen from the start. But in addition to these outward dilemmas there are also inward ones, involving problematic relations between the self and God, as well as, reflexively, between the self and itself. The
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resolution of the dilemmas consists in the establishment of some sort of conscious harmony between the conflicting partners in these relationships. The three protagonists with whom I shall mainly be concerned are all at some point ill at ease with themselves, and they all worry about this. It seems reasonable therefore to begin with the last, or reflexive, case.
prisoner released on Napoleon’s approach to the city; ‘‘Lightly swayed on the easy springs of the carriage and no longer hearing the terrible sounds of the crowd, Rostopchin grew calmer physically and, as always happens, simultaneously with physical relief his reason suggested arguments to salve his conscience’’ (pp. 1057–58). The case of Maslova is trickier and I shall come back to it.
It is to be noted that without it the other problems would not arise: there are characters who manage not to feel it—Napoleon, military people in general, Kuragin, Rostopchin, Vronsky, Maslova—and although with the exception of Maslova, more sinned against than sinning, they are a bad lot; they seem at least to be relatively untroubled. Such are the rewards of selfdeception. These cases are instructive because they show the underside of the solution and because Tolstoy allows himself in some of them to make judgments in the light of conventional moral theories.
The moral situation of the army as an institution is sui generis and may be dealt with, as a topical parenthesis, at once. I allude here not to Tolstoy’s anti-militarism, his characterization of war as murder, but to the constitutive moral harmony of the military life, as exemplified in the character of Nikolai Rostov, one of the least troubled members of the cast of War and Peace. Not only does Rostov find a second home in his regiment: ‘‘After reporting himself to his colonel and being reassigned to his former squadron . . . Rostov experienced the same sense of peace, of moral support, and the same sense of being at home and in his right corner as he felt under the paternal roof. Here was none of that turmoil of the world at large in which he found himself out of his element and made mistakes in exercising his free will’’ (WP, pp. 462–63), but the class of officers enjoys a systematic sense of righteousness:
Thus Kuragin and Vronsky are immoral on consequentialist grounds, as having no scruples: Kuragin ‘‘was always very well satisfied with his position, with himself and with the rest of the world. He was instinctively and thoroughly convinced that he could not possibly live otherwise than in the way he did live, and that he had never in his life done anything evil. He was incapable of considering how his behavior might affect others, or what the consequences of this or that action of his might be,’’ and ‘‘Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt like a king, not because he believed that he had made an impression on Anna—he did not believe that yet—but because the impression she had made on him filled him with happiness and pride. What would come of it all he did not know and did not even consider. He felt that all his powers, hitherto dissipated and wasted, were now concentrated and bent with fearful energy on a single blissful goal. And this made him happy.’’ Napoleon is immoral on deontological grounds, as having no principles: ‘‘It was plain that it had long been Napoleon’s conviction that no possibility existed of his making a mistake, and that, according to his understanding of things, whatever he did was right, not because it harmonized with any preconceived notion of right or wrong but because it was he who did it’’ (WP, p. 740). Rostopchin comforts himself physically in a bad sense, although as we shall shortly see it is also possible to do this in a good sense. As governor of Moscow, he has allowed the mob to assassinate a political
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. . . our moral nature is such that we are unable to be idle and at peace. A secret voice warns that for us idleness is a sin. If it were possible for a man to discover a mode of existence in which he could feel that, though idle, he was of use to the world and fulfilling his duty, he would have attained to one facet of primeval bliss. And such a state of obligatory and unimpeachable idleness is enjoyed by a whole section of society—the military class. It is just this compulsory and irreproachable idleness which has always constituted, and will constitute, the chief attraction of military service. (p. 574)
In both cases this harmony is purchased at the expense of a divorce from the reality of moral life in society at large, but this divorce itself is a real fact of society and seems to me to be as salient now, in the Pentagon for example, as it was in Tolstoy’s day. It is something any move towards disarmament has to reckon with, and may be far more intractable than nuclear war itself, to whose likelihood however it probably makes the greatest single contribution. Having got the villains out of the way, let me turn to the heroes. I begin with what may be called the non-moral strategies for dealing with uneasiness of the self. There are four of these, respectively work, love, hardship, and philosophical modesty.
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One of the most celebrated descriptive passages in Anna Karenina is the scene of the mowing of the great meadow. Levin has been arguing with his brother, Koznyshev, and has felt more bewildered than usual; he needs air and exercise, and joins the peasants for a day’s mowing. On his return Koznyshev tries to resume the conversation: ‘‘‘Yes, of course. But what does it matter? I don’t insist on my view,’ answered Levin, with a guilty, childlike smile. ‘Whatever was I disputing about?’ he wondered. ‘Of course, I’m right, and he’s right, and everything’s excellent. Only I must go round to the office and see to things.’ He stood up, stretching and smiling’’ (AK, p. 279). Sometimes, therefore, the problem is just dissolved; under the right circumstances, healthy fatigue can be as effective as enlightenment. So can bliss, as in the case of Pierre when he realizes that he is in love with Natasha, even though she is in disgrace and he is married: ‘‘his image of her instantly lifted him into another world, a serene realm of spiritual activity, where there could be neither right nor wrong—a realm of beauty and love which it was worth living for’’ (WP, pp. 787–88). This situation will not be resolved without suffering, and Pierre suffers, as a prisoner of the French—and paradoxically is rewarded with a form of liberation hitherto unknown to him: ‘‘All Pierre’s dreams were now centered on the time when he would be free; though afterwards, and to the end of his days, he thought and spoke with enthusiasm of that month of captivity, of those irrecoverable, intense, joyful sensations, and above all, of the perfect spiritual peace, the complete inner freedom, which he experienced only during that period of his life’’ (WP, p. 1199). Finally Levin, on his way to enlightenment but before he actually gets there, finds his burden lifted when he stops chafing under it: ‘‘When Levin puzzled over what he was and what he was living for, he could find no answer and fell into despair. . . . But when he did not think, but just lived, he never ceased to be aware of the presence in his soul of an infallible judge who decided which of two possible courses of action was the better and which the worse . . . ’’ (AK, p. 826).
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they did. In the case of Rostopchin, cited above, the harmony he achieves is transparently a matter of rationalization and so does not count, but it would seem on the face of it hard to know in what might look like authentic experiences that some such rationalization had not taken place. Maslova is a case in point; as Nekhlyudov becomes re-acquainted with her, ‘‘what surprised him most was that she showed no sign of shame, except of being a convict—she was ashamed of that, but not of being a prostitute. On the contrary, she seemed rather pleased, almost proud of it. And yet, how could it be otherwise? Nobody can wholeheartedly do anything unless he believes that his activity is important and good.’’ However, a couple of tests of the genuine article do emerge from a comparison of its prime exemplars: on the one hand it has to be clear and unambiguous, on the other it has to be selfless. . . . Source: Peter Caws, ‘‘Moral Certainty in Tolstoy,’’ in Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2000, pp. 49–66.
Gary R. Jahn In the following excerpt, Jahn debates the interpretation of ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ as a negative exemplum or warning against avarice.
All this however is therapy, not moral certainty. Moral certainty is the positive mark of a special variety of experience (the echo of William James is not inappropriate in this context) that comes almost as a form of grace to the principal characters at the end of their troubled adventures. It too has its counterfeits, which ought perhaps to have bothered Tolstoy more than
. . . ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ was written and first published during this period of intermittent depression. The story begins with a townswoman’s arrival in the country to visit her peasant relations. Following a discussion of the relative merits of country and town life, the peasant Paxom (the story’s main character) smugly reflects on the superiority of his lot, the only shortcoming of which is the small amount of land at his disposal. The devil, overhearing these reflections and taking Paxom’s self-satisfaction as a challenge, decides to put him to the test by arranging for him to become a large landholder. Paxom moves from one place to another, at each stage owning more land than before. He is, however, never quite satisfied, Finally he goes to Bas˘kiria to take advantage of the method of land purchase in use there: the purchaser, for a fixed sum, is granted title to as much land as he can walk around in a single day. Although warned by a dream of ill-omen, Paxom insists on putting this plan into effect. His desire for land, however, proves to be greater than his endurance, and his attempted circumambulation of a very large area exhausts and, finally, kills him. He drops dead inches short of completing his circuit. The story ends with a terse account of his burial.
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People and their clear indication of that ‘‘other way,’’ one might well read the story as other than a morally prescriptive negative exemplum. WE SEE THE MAJOR MOTIF OF HIS CRISIS OF THE 1870’S RE-EMERGING: THE HORROR OF INEVITABLE DEATH AND THE CONVICTION THAT LIFE IS EITHER MEANINGLESS OR A CRUEL JOKE PLAYED UPON MAN BY AN EVIL POWER.’’
An alternative reading is that the story is objectively descriptive of the human condition in general. Al’tman has suggested that the story transcends the moral didacticism which was essential to Tolstoj’s intent. Not just a further chapter in his moral writings of the 1880s, the story became a stylization of an ancient legend about the Scythians which was recorded by Herodotus:
In the light of the joy and triumph of virtue which mark other Stories for the People, there is a natural inclination to interpret ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ as a negative exemplum (specifically, as a warning against avarice) designed to be understood in the context of the positive ideal of the other stories. No doubt this was Tolstoj’s intention in writing the story. However, this interpretation relies too heavily on the apparent similarities to the other Stories for the People and pays insufficient heed to the details and structure of the individual text. There is little evidence within the story itself that it is to be taken as a warning. For instance, Paxom follows the devil’s way in the story, but it is not clear, from the story itself, that there is an alternative (God’s way) which would have led him to a better fate. In the other Stories for the People God and Christ are mentioned frequently, and most of them also have a biblical overtone, represented by the various scriptural epigraphs, quotations, and language which they contain. In ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ the biblical element is wholly lacking and the name of God appears only near the very end of the story. Straining to reach his goal, Paxom thinks: ‘‘Land in plenty, but will God bring me to live upon it? Oh, I have done for myself, I won’t make it.’’ This passage may suggest that ultimate control over man’s fate is in God’s hands. Also, the close ‘‘I have done for myself’’ may indicate that Paxom had a choice between the course he followed and some better course, and that by living as he did he brought his fate upon himself. Even so, it would seem that the passage is ambiguous as evidence that the story is a warning and, in Paxom’s case, realization comes too late to serve as an effective deterrent to the proscribed form of conduct. Without the context of the other Stories for the
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. . . through all the rationalist shrouds of Tolstoj’s story . . . one feels the heat of the ancient ‘‘tale of the land.’’ Although he changed the original title [from ‘‘Skazka o zemle’’] Tolstoj was not able to change the basic essence. Tolstoj himself compared writers with the biblical Balaam (Numbers, xxi–xxiv), who often wants to do one thing but does another. This happened to Tolstoj himself more than once. And in our case again. Without thinking to, without even wanting to, he created, no, re-created, an ancient pagan myth instead of a pious and partially Christianized story. (319)
In theorizing that the story is mythic, Al’tman maintains that it is descriptive rather than critical of the view of the human condition which it presents. The story may be divided into two parts of unequal length. Chapters one through seven tell how Paxom is drawn gradually and unwittingly, by the lure of ever greater property, into the devil’s hands. Chapters eight and nine present Paxom’s attempted circumambulation, his death, and the final victory of the devil. The indications of a structural division at this point are the change of locale, which removes the action of the story from familiar Russia to exotic Bas˘ kiria, and Paxom’s dream (in chapter seven), which replaces the realistic and ordinary with an intimation of the fantastic and extraordinary. In one sense the second part of the story functions simply as the final and climactic episode of the series developed in the first part. Viewed only in this way, however, the second part of the story may seem redundant, since the first part contains (in the form of Paxom’s dream) a rather exact anticipation of the action of the last two chapters. One is quite certain even before the dawn of Paxom’s last day that the hero’s efforts will prove fatal. I would suggest that the second part of the story has a second function: to serve as a recapitulation of the
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whole of the first part and to suggest a broader frame of thematic reference. Chapters eight and nine support the reading that the story is descriptive rather than didactic. The first seven chapters did not contradict a descriptive interpretation, but they do restrict its applicability to the case of the protagonist. The retelling of Paxom’s story in symbolic form in the final two chapters suggests that it is applicable to the human condition in general. As an individual, Paxom is portrayed as chiefly concerned to gain more and more land for himself. A contrast is provided throughout the story by the words tesnota (narrowness, crampedness) and prostornost’ (breadth, expansiveness). The feeling of being enclosed and limited drives Paxom to ever greater acquisitions of land. Thus, when he expresses the hope that his neighbors will move away and leave him to purchase their land he says, ‘‘A to vse tesnota.’’ When they do not, Paxom decides to leave himself, saying, ‘‘Cto z tut v tesnote bed` stvovat’’’ and later, ‘‘A zdes’ v etoj tesnote—grex odin.’’ He moves from his native region and settles on much greater lands than before. Again he ` becomes dissatisfied: ‘‘ . . . i na etoj zemle [Paxomu] tesno pokazalos’.’’ Still later, in explaining his purpose to the Bas˘ kirs, he says, ‘‘U nas v zemle tesnota.’’ The motivating force of Paxom’s life is the need to escape the tesnota of which he is always conscious. The application of this in general terms is that man seeks to escape from limitation by broadening his field of free action. This situation is tragic because, ultimately, the limiting force against which man struggles is not external to but a part of his own nature and hence inescapable. This is the implication of Paxom’s refusing the opportunity to free himself completely from tesnota when he first arrives among the Bas˘ kirs. Paxom is offered the free use of any lands within the chief’s gift. Able at last to have land without limit, Paxom nevertheless declines this offer, preferring land with definite boundaries—that is, land which is inherently limited. Thus, the limitation is associated with man, rather than with the land. The final image of tesnota in the story is that of Paxom in his grave. The limitation which Paxom has been trying to overcome is here shown to be his death. Thus, at the deeper thematic level the story is representative of man making a symbolic and hopeless challenge to death, the limitation which he cannot overcome.
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The world in which the bitter comedy of man’s struggle with death is played seems quite ordinary, except for the brief appearance of the devil in chapter one and the remark, in chapter two, that the peasants were unable to purchase the land of their mistress communally because ‘‘the devil divided them.’’ In chapter seven Paxom dreams that those who inspired him to obtain more land, as well as the chief of the Bas˘ kirs, were all the devil in different guises. This dream shows Paxom’s world to be under the absolute control of the devil and Paxom merely a pawn in the devil’s hands. His symbolic struggle against death is shown to be an unwitting, unavailing, and unequal battle with the devil. Paxom, however, ignores his dream, and it is only at the moment of his death that he recalls it and understands his true position. The story suggests that man lives in a world controlled by evil, and the two final chapters summarize this life symbolically. Like the life of man, Paxom’s last day on earth continues from darkness unto darkness, from sunrise until sunset. Although Paxom’s task seems pleasant in the cool and beauty of the morning (as man’s life is easier in childhood, at a relative distance from his ultimate fate), as the day wears on his increasing physical exhaustion and the circular course which he pursues signify the weary hopelessness of a life that is essentially a frantic and useless effort leading nowhere; Paxom’s last day begins and ends at the same spot. Throughout the last two chapters Paxom’s constant companion is the sun, symbolizing his life and, in its inevitable descent toward the horizon, portending his certain death. Death is man’s real foe and Paxom’s efforts to reach his goal become more and more frenzied as sunset draws near. Only at the end, when the image of the blood-red sun has made the reality of death clear to Paxom, does he remember his dream and realize its significance. He recognizes in himself the victim of a devilruled world, but since he is also the victim of his own mortal nature he cannot stop; he even increases his pace until, just reaching the goal, he collapses. The flow of blood from his mouth in death is prefigured by the crimson of the sinking sun. The view of man which emerges is thus in tension with that elaborated by Tolstoj in his religious writings of the early 1880s and in his other Stories for the People. To be sure, this story has much in common with the others:
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language, character types, the supernatural, a thematic concern with proper human conduct. But these familiar elements here combine to present an understanding of the human condition which is quite alien to that with which the postconversion Tolstoj comforted himself. ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’’ is indicative of the incompleteness of the triumph of the moral and religious system which served Tolstoj as a refuge from the vision of the power of death; it suggests a return to the despair which preceded his ‘‘conversion.’’ We see the major motif of his crisis of the 1870s re-emerging: the horror of inevitable death and the conviction that life is either meaningless or a cruel joke played upon man by an evil power. Following Tolstoj’s example, one might draw an analogy from the Gospels: it is as though he were trying to patch over death, an old tear in the fabric of his life, with the new cloth of his Christian teaching. By 1886 that new cloth had begun to shrink and the edges of the rent in his happiness were again becoming apparent. It is possible to interpret this story in two ways—as a moral proscription of a certain type of conduct or, as has been shown, as a pessimistic description of the human condition in general. The present interpretation has the advantage of providing a logical context for the sympathy which readers commonly experience for the story’s central character. If the story is simply morally prescriptive, then Paxom is a greedy fool whose premature death is the just and ironic recompense for his misspent life. Within this framework sympathy for Paxom and the pessimistic tone of the story (why should justice make us feel pessimistic?) seem to have no basis. But the evidence suggests the existence of a thematic undercurrent in the story which is in accord with the feelings of sympathy and pessimism which the story arouses. By the middle of the 1880s Tolstoj’s hard-won spiritual unity was beginning to show signs of fracture. On one hand we can see the self-assured Christian teacher, on the other the reawakening seer of death and hopelessness. Between the two stands Tolstoj the artist, moved now by one, now by the other. In ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?,’’ considered outside the explanatory context of the other Stories for the People and in the light of biographical facts, the artist was especially responsive to the seer of death. Source: Gary R. Jahn, ‘‘Tolstoj’s Vision of the Power of Death and ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?,’’’ in
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Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 22, No. 4, Winter 1978, pp. 442–53.
Alexey Remizov In the following essay, Tolstoy is revealed to, despite the harsh realities of his lifetime, believe in miracles. Barren of faith, so that it seems beyond understanding that men could ever have undertaken collective works extending over years like the Gothic cathedrals; narrow of outlook—seeing that which lies before the eyes, but of what is farther and deeper—nothing; crushed in will, craven, thirsting with all its being for the miracle which alone might lift the spirit from the abysmal rut of a grey, trampled, hopeless existence on earth—such is the world into which came Tolstoy and brought his vision, his fearless and challenging word, and his belief in the miraculous, here in this world, and in man. All thoughts on life and man have long since been spoken and their living force lies not in novelty but in the faith, the sincerity and the fire of the word. Intense belief in the miraculous and boundless trust in man—in man’s will and conscience— this—faith, will, fire—is the urge to creation in Tolstoy. Herein is the reason why men surged to him, why his words moved mankind. Tolstoy taught ‘‘non-resistance’’:—this in the face of life’s cruel law of merciless strife, it matters not with what tools, when Heraclitus’ God of War is indeed ‘‘Lord and Father of Life’’! What must have been his faith in the miraculous in man! Man will hear, feel, understand, let fall the uplifted hand, and furthermore, will find within himself the strength, with all the fortitude of his soul to forbid. And again Tolstoy’s words: ‘‘Halt! Cut short this life you are leading on earth, founded on falsehood and coercion, on man’s exploitation by man and the condonation of force, which creates not such things as raise man’s spirit but such as poison and blunt his soul!’’ What faith in the miraculous! Man will find in himself the strength to halt and, of his own volition, to revoke the whole tenor of his existence and begin a new, free life. This faith in the miraculous conquers the man who, not yet crushed and stifled, strives to free his living spirit from the narrow circle of a life hemmed in by arduous toil.
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Tolstoy saw life as a great reality, not bounded by the daily round but stretching into the manifold complexities of a dream. To dreams Tolstoy attached great significance and often repeated Pascal’s words: ‘‘If dreams were consecutive we should not be able to tell which is dream and which reality.’’ In Russian literature dream concepts have always held a great place. Gogol, like E. T. A. Hoffmann, grasped the dream in its purest essence—his story ‘‘The Nose’’ is founded on a dream, in a dream. Dostoyevsky gave instances of ‘‘visions’’; with Tolstoy and with Leskov the dream permeates life, is inextricably mingled with the happenings of to-day and yet unknown to-morrow. This prophetic dream, revealing the hidden fate of man, comes to them with all the clarity of the realisation of a strange and ineffable manifoldness. In Anna Karenina the dream marks the path of the story; there are wonderful dreams in the tale of ‘‘The Two Old Men’’ and in ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need’’ and ‘‘What Men Live By.’’ The reality of life, enlarged in depth and breadth, where to-day holds the vision of tomorrow,—this is a flight—superhuman; this is to see and brush against fate itself. And this flight is miraculous and, like belief in miracles, it conquers man. Belief in the miraculous is eternal youth and the guarantee of life, for faith not only moves mountains and subdues the elements—but builds new worlds. Source: Alexey Remizov, ‘‘The Miraculous in Tolstoy,’’ in Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 7, No. 20, January 1929, pp. 473–74.
Sara A. Hubbard In the following review, Hubbard praises Tolstoy’s faith and honesty, but laments that his religion may have hurt his writing.
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which have become the rule of his life, cutting short, as it is judged, a brilliant literary career, is given in the volume entitled My Religion. A supplement to this work—or, more properly speaking, the prelude to it—now appears under the title of My Confession. It was written in 1879, and in the right order of sequence should precede the book which it follows as an appendix. It is the simple avowal of a heart utterly intent on the service of truth and unmindful of the praise or censure of men. Count Tolstoı¨ was christened and educated, like the mass of the Russian nation, in the Orthodox Greek Church. Nothing disturbed the passive character of his faith until his twelfth year (in 1838), when a boyish comrade brought him word of the discovery, rife among the pupils of a gymnasium, that there was no God, and all that had been taught concerning him was merely the product of human invention. The young Lyof was captured by the novel idea, and thereupon began reading Voltaire. In his precocious wisdom he perceived the necessity of learning the catechism and continuing attendance at church; but his faith in the creed of his fathers gradually died out, until, at the age of sixteen, he ceased to pray or pay heed to any of the observances it prescribed. Nevertheless the instincts of a religious nature were not to be suppressed; and to satisfy these he strove after perfection in mental and bodily attainments, pushing his studies in every direction and inuring himself to severe physical exercises and the endurance of voluntary trials and privations. The pathetic tenor of this period in the history of the motherless boy is little more than hinted at in the narrative, but between lines like the following its entire significance may easily be read: I honestly desired to make myself a good and virtuous man; but I was young, I had passions, and I stood alone, altogether alone, in my search after virtue. Every time I tried to express the longings of my heart for a truly virtuous life, I was met with contempt and derisive laughter; but directly I gave way to the lowest of my passions, I was praised and encouraged. . . . I gave way to these passions, and becoming like unto my elders, I felt that the place which I filled in the world satisfied those around me. My kind-hearted aunt, a really good woman, used to say to me, that there was one thing above all others which she wished for me—an intrigue with a married woman: ‘Rien ne forme un jeune homme, comme une liaison avec une femme comme il
The inner history of any strong personal experience is instructive; more deeply so when it is that of a man of ardent feeling, of earnest aspiration, and fine intellect. The life of Count Tolstoı¨ , as it has been revealed in his writings, has excited universal interest. His genius was first made known through his earlier works of fiction; and immediately upon the enthusiasm which this created there came intimations of curiously eccentric conduct induced largely by intense and peculiar religious convictions. The novelist’s own account of the singular tenets
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faut.’ Another of her wishes for my happiness was that I should become an adjutant, and if possible, to the Emperor; the greatest happiness of all for me, she thought, would be that I should find a wealthy bride who would bring me as her dowry an enormous number of slaves.
The Count arraigns the sins of his youth in unsparing terms. I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others, I lost at cards, wasted my substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder, all committed by me, not one crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by my equals a comparatively moral man. Such was my life during ten years. During that time I began to write, out of vanity, love of gain, and pride. I followed as a writer the same path which I had chosen as a man.
Notwithstanding the career of dissipation thus unreservedly avowed, the better self dominated at intervals, for it was while he was in the army that Tolstoı¨ laid the firm foundation of his literary career. At twenty-six, when the war closed and he repaired to St. Petersburg, he was welcomed by the guild of authors there as one of the most gifted and promising of their fraternity. It was the conviction of this circle of thinkers and poets that they were ordained by the endowment of genius to be the instructors of mankind; and, without any definite preparation or purpose, they spoke and wrote and printed unceasingly. Count Lyof adopted the flattering theory with eagerness, and wrote and taught he ‘‘knew not what,’’ with similar impetuosity. For doing this,’’ he says, ‘‘I received large sums of money; I kept a splendid table, had an excellent lodging, associated with loose women, and received my friends handsomely; moreover, I had fame.
The natural integrity of the man again prevailed, however, and he sickened of the false pretenses of men whose immoralities even exceeded those to which he had been accustomed in his military career. He travelled abroad, everywhere mingling with eminent foreigners and searching among them for higher motives to sanctify the aims of life. He returned unsatisfied; and, turning his back upon the excitements and pursuits of the city and of a literary teacher, he settled in the country and busied himself with the organization of schools for the peasantry. A year was spent in this employment, and again he went abroad, looking for more light on the great social problems he
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was struggling to work out. His return this time was coincident with the emancipation of the serfs; and, accepting the office of a country magistrate, he resumed the work of education, teaching simultaneously in the schools and in the columns of a newspaper which he published. At the end of a twelvemonth his health gave way and he was forced to seek restoration in new scenes and occupations. He was soon after married, and for a term of fifteen years was happily absorbed in the interests of his family and estate. Then arose anew in his mind the restless inquiry into the true meaning of life; and, tormented by the baffling query, he was brought to the verge of suicide. He was obliged to hide a cord to avoid hanging himself by it, and to cease carrying a gun because it offered too easy a way of getting rid of the misery of existence. Such was the condition I had come to,’’ he says, ‘‘at a time when all the circumstances of my life were pree¨minently happy ones, and when I had not reached my fiftieth year. I had a good, a loving, and a well-beloved wife, good children, a fine estate, which, without much trouble on my part, continually increased my income; I was more than ever respected by my friends and acquaintances; I was praised by strangers, and could lay claim to having made my name famous without much self-deception. Moreover, my mind was neither deranged nor weakened; on the contrary, I enjoyed a mental and physical strength which I have seldom found in men of my class and pursuits: I could keep up with a peasant in mowing, and could continue mental labor for ten hours at a stretch, without any evil consequences.
He turned for an explanation of the questions which destroyed his peace, to all the sources of knowledge open to him, to books and to personal intercourse with learned men. ‘‘I sought it,’’ he says, ‘‘as a perishing man seeks safety, and I found nothing.’’ At last he directed his study to the life of the common people, the simple, the unlearned, and the poor, and here he discovered a peace and content founded upon genuine faith, which did not exist elsewhere. He contrasted this life of sincerity and serenity with that of the rich and the learned and the distinguished with whom he had dwelt, and the latter not only became repulsive, but lost all meaning whatever. All our actions, our reasoning, our science and art, all appeared to me in a new light. I understood that it was all child’s play, that it was useless to seek a meaning in it. The life of the working classes, of the whole of mankind, of those that create life, appeared to me in its true significance. I understood that
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this was life itself, and that the meaning given to this life was the true one, and I accepted it.
As Count Tolstoı¨ interprets it, the meaning of life is that man shall gain his living by labor, and that he shall not only work for himself but for all. And this creed of industry and humanity he proceeded to carry out faithfully in his daily conduct. I renounced the life of my own class, for I had come to confess that it was not a real life, only the semblance of one; that its superfluous luxury prevented the possibility of understanding life; and that in order to do so I must know, not an exceptional parasitic life, but the simple life of the working classes, the life which fashions that of the world, and gives it the meaning which the working classes accept.
The faith of the people was that taught by the orthodox church, and to this Count Tolstoı¨ went back after an absence of many years. But in the very heat of his enthusiasm he was chilled by the assertion of dogmas his reason repelled. At his first communion, he says, ‘‘when I drew near the altar, and the priest called upon me to repeat that I believed that what I was about to swallow was the real body and blood, I felt a sharp pain at the heart.’’ The bitterness of doubt and perplexity was renewed, and no peace remained until he gave up the attempt to reconcile the false and the true which were entangled inextricably in the tenets of the church. He abandoned all communion with it, and taking the Scriptures alone for his guide he found in them at last a full and perfect answer to the questions which had so long and painfully agitated him. Appended to this confession of Count Tolstoı¨ is a short exposition of the gospel, an extract from a large manuscript work by him, the publication of which is prohibited in Russia for obvious reasons. The commentary presents ‘‘The Spirit of Christ’s Teaching’’ as the author understands it. He does not believe in the literal inspiration of the Scriptures, but regards them as the work of many human minds which has undergone endless alterations during the passage of centuries. He sees in them ‘‘not an exclusively divine revelation, not a mere historical phenomenon, but a teaching which gives the meaning of life.’’ His ideas, as frankly stated in the preface to the work on the Gospels, commend themselves by their liberality and moderation. They are those of a man of original mind, of great learning, of honest purpose, of endless courage, and of intense earnestness.
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Source: Sara A. Hubbard, ‘‘The Confession of Count Tolstoi,’’ in the Dial, Vol. 8, No. 90, October 1887, pp. 125–27.
SOURCES ‘‘Bashkiriya at the end of 18 - Beginning of 20 Centuries,’’ in 450 Years With Russia, http://eng.bashkortostan450. ru/history/XVI-XIX/xvi-x.html (accessed July 30, 2009). Bennett, William J., ed., The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, Simon & Schuster, 1993, p. 88. The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Oxford University Press, 1952, p. 1095. Christian, R. F., Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 267. Clarkson, Jesse D., A History of Russia, Random House, 1961. Clay, George R., ‘‘Tolstoy in the Twentieth Century,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, edited by Donna Tussing Orwin, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 209–21. Jahn, Gary R., ‘‘Tolstoy as a Writer of Popular Literature,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, edited by Donna Tussing Orwin, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 113–26. Love, Jeff, Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed, Continuum, 2008. p. 114. Rowe, William W., Leo Tolstoy, Twayne’s World Author Series No. 772, Twayne Publishers, 1986, pp. 96–98. Tolstoy, Leo, ‘‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?,’’ in Twenty-three Tales, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 207–26. ———, What Is Art? What Is Religion?, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923, p. 151. Troyat, Henri, Tolstoy, translated by Nancy Amphoux, Penguin, 1970, pp. 313, 456, 458, 554–55. Walker, Christopher, ‘‘Muzzling the Media: The Return of Censorship in the Commonwealth of Independent States,’’ in Freedom House, http://www.freedomhouse. org/uploads/press_release/muzzlingthemedia_15june07. pdf (accessed July 30, 2009).
FURTHER READING De Vos, Gail, and Anna E. Altmann, New Tales for Old: Folktales as Literary Fictions for Young Adults, Libraries Unlimited, 1999. This study of folktales includes analysis of some of the most well-known tales, including Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood. The authors discuss topics such
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as critical interpretation, different versions of the stories, and adaptations in other media (novels, films). They also provide a bibliography and list of Internet resources. Katz, Michael R., ed., Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, 2nd ed., Norton Critical Editions, Norton, 2008. This book contains twelve of Tolstoy’s most popular stories, annotated by Katz for student readers. Also included are selections from Tolstoy’s letters, memoirs, and diaries that are relevant for understanding Tolstoy’s creativity, and twenty-three critical essays on all aspects of the stories.
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Thompson, Stith, The Folktale, University of California Press, 1977. This is a classic study of the folktale in which Thompson analyzes recurring motifs and patterns in tales drawn from all over the world. The index of tale types is particularly useful. Wilson, A. N., Tolstoy: A Biography, Norton, 2001. This biography of Tolstoy has received high praise from reviewers as a thorough exploration of the man and his times. Wilson discusses Tolstoy’s three central relationships—with God, with women, and with Russia.
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Marigolds ‘‘Marigolds’’ remains one of the most frequently anthologized American short stories in high school English textbooks, despite the fact that it was one of the earliest of only a handful of short stories written by Eugenia W. Collier.
EUGENIA W. COLLIER 1969
Originally published in 1969 and most recently published in a 1994 collection of the author’s stories titled Breeder and Other Stories, the story seems almost to be written for the specific purpose of analysis because it includes several literary techniques—symbolism, metaphor, internal and external conflict—that are immediately apparent even to the novice literary critic. Additionally, its themes of poverty, identity, and loss of innocence are those common to stories that appeal to even the youngest readers. And yet ‘‘Marigolds’’ is much more than an early attempt at writing in the short story genre. It is a powerful account of a seemingly insignificant event which, understood by itself, is nothing more than a temper tantrum. Upon further inspection, however, those few moments of desperate destruction have a lifelong impact on the memory keeper. There is nothing fancy in Collier’s writing style; she does not write to entertain or inspire deep philosophical introspection. She writes to remember. ‘‘Marigolds’’ is a memory, and memory is faulty. What she provides—from the perspective of a young girl grown older—is not so much a report of the events of one late summer day but rather an emotional word painting of a scene from
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the woman’s childhood that forever altered her perception of the world in which she lived.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Eugenia Williams Carter is an African American author and educator who was born on April 6, 1928, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father, Harry Maceo, was a physician and her mother, Eugenia (Jackson) Williams, was an educator. Collier graduated magna cum laude from Howard University in 1948, the same year she married Charles S. Collier. The couple had three sons and eventually divorced. Collier earned her M.A. from Columbia University in 1950 and secured a job as a case worker with the Baltimore Department of Public Welfare. She left that job in 1955 to accept a position as assistant instructor at Morgan State College in Baltimore. One year later, she became an instructor at the college, a job she held until 1961, at which time she was promoted to assistant professor of English. Beginning in 1966, Collier held a number of teaching positions with the Community College of Baltimore. In 1969, Negro Digest published Collier’s short story ‘‘Marigolds.’’ This was a departure from the author’s usual writing, which primarily encompassed literary criticism and publication in academic journals. The story won Collier the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Fiction that year. ‘‘Marigolds’’ was not the only literary endeavor Collier undertook in 1969. She edited with Ruthe T. Sheffey a book of literary criticism titled Impressions in Asphalt: Images of Urban America in Literature. The following year, she authored with Joel I. Glasser and others a writing reference book A Bridge to Saying It Well: Grammar and Forms for Today’s Students. The author would continue to contribute to and edit anthologies throughout the 1970s while teaching at various universities and colleges. Her most well-known editing project is the 1972 anthology Afro-American Writing: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, edited with Richard A. Long and published by New York University Press. In addition to her scholarly writing and short stories, Collier has written poetry and contributed numerous essays to periodicals, including Negro Digest/Black World. Collier earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1976. That same year, one of her short stories, ‘‘Ricky,’’ was adapted into a play by the same name and performed at the Eugene Perkins Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. The next two
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decades were spent lecturing, teaching, and hosting educational workshops. In 1992, she accepted a position as professor of English at Morgan State University in Baltimore. It would be her last official job, as she retired in 1996. As of late 2009, Collier lives in Baltimore, where she occasionally visits classrooms to give presentations on creative writing and her stories.
PLOT SUMMARY ‘‘Marigolds’’ is set in a rural Maryland steel town during the Great Depression (1930s). Since segregation is only just beginning to be legally opposed, it is safe to assume that the entire community is African American. At the very least, all the characters in the story and the neighborhood in which they live are African American. Fourteen-year-old Lizabeth is the narrator of the story, and she opens by recalling her childhood hometown. From this the reader understands that Lizabeth is now a grown woman, writing about her experience from memory. In her memory, she remembers mostly dust, although she admits there must have been green lawns and paved streets lined with shade trees somewhere in her youth. But memory is just that: a recollection of something as it is remembered, not necessarily as it was. The narrator remembers that amidst the dilapidated shacks and soul-crushing poverty stood Miss Lottie’s house. By far in the worst condition, her yard nevertheless boasted what no other property did: a breathtaking color explosion of yellows and oranges in a marigold garden that Miss Lottie lovingly tended. Those flowers symbolized hope, a seemingly perverse idea in a community that had never known anything but hopelessness and destitution. Lizabeth recalls that her community was rather isolated from the rest of the world because no one could afford the latest technological advancement known as radio, nor was there an abundance of newspapers and magazines. She likens poverty to a cage in which everyone there was trapped. The children’s anger at their poverty lay just beneath the surface. ‘‘Our hatred of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo-bred flamingo who knows instinctively that nature created it to be free.’’ Lizabeth and her eleven-year-old brother Joey are the only children left at home, the others
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having moved or been sent away. As September is passing and summer is coming to a close, Lizabeth and Joey find themselves bored yet wanting to wring every last drop of freedom from the waning summer days. They are left on their own each day as their father looks for work and their mother, Maybelle, works as a servant in the home of a white couple, Mr. and Miz Ellis. Joey gets bored one day and suggests to Lizabeth and a handful of their friends that they go to Miss Lottie’s. The idea is immediately accepted because Miss Lottie and her simpleminded son, John Burke, are the town outcasts. Although the children fear Miss Lottie, they turn that fear into meanness as they taunt and torment John Burke and his mother. On this particular day, John Burke is sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch, just as he is almost every day. He spends his days in a mindless stupor and is generally unaware of the world around him. When irked, ‘‘he would become enraged, strike out at you, and curse at you in some strange enchanted language which only he could understand.’’ The children have made a game out of exploring ways to disturb and then escape the adult but childlike John Burke. Miss Lottie is another story. The children think of her as a black witch because they never see her in town or anywhere else but her house. She welcomes no visitors and so isolates herself that they figure she must perform magic to complete those day-to-day chores that require human interaction. She seems to them a hundred years old, and her once-powerful body is now bent from years of labor and hardship. When the children come upon Miss Lottie, she is hunched over in her marigolds, weeding. The children throw stones and knock off the heads of some of her flowers, which sends her into a fit of rage. She yells for John Burke to come help her, but before his reverie is broken, Lizabeth runs straight at Miss Lottie, chanting a nasty child’s rhyme. The other children join her in her bullying until John Burke finally understands that his mother needs him. The children then scatter in all directions and gather again back in the safety of Lizabeth and Joey’s yard. Unlike the other, younger children, Lizabeth is ashamed of her behavior. Dinner that night is quiet as the children and their father eat leftovers. Maybelle is working late to earn much-needed money.
inability to find work and provide for his family. ‘‘Twenty-two years, Maybelle, twenty-two years and I ain’t got nothing for you, nothing.’’ His own sense of pride is hurt, but more importantly, his own sense of self-worth is damaged. This is a man who has historically been a capable provider and a loving father who not only cares for his children, but involves himself in their lives. Since the Depression hit, he has lost his job and with it, his self-identity. Even as Maybelle soothes her husband’s sorrow and grief, he breaks down into heaving sobs, like those of a tiny child. Lizabeth hears this foreign sound and cannot wrap her brain around the idea that this is what her world has come to. ‘‘The world had lost its boundary lines. . . . Where did I fit into this crazy picture? I do not remember my thoughts, only a feeling of great bewilderment and fear.’’ Lizabeth is struck with the realization that her world order has been upended. Whereas she once knew—or thought she knew—how everything worked, she suddenly understands that her life has veered off course. Lizabeth needs to escape so she wakes up Joey and tells him to follow her outside. They climb out the window and she runs as if her life depends on it. She finds herself in Miss Lottie’s yard once again, and though the crumbling house frightens her, she does not turn away. ‘‘It looked haunted, but I was not afraid, because I was haunted too.’’ Lizabeth then proceeds to destroy Miss Lottie’s marigolds. With blind fury, she pulls them out of the ground and smashes them, damaging the one thing of beauty in an ugly, oppressive world. She pulls with a rage for all the emotions she has kept inside, the unceasing ‘‘need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness of our poverty and degradation, the bewilderment of being neither child nor woman and yet both at once, the fear unleashed by my father’s tears.’’ When her emotional storm has subsided, Lizabeth sits in those flowers, sobbing with the realization that she can never undo the ruin she has caused. She looks up and sees Miss Lottie towering over her. Only she no longer sees a threatening witch, but a broken old woman who had tried to make the best out of a life of sorrow and despair.
Lizabeth falls into a fitful sleep on her pallet but is awakened in the middle of the night by her parents’ voices. Her father is lamenting his
Although she had no words to describe the experience at the time, the adult Lizabeth recognizes that the event was the very moment that slammed the door on childhood and pushed her through the door to womanhood. Her innocence was gone, forever, and in its place grew compassion.
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‘‘Innocence involves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface. In that humiliating moment I looked beyond myself and into the depths of another person.’’ Miss Lottie never does replant those marigolds. Lizabeth, finally understanding the symbolic hope of those flowers, admits that along her life’s path, she has planted her own marigolds.
CHARACTERS John Burke John Burke is the ‘‘queer-head’’ son of Miss Lottie Burke. Although his condition is never labeled, he is known to be mentally challenged. Lizabeth describes him as ‘‘totally unaware’’ of his surroundings, an ageless black man prone to violence if his ‘‘mindless stupor’’ is interrupted. John Burke spends most of his time sitting in the rocking chair on his front porch, lost in his own limited world. As often is the case in small towns where everyone knows everyone else, the neighborhood children look for ways to taunt their dim-witted neighbor and then run screaming when their efforts succeed. For Lizabeth, John Burke rounds out the picture of the neighborhood’s relentless decay. Regardless of what else goes on in that Maryland steel town, the buildings continue to crumble from neglect and John Burke continues to rock. His eternal rocking—his presence on the front porch—is as constant as the decline of the town’s economic conditions and the dissipation of hope as days pass and hardship increases.
never see her anywhere but in her front yard, Lizabeth and the other children cannot fathom how she conducts those daily tasks that require human interaction. How does she get her groceries? Does she ever go into town? She never has visitors and does not want anyone in her home. These little mysteries roused suspicion and great fear in the children when they were younger. And although as teens they no longer believe she holds witchlike powers, their fear of Miss Lottie remains. Those fears manifest themselves in the form of bullying, and like her son, Miss Lottie is the target of the neighborhood children’s ridicule and taunts. Although she never bothers anyone, Lizabeth and the other children go out of their way to harass Miss Lottie. They especially despise her abundant display of marigolds. ‘‘For some perverse reason, we children hated those marigolds. They interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place. . . . Something in the vigor with which the old woman destroyed the weeds intimidated us.’’ And so the children take out their aggression on Miss Lottie by throwing stones at her flowers. After Lizabeth loses control and destroys Miss Lottie’s marigold bed, she realizes Miss Lottie is nothing more than a destitute, defeated old woman whose only joy was found in tending to her flowers. The reader never knows how Miss Lottie reacts to Lizabeth’s tantrum, but she never replaces those flowers she so dearly loved. In Lizabeth’s mind, Miss Lottie becomes a symbol for an entire generation of downtrodden, poverty-stricken people who dared to hope even in the most desperate circumstances.
Miss Lottie Burke Miss Lottie is John Burke’s mother and the gardener of the marigolds for which this short story is titled. She is a neighborhood character whose legend and mystery overshadows the truth of her life, and the children perceive her as a witchwoman. Of all the houses in the town, Miss Lottie’s is the most dilapidated, its weathered boards warped and tumbledown. Like Miss Lottie herself, the building seems to have a magical quality about it: ‘‘the fact that it was still standing implied a kind of enchantment that was stronger than the elements.’’ A large, African American woman, Miss Lottie seems to the children to be at least one hundred years old and a complete mystery. Because they
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Father Lizabeth’s and Joey’s father has been out of work for an unspecified amount of time. His frustrations overwhelm him as he apologizes to Maybelle for not being the provider he is expected and wants to be. When Maybelle tries to assuage his guilt by reminding him that she gets paid weekly and that the people she cleans for pass along useful clothing, Lizabeth’s father begins to sob. It is a sound she has never heard before, and the sudden realization that the world is not as she thought it was—how it ought to be—proves too much for Lizabeth to bear. Children typically experience an event that in hindsight can be considered the bridge between childhood and adulthood. In Lizabeth’s case, her father’s emotional breakdown is the catalyst for her own act of defiance.
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Joey Joey is Lizabeth’s eleven-year-old brother. During the summer, Joey and Lizabeth are left on their own while their parents work, and so Joey becomes his sister’s closest companion. Lizabeth considers her younger brother more of a pain than anything, someone to accompany her in her summer boredom. ‘‘Joey was three years younger than I, and a boy, and therefore vastly inferior.’’ He is a typical younger brother, taking glee in annoying his sister and making her shake her head in judgment. Joey is the child who comes up with the idea to throw stones at Miss Lottie and her marigolds while she tends to them. And when Lizabeth cannot sleep in the night and wants to escape her feelings of confusion and grief, it is Joey whose company she seeks to save her from her loneliness. He witnesses Lizabeth’s formidable fury as she lays waste to Miss Lottie’s marigolds that night, and when his sister’s rage finally subsides, Joey is still there, loyally sitting beside her in disbelief and fear. Joey’s character acts as a sort of looking glass into the past for Lizabeth. Though just three years younger than she, he is a version of how she once was: naive, childlike, accustomed to acting before thinking things through. Joey lives in the moment as Lizabeth once did, thinking only of himself and what he desires at the moment.
eyes. She exhibits traits universal to most teens: restlessness, egocentricity (thinking she is at the center of the world), subject to daydreaming with a tendency to shift moods abruptly. But in the scope of one late summer’s night, Lizabeth leaves behind the innocence of her childhood and takes those first tentative steps into adulthood as she realizes reality lies in the eyes of the beholder. Lizabeth is the character who experiences the most growth and change in the story. Whereas she first appears as a sullen girl who is annoyed with the world in general, the story culminates in her evolution into a woman whose awkwardness has transformed into realization and understanding. The final passages of the story reveal a woman whose life experiences have led her full circle, back to those marigolds and all they have come to symbolize.
Maybelle Maybelle is Lizabeth and Joey’s mother. She tries to comfort her husband when he laments his current unemployed state, ‘‘Honey, you took good care of us when you had it. Ain’t nobody got nothing nowadays.’’ Maybelle is solely responsible for the family’s income, but rather than feel resentment, she rises to the responsibility of being the source of her family’s strength.
Lizabeth Lizabeth is the narrator of the story. Although she recalls the memory as an adult, at the time the event took place, she was fourteen years old. Lizabeth is an African American teenager growing up in the poverty of the Great Depression. Although everyone in her Maryland steel town lives in the grips of poverty, the adult Lizabeth is aware that as an African American, the economic depression had an even more severe impact on her race. Even in the best of times, blacks did not generally aspire to achieve the American dream (a comfortable life in which all needs are met and children grow to achieve more than their parents did); they realistically judged it to be out of their reach due to the confines and limitations of widespread racism and prejudice. At the time the story takes place, however, the depths of despair were not realized by Lizabeth or her peers. ‘‘We children, of course, were only vaguely aware of the extent of our poverty. . . . In those days everybody we knew was just as hungry and ill-clad as we were.’’
THEMES Coming of Age A coming-of-age story is one in which the protagonist, or main character, is initiated into adulthood through the attainment of knowledge or experience. Often, experience leads to knowledge, and the process is often one of disillusionment. ‘‘Marigolds’’ isLizabeth’scoming-of-age story. The confusion she feels over her father’s desperation and shame and the subsequent role reversal of her parents leave her mind reeling as she tries to make sense of her world. Immediately after destroying Miss Lottie’s garden, Lizabeth recognizes she has crossed the bridge from childhood into adulthood. ‘‘And that was the moment when childhood faded and womanhood began. . . . For as I gazed at the immobile face with the weary eyes, I gazed upon a kind of reality which is hidden to childhood.’’
‘‘Marigolds’’ is Lizabeth’s story; readers know what happens from her perspective, through her
Lizabeth’s coming-of-age includes two other themes: innocence and compassion. At the instant of Lizabeth’s coming-of-age, innocence
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
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Read Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). How is the character Boo Radley similar to John Burke? What traits do they share? How do they affect neighborhood children? Make a list of similarities between the two men. Include descriptive phrases and passages from both texts. Choose one of the characters from the story ‘‘Marigolds’’ and write a biography of that person’s life up until the time of the story. Be sure to include pertinent information like birth date and place, important events and milestones, and details about that person’s character traits. Using any artistic medium, illustrate the climactic scene where Lizabeth destroys Miss Lottie’s marigold garden. Research the Great Depression. Imagine you lived during that era and write a paper using this prompt: If I lived during the Great Depression. . . . You can imagine yourself as a teenager like you are now, or a parent, or a single adult. Create your own circumstances, but be sure your paper reflects your understanding and knowledge of what it was like to live in America in the 1930s. Cover not only the economic factors of the age, but also the cultural and societal aspects. Music of the Great Depression reflected the emotional lows and hopeful highs of Americans throughout the nation. Much of the era’s music was an extension of the African American experience during that decade of economic hardship. Research the music and its musicians and prepare a presentation using PowerPoint or some other computer software program. Educate your audience on the types of music popular during the 1930s as well as its musicians. What musical genres came to the forefront of American
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society? Who composed and performed the songs? Provide examples of the songs and their lyrics.
In addition to African Americans, one of the most seriously impacted ethnic groups during the Great Depression was Mexican immigrants. While experiencing food and job shortages, they also faced the threat of deportation. Using online research, compare and contrast the Mexican immigrant experience with that of the African American experience during this time period. What struggles and circumstances did they share? Which were unique to each population? Present your findings in a PowerPoint presentation.
Reread ‘‘Marigolds’’ with a focus on Lizabeth. Create a poster board cutout of a marigold and then list as many adjectives and emotions as you can think of to describe her character, listing one on each petal. Include those found in the story itself, but try to come up with as many of your own descriptors as possible.
Hollywood took advantage of America’s need to escape reality and churned out one movie after another throughout the 1930s. So prolific were the movie production companies that the era became known as Hollywood’s ‘‘Golden Age.’’ Research the movie industry of the 1930s. What were some of the recurring themes explored in film? Who were the big stars of the era? What were some of the major films and their actors? Develop your presentation as a slideshow, complete with music and narration, or have someone videotape you as you host an imaginary television special on the Golden Age of Cinema. Your television show can include other people dressed up as actors or movie directors. As long as your production is informative, you can design your own show.
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is replaced with compassion as childhood is left behind. She suddenly understands that life and its events—and people—cannot be taken at face value, that there is always more than meets the eye. Lizabeth could now look at her parents and Miss Lottie and understand them with a sense of compassion she did not possess just a moment ago. The loss of innocence involves a willingness to embrace the idea that the world does not revolve around Lizabeth and her limited ability to truly ‘‘see’’ reality. ‘‘This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence.’’
Conflict Two types of conflict are addressed in ‘‘Marigolds’’: external and internal. The external conflict causes—or at least exacerbates—Lizabeth’s internal conflict. Lizabeth lives in poverty. For a young black girl in rural Maryland in the 1930s, poverty is not a result of the Great Depression, but merely a fact of daily existence. She and her neighbors know prosperity is not just around the corner as President Herbert Hoover and his administration are claiming. She knows she and her people need nothing short of a miracle. ‘‘But God was stingy with miracles in those days, and so we waited—and waited.’’ Lizabeth’s father is unable to find work and so he and his children rely on Maybelle’s meager income. He expresses his remorse and shame to Maybelle, and the conversation ends in his sobbing. Lizabeth has never heard her father cry; she does not even know that men ever cry at all. Lying in the dark, she listens to her strong, able father emotionally fall apart while her small, gentle mother offers comfort and solace.
she initially claims that as children they were only vaguely aware of their circumstances, she eventually wonders if that is true. ‘‘Perhaps we had some dim notion of what we were and how little chance we had of being anything else.’’ Poverty is but one aspect of the lives of Collier’s characters, but it is a highly defining aspect, both in terms of how the world sees them and how they see the world. Lizabeth likens poverty to a cage, and it is this realization that she comes to when she experiences her epiphany, or sudden insight, there in Miss Lottie’s garden. The last paragraph of the story implies that Lizabeth grew up to overcome the poverty in which she was raised. Yet even as an adult, she clearly identifies with the concept; it will always be with her.
Identity Both self-identity and social identity are explored in Collier’s story. Lizabeth and the other children form their self-identity based on their living conditions. Rather than acknowledge their poverty as merely one factor in who they are, they define themselves by it. They do not see themselves as a who, but a what. Likewise, their social identity is wrapped up in those same limitations. Their living conditions and ignorance of society at large form the basis of how they relate to the world around them. ‘‘ . . . we were somewhat unaware of the world outside our community. Nowadays we would be called ‘culturally deprived,’ and white people would write books and hold conferences about us.’’ The children do not have any perception of themselves as children in a larger community, but of a poor, isolated community in a much larger, more prosperous world.
This is a world Lizabeth did not know existed, and she does not know how to deal with her sudden realization of it. In her struggle to comprehend the destruction of her world’s boundaries, she falls back on the emotion that becomes the bucket for emotional confusion: anger. Miss Lottie’s garden becomes the target of Lizabeth’s anger, the manifestation of her internal conflict, which was caused by external conflict.
Lizabeth’s father’s sense of self is based on his role as provider and protector. His shame at failing his family in those capacities overwhelms him, and when Maybelle tries to comfort him by mentioning the clothing Mr. Ellis is going to pass along, it only inspires an emotional breakdown. All of Lizabeth’s father’s shame and humiliation, his frustration and grief is contained in those sobs, and it is that sound that sends Lizabeth fleeing from the house and into her destructive behavior.
Poverty Poverty is almost a character of its own in Collier’s ‘‘Marigolds.’’ It affects every aspect of the story in the way it affects everyone’s life that it touches in the real world. Lizabeth identifies with poverty from the very beginning of the story. Although
Lizabeth clearly loves and admires her father. In her eyes, he is the strength of the family, the person around whom all others orbit. When that perception is proved to be false, her own identity is brought into question, and she flounders and lashes out in confusion.
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Desert marigold bloom (Image copyright Steve Shout, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
Gender Roles This theme goes hand in hand with identity. There are clear gender role expectations in the world of ‘‘Marigolds.’’ Joey, as Lizabeth’s younger brother, is, in her eyes, ‘‘a boy, and therefore vastly inferior.’’ Her parents, too, have predetermined roles in Lizabeth’s mind. Her mother, tiny in stature and soft in nature, is suddenly the source of the family’s strength, the one who comforts her father in his time of weakness. Her father, the stable core of the family, is reduced to the violent, heaving sobs of a child. This reversal of roles throws Lizabeth’s sense of balance off center. ‘‘Everything was suddenly out of tune, like a broken accordion.’’
STYLE
make the story more personal, more emotional than it would be if told in the third person or in the style of newspaper reporting. Although a memoir is assumed to be autobiographical, this is not the case in ‘‘Marigolds.’’ Lizabeth is not Collier, and the scenes depicted do not describe Collier’s experience. That the story reads like a memory of something the author experienced reflects the power of the memoir to conjure up feelings and emotions. The emphasis of this story is on emotion rather than events; the climactic scene of the story—the destruction of Miss Lottie’s marigolds—is merely a result of Lizabeth’s emotions. Without an understanding of what Lizabeth was feeling, that scene loses its meaning. Telling the story in the form of a memoir encourages the reader to focus on what lies beneath and motivates its characters.
Memoir Collier tells the story in the style of a memoir, that is, in first person, as if she is speaking directly to the reader. Use of the words ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘my’’ and ‘‘we’’
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Metaphor Collier frequently uses metaphor—an expression that connects seemingly unrelated subjects or
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concepts—frequently in ‘‘Marigolds.’’ Already in the first paragraph, she turns to metaphor. ‘‘But memory is an abstract painting—it does not present things as they are but rather as they feel.’’ Another metaphor Collier uses involves the oppression of poverty. ‘‘Poverty was the cage in which we were all trapped . . . .’’ Metaphor is a useful device for underscoring thematic elements in a story. Both of the previous metaphor examples serve this purpose. The first emphasizes the theme of memory, the second focuses on poverty. Both themes are explored in ‘‘Marigolds’’ and add to the meaning of Collier’s message. By creating the story as a memory, she suggests to the reader that what is written is only what is remembered in terms of feelings, not necessarily what actually happened. Without placing Lizabeth in the grips of extreme poverty, the story would be about a girl who is merely confused by what she overhears. The climactic scene would take on a different meaning, perhaps one of malice. With poverty as a backdrop, the reader better understands the impact of Lizabeth’s desperation upon realizing the reality of her life. The climactic scene, then, is understood to be motivated by grief, a sort of painful evolution.
Symbolism Marigolds are the primary symbol in the story. Against a dusty brown yard upon which sits a decaying hut, those flowers ‘‘rose suddenly and shockingly’’ in a ’’dazzling strip of bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds, warm and passionate and sun-golden.’’ The flowers symbolize hope and freedom. Even in the midst of a lifetime of hardship that includes poverty and raising a mentally challenged son on her own, Miss Lottie holds on to her hope that life might one day improve. While tending her marigolds, she is free from the constraints and concerns of poverty as she focuses only on keeping those marigolds alive through tender care. Those moments spent in her garden allow Miss Lottie to escape, to find freedom from her oppressive life. To Lizabeth and the neighborhood children, who do not fully comprehend the far-reaching effects of chronic poverty, the flowers are confusing. That Miss Lottie would spend her time tending to them with obvious love and determination to keep them alive even though the world around her is barren and hopeless does not make sense. The children do not understand the meaning behind planting and nurturing those marigolds. What they cannot understand, they despise and wish to destroy.
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The use of color—specifically, the lack of it— symbolizes poverty. Although the child Lizabeth does not realize the extent or meaning of her impoverished life, her story, which is a memory, is filled with drab colors. Collier emphasizes this in the first sentence of the story. ‘‘When I think of the home town of my youth, all that I seem to remember is dust—the brown, crumbly dust of late summer—arid, sterile dust . . . .’’ Other references to the lack of color include ‘‘from white to a sullen gray’’ and ‘‘a gray rotting thing.’’ Understanding the lack of color as symbolic of poverty makes the meaning of the intensely bright marigold symbol easier to comprehend. If not for the abject poverty in which Lizabeth and the neighborhood children have been living, the presence of the cheerful marigolds would not have inspired such intense longing to destroy them.
Epiphany An epiphany is a defining moment, sometimes referred to as the ‘‘ah-ha!’’ moment when something is suddenly realized or comprehended. Collier’s entire short story is developed around Lizabeth’s epiphany. As she stood in front of Miss Lottie in the haze of early dawn, Lizabeth intuitively knew her life was forever changed by the destruction of Miss Lottie’s beautiful marigolds. ‘‘That violent, crazy act was the last act of childhood.’’ It was the exact moment Lizabeth left behind her childlike innocence in exchange for a sense of compassion. Miss Lottie was no longer a witch, but merely an old woman whose life had given her next to nothing and yet who had chosen to create beauty among the ruins. ‘‘Whatever there was of love and beauty and joy that had not been squeezed out by life, had been there in the marigolds she had so lovingly tended.’’ This epiphany is what the story builds up to; it is what allows Lizabeth to leave behind the dust and squalor of her childhood. It is the turning point in both the story and the main character’s life.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Segregation in the Great Depression The 1930s in America were years of severe economic depression resulting in abject poverty. Some fared better than others; minority populations such as African Americans and Mexican immigrants tended to struggle the most because they already faced racial discrimination and thus had to work harder than whites to achieve the
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1930s: Racial segregation exists in American society. Education is segregated, as are neighborhoods and public facilities. Black attorneys begin fighting segregation in the courts. 1960s: The civil rights movement begins, and major civil rights laws are passed in the mid1960s that prohibit racial discrimination in public education and accommodation and extend fair voting rights to African Americans. Affirmative action (policies to increase opportunities for racial minorities) is enacted by 1969. Although formal segregation is abolished in most cities by 1968, segregation still exists. Today: Racial discrimination is illegal throughout the country. Affirmative action policies are controversial for their very nature of favoring one race over another, but perception of and belief in racial equality has changed as America’s first African American president is elected. Despite the fact that public policy favors integration, segregation still exists in some regions of the country.
In ‘‘Marigolds,’’ the Depression is in full swing, but Lizabeth and her family have never known anything else, ‘‘The Depression that
1930s: Electrification comes to rural America and with it, the radio. Those households that can afford radio suddenly find themselves connected to the rest of the country, no matter how isolated they are geographically, as long as each mile of power lines services three customers or more. 1960s: With the advent of television a decade ago, radio is no longer the primary medium that connects Americans to events happening in the nation and across the globe. Radio remains the main source of music, however, due to the development of FM (frequency modulation) radio, which allows for more stations and better signal reception. Today: Radio is still a means of news gathering and entertainment, but it shares that job with cable and satellite television as well as the Internet. The most recent invention is SIRIUS and XM Satellite Radio, which include hundreds of commercial-free channels and allows for customized programming.
1930s: The previous decade found women breaking through the social and cultural barriers that had kept them largely relegated to the home and family. The 1930s extends that transformation. The 1940 census reveals that approximately thirteen million (25.4 percent) women over the age of fourteen work outside the home, primarily in domestic-, clerical-, factory-, and sales-related positions. 1960s: More and more women are entering the workforce. By 1969, 43 percent of all American women have joined the labor force. In the past, women who worked outside the home usually did so out of necessity,
same quality of life. But no one was spared in the Great Depression.
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perhaps because they were single and had no one to support them financially. By 1960, over 30 percent of all married American women are working, a 15 percent increase from 1940. Today: Women can be found in all levels of administration and management as well as in politics in the twenty-first century. In the latter part of the first decade of the century, approximately seventy-two million (about 59.5 percent) American women age sixteen and older are labor force participants. The largest percentage of employed women work in management, professional, and related occupations.
gripped the nation was no new thing to us, for the black workers of rural Maryland had always been depressed.’’ As American society was still marked by severe racial segregation in the 1930s, one can assume that most, if not all,
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A single marigold grows in the Dust Bowl. (Image copyright Carlos Caetano, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
neighbors in that Maryland steel town are African American. If so, their sufferings are similar in that jobs are difficult to come by and those that can be found do not pay well. By 1932, about half of the country’s black population was out of work. Even in cities in the North (which would include Maryland), where race relations were relatively better, some whites demanded black employees be fired from their jobs so that whites could take their place.
decades in American history. The early years saw the organization of black activist groups whose combined efforts resulted in civil rights protests and demonstrations. The first student sit-ins took place in the South, where four states—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi— still refused to desegregate their public schools, despite a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
‘‘Marigolds’’ was first published in 1969, the final year of one of the most violent and transitional
In 1963, the struggle for civil rights was deemed a moral issue by President John F. Kennedy, and he beseeched Congress to turn its focus to voting rights and integration. Protests and marches across the South and in Washington, D.C., were often reacted to with violence. Race relations were strained like never before and black civil rights activists and leaders like Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated. One act of violence against blacks and their supporters followed another, and before the end of the decade, both President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, would be assassinated, leaving America reeling with grief and a sense of hopelessness.
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These dire circumstances—no work and no hope of finding any in the near future—are why Lizabeth’s father’s desperation is so particularly intense and gripping. He lives in a white society in which he can work and be productive but not really participate. His family and his ability to provide for and protect them directly influence his self-identity. His consistent failure to achieve these goals causes him to break the confines of the traditional father-as-strength and collapse into tears. This in turn frightens Lizabeth.
African Americans in the 1960s
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By 1969, the nation was still in an upheaval over the intensity and divisiveness of racial violence as well as the controversial war being fought in Vietnam. America was a nation divided on several levels, and it was in this social and cultural climate that Collier penned her short story. Although integration had, by this time, been federally mandated across the country and other civil and voting rights legislation had passed, America was still a segregated place, especially in urban regions and the South. Collier lived through the Great Depression and survived the civil rights movement and its accompanying violence. Her short story harkens back nearly forty years to an era that was in many ways simpler and yet ironically similar to the tumultuous times in which she was living.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW Collier’s ‘‘Marigolds’’ is one of the most anthologized short stories in high school English textbooks, even in the twenty-first century. It won the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Fiction in 1969. According to Opal J. Moore, a reviewer for Black Issues in Higher Education, ‘‘Marigolds’’ sets the tone for the entire collection, a world where everything is out of tune, and women repeatedly ask, ‘‘Where do I fit into this crazy picture?’’ The collection Moore refers to includes six other short stories in the 1994 book Breeder and Other Stories, Collier’s first published short story collection. In her entry of the Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, T. Jasmine Dawson praises Collier’s short story collection for its portrayal of black women as multidimensional. A Publishers Weekly review comes to a different conclusion and claims the message of the stories ‘‘dies with her flat, didactic writing.’’ Ida Peters, journalist for the Washington AfroAmerican, heralds Collier as a ‘‘master storyteller’’ whose voice ‘‘disturbs the peace’’ as the stories in Breeder encompass a broad emotional spectrum.
CRITICISM Rebecca Valentine Valentine is a freelance writer who holds a B.A. in English with minors in philosophy and professional communications. In this essay, she uses a formalist
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literary framework to determine Collier’s use of symbolism as the organizing principle for the story ‘‘Marigolds.’’ Formalist critics look at a piece of literature in terms of how its elements work together to create a meaningful whole. The piece must have internal logic in order to present the themes coherently as well as cohesively. In other words, the formalist framework takes into consideration how the elements work together to form a relationship and support the author’s themes. This unity of form and content is called an organizing principle. Once an organizing principle is determined, the critic can use it to present her interpretation of the text. Collier uses symbolism as an organizing principle in her short story ‘‘Marigolds’’ to develop and communicate the coming-of-age theme. ‘‘Marigolds’’ explores several themes, but the most obvious one is coming-of-age, that watershed in every person’s personal history when one crosses over from childhood to adulthood. To underscore this theme, Collier employs a variety of literary elements—metaphor, character development, patterns of contrast—but none so much or so inherently as symbolism. The very title of the story is one of the primary symbols found in the text. Collier describes the marigolds using vivid, lively adjectives: dazzling, passionate, beautiful. Contrast this description with that of the rest of the neighborhood: crumbling decay, perfect ugliness, grotesque. The flowers symbolize beauty in a world marked by its barren unsightliness. Their very existence in the otherwise black and gray world of that poverty-stricken steel town represents an audacity few could muster under such difficult circumstances. Yet Miss Lottie planted those marigolds some time before the story began. Marigolds are annuals, that is, they die every year when summer ends. In order to enjoy them again the following summer, they must be replanted. The fact that Miss Lottie—arguably the most destitute of all the characters in the story— replants those marigolds year after year makes them symbolic of hope as well as beauty. Planting a garden is an act of hope in itself. The gardener hopes the plants will grow. She hopes they will bloom and thrive, that she can keep bugs at bay and weeds from choking the very life force out of the delicate stems. To possess this sort of hope even as life has taken more than it has given to the gardener is remarkable.
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
The other six short stories in Collier’s most famous anthology Breeder and Other Stories (1994) tell more tales about the destructiveness of the effects of slavery on African people and families. Editor Lori Carlson’s American Eyes: New Asian-American Short Stories for Young Adults (1994) collects ten short stories written for the teenage audience. Together, the stories explore and explain what it means to grow up Asian American in a country that sometimes considers anyone who is slightly different to be an ‘‘other.’’ Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s (1995) offers a reinterpretation of more than fifty well-known and rediscovered works of fiction from the Great Depression. Author Laura Hapke is a literary scholar who analyzes these works using resources not commonly referred to: romance novels, films that stereotype women as villains rather than victims, and statistics published by the U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau. Hapke argues that working women of the Great Depression became the literary and cultural scapegoats of the decade.
13: Thirteen Stories That Capture the Agony and Ecstasy of Being Thirteen is a 2006 collection of stories edited by James Howe. Familiar young adult authors such as Meg Cabot and Ann Martin explore what it means to be thirteen, addressing themes that range from gang experiences to humor, friendship, and the nature of family.
Editors Faith Adiele and Mary Frosch have pulled together a multicultural collection of stories in Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (2007). Readers will hear voices from every continent as they share their coming-of-age stories.
Sandra Cisneros’s 1983 The House on Mango Street features Esperanza Cordero, a girl coming of age in a Hispanic section of Chicago. She shares her thoughts and feelings through poems and short stories as she deals with topics such as poverty, hypocrisy, and child abuse through the eyes of a woman-child.
Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun is a classic story of an African American family living in Chicago and struggling with poverty and prejudice in the 1950s.
Harper Lee’s famous 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of single parent Atticus Finch and his two children, Scout and Jem. Set in rural Alabama in the Great Depression, this coming-of-age story examines themes of justice, racism, honesty, class, and compassion through the eyes of Scout.
Ilan Stavans has edited The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998) and collected works from fifty-two Jewish writers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel. Stories date back to the mid-1800s and trace the rich Jewish heritage into the current era.
That Miss Lottie chose marigolds rather than some other type of flower is not accidental. Marigolds are known for their hardiness. Though they prefer rich soil, they can thrive in less than ideal conditions. And marigolds are prolific—they grow quickly and abundantly, requiring little attention. This would not be the case had Miss Lottie chosen to plant roses or, say, lilies. Without a doubt, they
would provide that burst of color, but flowers such as these are high maintenance and delicate. Harsh conditions destroy them. Like Miss Lottie herself, those marigolds are able to adapt to their conditions and surroundings.
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The marigolds also symbolize freedom, another conundrum: How can one be free in the binds of such fierce oppression as that caused by
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severe poverty? Miss Lottie lives her entire life in squalor. Happiness is never a factor in the old woman’s existence. Never is she allowed a moment of joy; her own son, damaged and perhaps a burden in an already difficult life, is a constant reminder of a passion she once shared, perhaps too briefly. Yet despite these limitations, Miss Lottie recognizes in her marigolds a haven where she is free to nurture, love, and care for something that can never cause her pain or sadness. Planting those flowers is an act of courage; keeping them alive is a means to achieving a sense of freedom from the constant reminder of her poverty. Collier uses color as symbol in ‘‘Marigolds.’’ Those flowers provide the sole color in a world Lizabeth remembers as otherwise monochromatic. Although she admits her childhood must have included green lawns and leafy trees, the adult Lizabeth remembers only dirt roads and grassless yards. ‘‘And one other thing I remember, another incongruity of memory—a brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust—Miss Lottie’s marigolds.’’ In the story, the lack of color symbolizes the intense poverty that characterizes this African American shantytown. The shockingly bright colors of the marigolds against the dust and decay symbolize life itself and a refusal to bow to the unceasing oppression imposed upon Miss Lottie by her life’s circumstances. Collier’s characterizations feed into the idea of symbolism as the organizing principle of ‘‘Marigolds.’’ John Burke is that universal character found not only in literature, but in small towns across America. No doubt, metropolitan areas have their fair share of ‘‘simple’’ residents, but the very nature of small towns—in that they are small and people tend to know one another more intimately—makes those marginalized residents more obvious. In some cases, these characters become legends in their own time. Think of Harper Lee’s Boo Radley character in the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Macomb’s children are terrified of Boo because he is an adult who clearly does not possess adultlike behaviors or abilities. As the children torment Boo, so do Lizabeth and her friends torment John Burke. Characters like John Burke and Boo Radley serve as warnings in literature: Be good and count your blessings, for you could have a much worse lot in life. They symbolize the unknown, the freakish, the ‘‘other’’ that is always waiting around the corner.
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Even Lizabeth’s parents are symbolic; in their relationship and roles lies Lizabeth’s world order. Her father is the family’s rock and provider; Maybelle is the source of comfort, the nurturer. When that world order is turned upside down and Maybelle becomes the provider while her husband requires comfort and nurturing, Lizabeth does not know what to do or how to assimilate. ‘‘Everything was suddenly out of tune, like a broken accordion. Where did I fit into this crazy picture?’’ It is the symbolism of the parents that Lizabeth first understands. As she points out in the story, children take their world and everyone in it at face value. What they see is what they think exists. Only with a loss of childhood innocence—a coming-ofage—can they switch gears to understand that what appears to be is not always what is. When Lizabeth sees firsthand that her world is not ordered in the way she believed and was comfortable believing it was, she panics. Her rage overflows, and she sets off to destroy the thing she knows somehow does not fit into her impoverished world: Miss Lottie’s marigold garden. As a spent and distraught Lizabeth is confronted by Miss Lottie there on the destroyed flower bed, she sees her life and the lives of those around her in a new light, one devoid of childlike innocence but with a newfound compassion. At that moment, she understands the symbolic value of all that Collier has put forth, even though she is incapable of putting into words this new knowledge and understanding. ‘‘The years have put words to the things I knew in that moment, and as I look back upon it, I know that moment marked the end of innocence.’’ As the story closes, a more worldly—and seemingly weary—Lizabeth voices the wisdom she has collected over the years. Her own life’s experiences have brought her full circle to the acknowledgement that ‘‘one doesn’t have to be ignorant and poor to find that life is barren as the dusty roads of our town. And I too have planted marigolds.’’
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Source: Rebecca Valentine, Critical Essay on ‘‘Marigolds,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Opal J. Moore In the following review, Moore identifies ‘‘Marigolds’’ as the beginning of the collection Breeder and Other Stories and claims it sets the tone of crazy desperation for the whole compilation. In Breeder and Other Stories, a collection of seven tales, Eugenia Collier elaborates on the
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Flower gardens were rare in the Depression-era drought. (Ó Pictorial Press LTD/Alamy)
destructiveness of American slavery upon African peoples and their families and, predictably, draws connections between past and present conditions. With the exception of the final tale, ‘‘Dead Man Running,’’ the stories are rendered from a female or woman-centered point of view and strive to describe the psychological and emotional losses of Black women and the resultant damage to their children. ‘‘Dead Man Running,’’ told in the voice of an anonymous omniscient narrator, closes the book with the story of the teenager, Jazzy, caught up in a drug deal that ends in murder. As a concluding story, it appears to represent the culmination of our pageant of slavery—missing fathers, grieving mothers, and death.
Black woman as martyr or as an icon to redemptive suffering, but rather, to address Toni Morrison’s observation that despite the factual accounts of slavery and the lives of its former inmates, ‘‘there was no mention of their interior life.’’
Much recent fiction by Black women has focussed upon telling the largely unrecorded stories of the lives of enslaved Black women. Contrary to some critical commentary, the purpose of the best of these works has not been to present the
So much contemporary writing about slavery and the men and women caught in that web of economics, power, and pain suggests the need to understand more about the interior lives of our forebearers—more than the much rehearsed tales of whippings and humiliations. There may be a need to understand and accept the feeling parts hidden by veils of polite or politic speech, especially the neat language of the law so carefully crafted to obscure the human aspects of the confrontations between life and jurisprudence. These realities, so long hidden, omitted or obscured through renaming (as when rape becomes property damage) can soon be denied and forgotten. Even when the facts of official records are revived and reviewed, where is the story of the interior life
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‘MARIGOLDS’ SETS THE TONE FOR THE ENTIRE COLLECTION, A WORLD WHERE EVERYTHING IS OUT OF TUNE, AND WOMEN REPEATEDLY ASK, ‘WHERE DO I FIT INTO THIS CRAZY PICTURE?’ ’’
‘simple.’ Miss Lottie possesses nothing valuable except the beauty in her impulse to cultivate a bright patch of marigolds every summer. One night, Lizabeth overhears her father weeping because he has no employment and must depend upon his wife’s income as the total family support: ‘‘My Mother, who was small and soft, was now the strength of the family; my father, who was the rock on which the family had been built, was sobbing like the tiniest child. Everything was suddenly out of tune . . . ’’
to be found? How is it to be revived and (re)viewed? The stories offered in Eugenia Collier’s collection, in their best moments, take us to the feeling parts of the history of slavery that we simultaneously clutch to us and revile. The lives of the women that she chooses to explore remind us of Melton McLaurin’s history, Celia, A Slave (1991), which described the passion and striving of Celia, a slave who was hanged in Missouri on December 21, 1855, for murdering her master who’d kept her in forced concubinage since she was fourteen years old. What elevates McLaurin’s rendition of a tragic story is his acute attention to the absence of information regarding Celia herself, despite the official record of her own testimony, according to which she killed her master when he refused to quit his sexual use of her, and incinerated his body in the large cooking fireplace. What did Celia, or other women like her, feel? What did they believe in? Where does feeling begin and end? In stories like ‘‘Rachel’s Children,’’ and ‘‘Journey Through the Woods,’’ and the title work, ‘‘Breeder,’’ Collier confronts us with the moral nightmares of her female characters who are able to kill in order to keep for themselves some shred of personal integrity. The collection opens with ‘‘Marigolds,’’ written in the style of memoir. In the episode, as it is recounted from memory, the youthful Lizabeth is in transition, between girlhood and womanhood. The narrator tells us that even now the marigolds remind her of, ‘‘ . . . the chaotic emotions of adolescence, elusive as smoke, yet as real as the potted geranium before me now. . . . I recall the devastating moment when I was suddenly more woman than child, years ago in Miss Lottie’s yard.’’ Miss Lottie is an old woman, poor, isolated, living with her son who is what people once called
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The girl, Lizabeth, asks, ‘‘Where did I fit into this crazy picture?’’ Having no answer, she climbs out of bed and carries her rage to Miss Lottie’s yard to stamp, rip, and uproot the marigolds. ‘‘Marigolds’’ sets the tone for the entire collection, a world where everything is out of tune, and women repeatedly ask, ‘‘Where do I fit into this crazy picture?’’ Sometimes, having no answers, they turn their hands to destruction. Sometimes, like Miss Lottie, they raise marigolds, obscenely beautiful, and seemingly pointless, in the midst of death and dust. And sometimes, they give up. When Lizabeth destroys the marigolds, Miss Lottie never replants her garden. The second story, ‘‘Ricky,’’ elaborates on the themes of ‘‘Marigolds’’ and predicts the closing story, ‘‘Dead Man Running.’’ Ricky is Vi’s young nephew, left orphaned and homeless by the disappearance of his father and the mental deterioration of his mother. Against the advice of family and friends, the elderly Vi who has been abandoned by her husband, takes in the eleven-yearold and tries to undo all of the damage done by poor parenting and incompetent functionaries of social institutions—including the courts, the schools and the child welfare agencies. Vi discovers that though Ricky has considerable charm, he also has secret demons. He is a seemingly incurable bed wetter and harbors violent tendencies that he acts out upon other children and helpless animals. In other words, Ricky is beautiful and scary. Realizing this, Vi reneges on her rescue mission. Feeling tired and overwhelmed, she puts Ricky out of her home and remands him to the failing systems of the state. But she is haunted by his absence, and she has forgotten to retrieve from him the key to her front door. In nearly every story, we encounter the women who face the impossibility of motherhood, both in and beyond literal slavery. In ‘‘Breeder,’’ Collier creates the voice of old Aunt Peggy, which conjures a memory of the days of kitchen talk, of
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the unique moment when an old mother would turn from the potato salad preparations with the sudden unrehearsed resolve to tell a story she never could tell if she were not near death. The story that Aunt Peggy tells is not meant to he original. It is a dramatization of the frequently referenced breeding slave woman, a story not detailed in any of the celebrated narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, or well-known others. We are told that, having barely come into her womanhood, Peggy was one day ordered out of the fields and into a shed where she was expected to couple with a male slave brought over from another plantation. Peggy bears two daughters in succession who are sold to the slave trade. When she bears a son, she decides she will keep this one, and chops off his foot with an axe to ruin him for the trade. Other stories explore a similar desperation. In ‘‘Rachel’s Children,’’ a lonely college professor confronts the ghost of a slave mother seeking beyond the grave for her children. In ‘‘Journey,’’ Azuree takes her own child’s life as a protective measure. These stories of women and their children fail if they can do no more than excite a knee-jerk pity or outrage, or worse, weariness of the past. They succeed if they can bear us up and into the feeling life of people who have lived and died before us. What must a woman feel when she is called out of the fields one day and sent into a shed to be initiated into her first sexual experience through the authorized and routinized rape of the slave breeding industry? What would such a woman feel about the birth of the child bred for sale? How does she know this child? How does she know herself? At what point did Black mothers turn from the fierceness of Celia, who killed her master for the love of a Black man, to killing and maiming our own children for the same love of them? When Aunt Peggy severs the foot of her infant son to make him unfit for sale, is she a hero or a co-inspirator in the madness of slavery? When Vi turns her nephew out into the streets to be dealt with by the system, is she a character in a story, or is she us? Are we, in America, destined, as these women seem to be, to remain trapped in an immoral machine, madly inventing our own moralities of death and mutilations? Far from indulging in self-pity, these stories should engage our understanding and questioning of our
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BECAUSE RACISM IS NOT OVER, WRITING STILL NEEDS TO DEFINE WHO WE ARE AS WELL AS BE POPULAR.’’’
revulsion of the past, as well as our self-protective embracing of it. Each of the stories in Breeder describes a condition of profound loss—not the loss of love itself, its pulse or impulse, but of its embrace. They tell of a loss of orderliness, of any of the traditional illusions of safety, of the pure luxury of expectancy. If such stories sound too gloomy or pessimistic, readers should remember that stories do not predict the future. Only our individual and collective answer to Lizabeth’s question—Where do we fit in this crazy picture?—can deliver hope or justify despair. Source: Opal J. Moore, ‘‘A Bill of Wrongs: Stories for the Children,’’ in Black Issues in Higher Education, Vol. 14, No. 2, March 20, 1997.
Joan Morgan In the following article, Collier is one of a few distinguished panelists meeting to discuss the Harlem Renaissance, its origination, and its acceptance by white readers and publishers. Is the current resurgence in Black literature an enduring one or is it just a ‘‘spike’’? What’s driving it? Will it last? And how should colleges and universities respond in their literature classes? These and other issues were raised recently by a distinguished panel of writers, publishers and academicians on the live videoconference ‘‘The Revival of Black Literature,’’ sponsored by Black Issues In Higher Education. Moderating the event was former news anchor and president of Bunyan Communications, Maureen Bunyan. Panelists included: W. Paul Coates, founder and publisher Black Classic Press; E. Lynn Harris, a current bestselling author; Sandra Kitt, author of Black romance novels; Dr. Eugenia Collier, an essayist and the former chair of the Department of English at Morgan State University; John Edgar Wideman, the first writer to win the PEN Faulkner Prize
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twice; and Max Rodriguez, publisher of The Quarterly Black Review of Books.
that energy—to me—was really what the Harlem Renaissance was all about,’’ Wideman said.
The question of whether the Harlem Renaissance was a spike—an upsurge that peaked and then fell off dramatically—or ‘‘the’’ turning point in African-American literature set the tone for the discussion.
Coates agreed with Wideman but added that the Renaissance, while being centered in Harlem, was not geographically limited to that part of the country. ‘‘It was a period of Negro nationalism when people decided what was best for them. We need to look at it as a literary achievement, but also as a larger movement.’’
‘‘The Harlem Renaissance was that period when Black literature flourished, but I always like to put it in context. It seems to me that when there is a cultural expression, writing always follows that,’’ Rodriguez said. ‘‘It followed not just a mass migration from the South to the North, but also a great movement around music, and a great expression of self that found its way to New York, because New York was always ‘Mecca,’’’ he noted, adding, ‘‘There was a literary movement prior to the Renaissance, but for the first time we found writers who were accepted by white audiences and white publishers. And that really is what the Harlem Renaissance was—the acceptance of our expression by a white audience.’’ Collier asked: ‘‘Was acceptance of our work by whites what caused the Harlem Renaissance? And if we are in a renaissance now, does its depend upon white acceptance of our work?’’ In comparing the Harlem Renaissance to the present, Harris pointed out that one difference today is that the success of contemporary Black writers is being spurred by Black readers, not by mainstream acceptance. ‘‘One of the things that’s been most heartwarming for me at my signings has been that it’s been Black people who have been buying my books,’’ said Harris. But there is a commonality, said Kitt. ‘‘We may, as writers, be writing for our communities and our people, but the publishers are still mainstream publishers and they are not [publishing Black writers] for altruistic reasons but because they know there is a market there and consumer dollars that they could potentially benefit from. The bottom line for publishers is still the money to be made.’’ Other panelists agreed and Wideman said the most important point to remember about the Harlem Renaissance was not whether the audience was Black or white, but that it was a period of tremendous self-assertion. ‘‘Whenever we see a change, it has to do with consciousness, politics and with all the cultural institutions being spiked in various ways. And
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One of the more provocative topics raised by calls from the viewing audience was whether the panel thought rap and rappers were a part of a new renaissance, and if rappers should be considered the new creators for the twenty-first century. Rodriguez expressed what most of the panel seemed to believe—that rap is a valid literary form. ‘‘It is our rappers who are our griots and they lead the way. It is a valid expression.’’ Said Wideman: ‘‘It is important to get young people to understand that even with all the creativity of rap, it is still within a tradition. Langston Hughes read his poems to jazz and the poets of the sixties did that. Blending of word, music and dance is definitely part of the great tradition we brought here from another world.’’ To illustrate how rap has influenced the world, Wideman related a story from a German friend. On the friend’s grandfather’s birthday, his two granddaughters serenaded him with rap music. ‘‘So just imagine two blond frauleins doing a rap,’’ said Wideman, ‘‘and he didn’t know what the heck was going on. But he loved it.’’ Collier said her only problem with rap was the images portrayed by the music. Rodriguez answered, ‘‘If we want images to continue and [be] in our voice, we have to be able to make decisions about what images those will be. We have to be able to perpetuate ourselves and not ask someone to perpetuate us.’’ Today’s renaissance also differs from the previous in the many new genres being published, including non-fiction books on race such as Dennis Rodman’s and Johnny Cochran’s, and the eighteen best-selling romance novels authored by Kitt. But Wideman noted that while there may be many messages and lots of interest in Black literature, there is still the ‘‘ex-slave narrative’’— the archetypal form of Black autobiography. According to Wideman, it tells a certain market what they want to hear: ‘‘Okay, the system’s not so bad after all.’’
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Another factor in the current resurgence, according to Kitt, is that the Black middle class in America is no longer as invisible as it has been and is composed of readers and consumers. ‘‘The appeal of Waiting to Exhale was that it was about the Black middle class who did not have a strong voice that translated out there to anyone else before,’’ Kitt offered.
Coates said readers have a responsibility to buy Black Classic Press as well as Doubleday, Putnam and other mainstream publishers.
Coates pointed out that we have to be careful not to measure a writing’s worth on how many books are sold. Kitt agreed, saying that Black writers have become the ‘‘flavor of the month,’’ a phenomenon driven by publisher’s following market trends.
Wideman answered that he thinks specialized literature classes are still needed. The complexities of the Black experience cannot be blended into courses with a different focus, he said.
Wideman added that part of the problem is that it is hard to figure out today what’s going to last tomorrow. ‘‘People have the power to commercially segment the market, but nobody knows what’s good. We figure that out with each book,’’ he said. The panel also explored the responsibility of a Black writer. Bunyan asked if the Black writer is responsible to his or her inner self, or if the responsibility of the writer is to help the community understand itself and its issues? Answered Collier: ‘‘All of the above applies. Because racism is not over, writing still needs to define who we are as well as be popular.’’ Wideman said the best way he could illustrate what responsibility should mean for Black writers and publishers—or those with the power to give the Black writer exposure—is the example set by Oprah Winfrey. The talk show host has devoted several programs to literature and chose Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as a book for discussion on her show. ‘‘That is the best coming together of commerce and art and that is a very exciting event for me,’’ said Wideman. ‘‘It’s the same thing as Michael Jordan going down to Cabrini Green and building a house and inviting doctors and lawyers to come live in his little village that he is starting.’’ Coates pointed out that publishers have seen the Black market as one they could expand while supporting other projects. But the publishing industry has suffered of late, and technology is changing the way books are delivered. Publishers are looking for new markets and that has triggered the recent upsurge in Black literature.
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George Mason University African-American literature professor Marilyn Mobley raised the issue from the audience of how colleges and universities should teach what is going on in Black literature.
In conclusion, Harris said: ‘‘It is an exciting time to be an African-American writer—and I don’t think it’s because of a new type of renaissance. It’s because the product is there and we have shown the people who make decisions that Black people do, in fact, read. And we want to read about ourselves.’’ Source: Joan Morgan, ‘‘We Want to Read About Ourselves: Writers and Scholars Assess State of Black Literature,’’ in Black Issues in Higher Education, Vol. 13, No. 21, December 12, 1996, p. 8.
Ida Peters In the following article, Collier’s previous experience working in a Maryland mental hospital is identified as a huge influence on her work ‘‘Marigolds.’’ In Breeder, a new book of short stories from the DuForcelf imprint of Black Classic Press, author Eugenia Collier disturbs the peace. Unsettling tales steeped in the African American oral tradition recall a shameful past and foreshadow an uncertain future. A master storyteller, Collier changes voices with the ease of a chameleon, spanning a broad emotional spectrum from dark moods to bright moments. Inspired by slave narratives, the title story, ‘‘Breeder,’’ expresses the eternal longing of an ex-slave who was separated from her two oldest children. Told in first person, the story reaches a horrific climax when she takes desperate measures to ensure her third child remains with her. As her story closes, the main character, Peggy, declares, ‘‘The half ain’t yet been told.’’ A similar outlook shapes the plots and heightens the suspense of Collier’s fiction. In ‘‘Rachel’s Children,’’ a chilling tale, a Black history scholar gets more than she bargained for when she migrates south. Seeking [to] start anew after her husband’s death, Miz Jenny finds ghosts that will not rest. The widowed college professor
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nearly goes mad unraveling the mysterious tragedy in her home’s haunting past.
http://memory.loc.gov/learn//features/timeline/depwwii/ race/race.html (accessed September 2, 2009).
Collier’s award-winning and widely anthologized story, ‘‘Marigolds,’’ traces a young girl’s coming of age to the painful moment when her [family’s] struggles become real to her. Innocent child’s play and the ritual taunting of an eccentric neighbor mounts into anger at a world in which no one masters their own fate. Originally published in Negro Digest in 1969, ‘‘Marigolds’’ won the Gwendolyn Brooks Award of fiction.
Harris, Bill, ‘‘Radio Reaches Rural America: The Early Days of REA,’’ http://www.radioremembered.org/rural.htm (accessed September 1, 2009).
A native of Baltimore, Md., Collier chairs the English department at Morgan State University in Baltimore. The daughter of a physician and teacher, she grew up in a large three-story house with her grandparents. ‘‘The house,’’ says Collier, ‘‘was filled with various and sundry roomers, handymen, hired girls and a wandering aunt who visited periodically, especially between her husbands.’’ She attended segregated schools in Baltimore, majored in English at Howard University and earned her Master’s degree form Columbia University. Because jobs were scarce, she worked in welfare departments in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and at a Maryland mental hospital. Through these jobs, she gained a different kind of education—experiencing others’ poverty and despair.
Moore, Opal J., Review of Breeder and Other Stories, in Black Issues in Higher Education, Vol. 14, No. 2, March 20, 1997, pp. 34–35. Peters, Ida, ‘‘Eugenia Collier, ‘Breeder’ and Other Stories,’’ in Washington Afro-American, September 10, 1994, p. B6. ‘‘Quick Stats on Women Workers, 2008,’’ in United States Department of Labor: Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2007, http:// www.dol.gov/wb/stats/main.htm (accessed September 1, 2009). Review of Breeder and Other Stories, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 3, January 17, 1994, p. 427. ‘‘What Is Sirius?,’’ http://www.sirius.com/getsirius (accessed September 1, 2009). ‘‘Women of the Century: 1960s,’’ in Discovery Education, http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/wo menofthecentury/decadebydecade/196 0s.html (accessed September 1, 2009).
Collier, who obtained her doctorate degree in 1976 from the University of Maryland at College Park, has taught at the Community College of Baltimore, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Howard University and Coppin State College. Source: Ida Peters, ‘‘Eugenia Collier ‘Breeder’ and Other Stories,’’ in Afro-American Red Star, Vol. 103, No. 4, September 10, 1994, p. B6.
SOURCES ‘‘African-Americans in the Twentieth Century: 1960s,’’ in Long Island University, B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library, http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/african/2000/ 1960.htm (accessed September 2, 2009). Collier, Eugenia, ‘‘Marigolds,’’ in Breeder and Other Stories, Black Classic Press, 1994, pp. 9–21. Dawson, T. Jasmine, ‘‘Eugenia W. Collier,’’ in Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, Vol. 2, edited by Yolanda Williams Page, Greenwood Press, 2007, p. 104. ‘‘Great Depression and World War II, 1929–1945: Race Relations in the 1930s and 1940s,’’ in Library of Congress,
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FURTHER READING hooks, bell, Where We Stand: Class Matters, Routledge, 2000. In this book, hooks explores the cultural, political, and social roots of class in the form of a memoir. Where We Stand challenges readers to analyze their own perspectives and attitudes in relation to their social standing. Kyvig, David E., Daily Life in the United States, 1920– 1940: How Americans Lived Through the ‘‘Roaring Twenties’’ and the Great Depression, Ivan R. Dee, 2004. Kyvig examines America’s social and cultural landscape through two of the most transitional eras in American history. Kyvig explores everything from Prohibition to religion to the introduction of the concept of buying on credit. McNaughton, Patrick, and Hilary MacAustin, eds., Children of the Depression, Indiana University Press, 2001. This collection of photographs taken of children during the 1930s tells the story of suffering and desperation in a way words cannot. Photos are accompanied by children’s recollections and letters to Eleanor Roosevelt as well as observations written by the era’s social workers. Rhodes, Jewell Parker, Proverbs for the People: Contemporary African-American Stories, Kensington, 2004. This volume collects nearly sixty short stories, each of which begins with a proverb. Topics vary widely and include ancestry, honesty, and relationships.
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The Medicine Bag Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ tells the story of a young Native American boy named Martin and his Lakota great-grandfather Grandpa). When Grandpa suddenly makes an appearance in Martin’s neighborhood, the boy is embarrassed by the old man’s appearance and strange ways. Soon, however, Martin learns how important his Native American heritage is to him, and how much he loves his great-grandfather. As Grandpa nears the end of his life, he passes a special treasure on to Martin, a medicine bag.
VIRGINIA DRIVING HAWK SNEVE 1975
First published in Boy’s Life magazine in 1975, ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ is one of Sneve’s early works. Sneve, an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and award-winning author, was born and raised on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. She draws on her heritage in her various works, including her readily available collection Grandpa Was a Cowboy & an Indian and Other Stories, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2000. ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ is included in this collection.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Sneve was born on February 21, 1933, on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, where she was also raised. She is an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, known in their own language as the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, or Burnt
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In 1971, Sneve began to write juvenile fiction, completing a manuscript for her first novel, Jimmy Little Hawk. She entered her novel in a contest held by the Interracial Council for Minority Books for Children, and her book won the category for Native American writers, leading to its publication in 1972. In the same year, she also published one of her best-known books, High Elk’s Treasure, followed by When Thunder Spoke and Betrayed, both in 1974. Sneve wrote and published the short story ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ in 1975. Over the years, Sneve has published twentyfive books and many short stories and poems. Some of these works are for children and young adults, including a series of books on individual Native American tribes, published during the 1990s, while others are aimed at adults. In all of her work, Sneve attempts to create a realistic portrayal of contemporary Native American life. Sneve has received many awards and honors for her literary contributions, including the 2007 South Dakota Governor’s Award in the Arts for Distinction in Creative Achievement and a 2000 National Endowment for the Humanities Award she received from President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Virginia Sneve (Reproduced by permission of the author)
Thigh Nation. Her father, James H. Driving Hawk, was an Episcopal priest. Her mother was Rose Ross Posey. Although Sneve’s parents were a great influence on her, they often had to travel off the reservation to find work. During these times, Sneve and her brother lived with their grandmothers. The stories Sneve heard from her grandmothers influenced her later writing career. Sneve attended school on the reservation and graduated from St. Mary’s Episcopal High School for Indian Girls in Springfield, South Dakota, in 1950.
Sneve retired from her positions as English teacher and counselor in 1995, and she and her husband make their home in Rapid City, South Dakota. Sneve’s most recent books include Grandpa Was a Cowboy & an Indian and Other Stories (2000), Lana’s Lakota Moons (2007), and a 2008 edition of The Chichi Hoohoo Bogeyman, a book originally published in 1975.
Sneve graduated from South Dakota State University with a bachelor of science degree in 1954, and she began working as an English teacher. In July 1955, she married Vance M. Sneve, an industrial arts teacher. Sneve became a full-time homemaker and mother in 1956, and she did not return to teaching until 1965, when she took a position teaching English, speech, and drama at the Flandreau Indian School, where she also served as a guidance counselor in later years. Sneve also earned a master of education degree from South Dakota State University in 1969.
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PLOT SUMMARY ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ is a story narrated by a young Native American boy named Martin. Martin’s mother is also Native American, but his father is a white man who teaches at a college. Although Martin’s age is not mentioned, other details in the story suggest that he is thirteen or fourteen years old; in the opening sentence he refers to his ‘‘kid sister’’ Cheryl, who is ten years old, implying that he must be at least several years older than her. The opening section of the story provides some background information. Martin relates that every summer he and his sister visit their eighty-six-year-old great-grandfather (whom they called Grandpa) on the Rosebud Reservation in
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South Dakota, where the Lakota live. When they return home to Iowa, they always tell their friends about the reservation, and they sometimes exaggerate about how exciting it is to be there. They also bring home with them authentic Lakota artifacts to show their friends who are fascinated with the items. Martin also explains, however, that they never show their friends any pictures of their great-grandfather because he does not look like they think an Indian should look, and because he does not live the way that television Indians live. Martin introduces this detail so that he can describe the embarrassment he feels when his great-grandfather shows up very unexpectedly walking down the street in Martin’s neighborhood. When Martin looks down the street to see why dogs are barking, he sees his great-grandfather, dressed in a tall black hat and baggy pants, walking down the middle of the road, apparently looking for Martin’s home. Although Martin is very embarrassed by how strangely Grandpa is acting and is dressed, he runs out into the street to help the old man with his suitcase and leads him to his home. Grandpa greets Martin formally and shakes hands with him, revealing that the old man is very traditional in his customs. Martin’s mother sees them coming and is shocked that her grandfather has made his way from South Dakota to Iowa. She does not hug him, however, because that would not be considered dignified. Cheryl, however, is young enough to hug the old man, and she does so happily, the only one in the family who does not seem to be taken aback by the old man’s sudden appearance. Grandpa, however, collapses immediately after the hug.
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family feels guilty that Grandpa had such a difficult journey, but Martin also feels respect for the old man who had been brave enough to set out into the unknown. Grandpa tells the family that the one hundred dollars that Martin found in his boots was the money he was saving to pay for his funeral, but he wants his granddaughter to buy groceries with it so that he will not be a burden to the family. Martin’s father treats Grandpa with a great deal of respect and apologizes that they never thought to bring the old man to their house before. Grandpa says that the time was not right for him to come to their house before, but now he wants to give Martin the medicine bag that hangs around his neck. Martin is horrified. He does not want the leather pouch but knows he must take it if it is offered to him. Grandpa stays with the family for two months. Although Cheryl has no trouble having her friends come to visit Grandpa, Martin is still embarrassed by the old man and does not want his friends to see him. Finally, one day his friends come to his house unannounced and say they want to meet Grandpa. Grandpa is dressed in his best clothing, and he greets the boys formally. He tells Martin that when he dressed in the morning, he knew that Martin’s friends would come for a visit, so he put on his good clothes. Then Grandpa begins to tell stories to Martin’s friends. The boys are both respectful and impressed, and Martin seems to see his grandfather in a different light.
After a visit from the doctor who believes that Grandpa is suffering from heat exhaustion, Grandpa eats some soup and tells Martin and his family why he has come to Iowa. He says that he was lonesome after the family left the reservation in the summer and decided he would visit his only living relatives. After receiving help from a policeman and taking a bus, Grandpa finally had made it to Martin’s street, but he was unable to see the house numbers clearly. Everyone in the
The next day, Grandpa tells Martin the story of the medicine bag, a story he says is only to be told to a man, and that the medicine bag must be only given to a man. Grandpa speaks of his father’s vision quest and how he achieved the name Iron Shell. While on the vision quest, his father found the shell of an iron kettle in an old campfire, so he took a piece of it and put it in the elk skin bag he had made in preparation for the quest. Grandpa also tells Martin that Iron Shell was later taken away from his home and sent to a boarding school far away. While he was at the boarding school, however, he learned the trade of blacksmithing. Iron Shell always kept his medicine bag with him, and he gave it to Grandpa when he was first a man. As Grandpa’s only son died fighting in a war (probably World War II), Grandpa did not have a son to whom he could give the medicine bag. For this reason, Grandpa wants Martin to have the bag.
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When Martin helps settle Grandpa into bed and undresses him, he realizes how old and frail the man is. He also discovers a leather pouch on a leather string tied around Grandpa’s neck. When Martin removes Grandpa’s boots, he finds them stuffed with money.
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Martin’s earlier fear of having to wear the medicine bag leaves him, and he waits for Grandpa to put it over his head. However, Grandpa just tells him to keep it safe and to put sage in it when he next goes to the reservation. The story ends quickly; Martin says that Grandpa has to go to the hospital that night. Two weeks later he is on the reservation, implying that Grandpa has died, and the family has brought him back to the reservation for burial. Martin does as Grandpa has told him—at the reservation, he puts a piece of sacred sage from the prairie in his medicine bag, signifying his acceptance of his cultural and spiritual heritage.
CHARACTERS Cheryl Cheryl is Martin’s ten-year-old sister. She is portrayed as a cheerful, loving little girl, far from adulthood. She has no embarrassment over her great-grandfather’s arrival at their home. Indeed, she seems proud to have her friends meet Grandpa. She treasures her Native American heritage. Grandpa also loves her, but it is clear that he does not value her in the same way that he values Martin, whom he sees as the person who must carry on the family and cultural traditions. Sneve’s portrayal of Cheryl, and of her mother, suggests a pattern of patriarchy; that is, a system in which the male members of the family are more powerful and are responsible for the cultural heritage.
lives on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, the same place where Sneve grew up. He has traveled a long distance to visit Martin and his family at their home in Iowa. Martin describes him as an old man, with stringy gray hair. He always wears a tall black hat with a feather in it. In addition, he wears baggy pants, a red satin shirt, and a bolo tie (a cord necktie fastened by a clasp, often ornamented with silver). Grandpa always acts with great dignity, greeting people formally in his own language and shaking their hands. He also seems to have a deep sense of the timeliness of events. It becomes clear throughout the story that the reason he has come to Iowa is because he senses his own death approaching. When Martin’s friends come to visit him, he is patient with the young people and answers their questions. As well, he tells them stories from his heritage. Grandpa has a very strong attachment to the traditions of his people and wants to pass these on to Martin. The medicine bag that he wears around his neck is the physical symbol of this idea. Filled with a small piece of iron, a pebble from the butte, and a piece of sacred sage, the medicine bag belonged first to Grandpa’s father, who made it from elk skin in preparation for a vision quest. Grandpa is a very important character in this story, because he is the one who enables Martin to embrace his own heritage.
Dad Dad is Martin’s father, and Mom’s husband. He is a white man who teaches at the local college. Although he is white, he clearly respects the Native American heritage of his wife and her family. He visits the reservation with his family every summer, and he treats Grandpa with a great deal of kindness and respect. He apologizes to Grandpa for not thinking to bring him home with them after their visit to the reservation in the summer. Although not a well-developed character, Dad is nevertheless an important influence on Martin, because he models acceptance and respect for the elderly man.
Grandpa Grandpa, whose real name is Joe Iron Shell, is a member of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, the Burnt Thigh Nation, also known as the Rosebud Sioux. This is the same nation that Sneve belongs to. He
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Hank Hank is Martin’s best friend. He is a very minor character in the story but serves an important purpose. When he visits Martin’s house to meet Grandpa, Martin is able to see his Grandpa through Hank’s eyes. When he realizes how impressed Hank is with Grandpa, Martin realizes that he has nothing to be embarrassed about.
Iron Shell Iron Shell is Grandpa’s father. He is not technically a character in the story, but rather is a character in a story told by Grandpa within ‘‘The Medicine Bag.’’ Iron Shell was a Native American man who lived in the general region of what is now Montana and the Dakotas. As Sneve wrote ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ in 1975, and the story seems contemporary with the writing, it is possible to make some guesses, based on the clues she provides, concerning the chronology of events and ages of the characters. For example, since at the time of the story, Grandpa is eighty-six years old, Grandpa must have been born around 1889. Consequently, it is possible to surmise that Iron
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Shell must have been a young man around 1880, and certainly would have been alive during the last of the great Indian wars fought in Montana and the Dakotas, ending with the Massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890. Grandpa notes that Iron Shell was a member of the Teton Lakota, and that it was in his generation that the Lakota were forced to live on reservations. Iron Shell’s importance to the story is great, as he is the ancestor who valued the ancient, honored traditions of his people despite the degradation he and his people suffered. He decided to go on a vision quest, a spiritual journey to find guidance for his life. He created the medicine bag in preparation for his vision quest, and while on the quest had a dream of iron. In addition, he found a small shell of an iron pot, which he put in his medicine bag. When he told his dream and experiences to the elders of the tribe, they gave him the name Iron Shell, which he passed on to his son. In addition, Iron Shell is important to this story, because he introduces the topic Indian boarding schools, where young Native Americans were forced to attend to learn English and white customs. That he was able to pass on cultural traditions to his son Joe Iron Shell, Martin’s great-grandfather, suggests that he was a very strong individual.
Joe Iron Shell See Grandpa
Martin Martin is the narrator and the protagonist, or main character, of this story. He is a young man, probably thirteen or fourteen years old, just on the verge of manhood. He is like most other young American boys, and he lives in what appears to be a white suburban neighborhood in Iowa. Although his mother is Native American, his father is white. Even though he visits the Rosebud Reservation every summer, during the rest of the year, he appears to live as a white boy rather than as a Native American.
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undressed in gym class, with the pouch around his neck. Martin, however, is a rounded character, and Sneve allows him to grow throughout the story. He soon comes to value his Grandpa, particularly after his friends come to visit and he sees how much they respect the old man and his stories. As a result, when Grandpa asks to speak to Martin alone, Martin listens carefully to the story about Grandpa’s father, the first Iron Shell, and he gracefully accepts the medicine bag that his Grandpa gives to him. In the last paragraph of the story, Martin returns to the reservation and does as his greatgrandfather has instructed: he picks a piece of sacred sage and places it in the bag. This act signals that he has embraced the customs and traditions of his Native American heritage, and that he wants to honor the memory of his Grandpa.
Mom Mom is Martin’s mother, and Grandpa’s granddaughter. She is a Native American woman who has married a white man and moved off the reservation. Her character is not well developed. She clearly loves her grandfather, who also loves her, but it seems evident that she is not valued the way a male would be. Nevertheless, she welcomes her grandfather in her home and she cares for him while he lives with the family. In addition, her return to the reservation with her children every summer suggests that Mom holds her Native American heritage precious, and that she wants her children to know their own traditions and background.
THEMES Family Relationships
Although Martin loves his Grandpa, he is very embarrassed by his appearance and odd ways. He does not want his friends to see Grandpa or to be associated with him in public. Most of all, he does not want to have to wear the medicine bag around neck. He considers it a dirty piece of leather, and he imagines how the other boys will make fun of him when he gets
Sneve explores family relationships in ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ at several levels. Martin’s nuclear family, comprised of Martin, his sister Cheryl, his mother, and his father, is in many ways a typical suburban American family. The members of the family get along well with each other, and the family relationships do not seem to be a source of anxiety or problems for anyone. Indeed, there seems to be a considerable closeness and respect among the members. Martin treats his mother with respect, doing what she asks him to do. He also does not tease or fight with his sister. In addition, Martin’s father (who is white) demonstrates respect for his
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Read Joseph Bruchac’s young-adult novel The Heart of a Chief. How does the protagonist move toward adulthood in this story? Write a short essay in which you compare and contrast Chris, the main character in Bruchac’s novel, with Martin, the main character in ‘‘The Medicine Bag.’’ With a small group of your peers, investigate the history of Indian boarding schools, using books, magazines, newspapers, and the Internet. (Be sure to use credible sources in each case.) How did the boarding schools start? Who was responsible for them? What was the purpose of the boarding schools? What do former students of such schools have to say about them? With your group, prepare a multimedia presentation for your class. Interview family members about your cultural heritage. Where did your people come from and under what circumstances? Does your family have any artifacts, special foods, or traditions that represent your cultural heritage? Prepare a PowerPoint presentation to give to your class in which you discuss your cultural heritage and what it means to you.
wife and her cultural traditions in that he supports the annual family trip to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation so that his wife can visit her family and the children can learn more about their own cultural heritage. Family relationships are also important beyond Martin’s nuclear family and include the relationship between the members of the family with Grandpa, Mom’s grandfather. Martin’s mother, and by extension, her children, are Grandpa’s only living relatives. The family demonstrates their respect for Grandpa by visiting him yearly. Grandpa demonstrates the importance of the family to him by making a long, arduous journey to travel from South Dakota to visit them in Iowa. Also, Martin’s father makes a special point of showing respect to
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Read Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, one of the best-known coming-of-age stories in English. Draw a map depicting Pip’s journey from childhood to adulthood, noting important events and scenes from the book. As well, draw a map depicting Martin’s growth throughout ‘‘The Medicine Bag.’’ Compare and contrast these maps in a brief presentation to your class.
With a small group of your peers, research and investigate the people known in English as the Sioux, and in their own language as the Lakota. Who are they? Where did they come from? Lead a class discussion based on your findings.
If possible, visit the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. If you are unable to do so, visit the museum’s Web site at http://www.nmai.si.edu. Examine as many artifacts as possible belonging to Lakota peoples. What do these artifacts tell you about their historic way of life? Write an essay in which you analyze the artifacts you have examined. Illustrate your essay with photos or drawings of the artifacts.
Grandpa when he apologizes for not inviting the old man to return with them to their home after their annual summer visit. Family relationships are also highlighted when Grandpa arrives at Martin’s home. Although Martin is embarrassed by his great-grandfather’s appearance and actions, he nonetheless treats the man with love and respect, helping him find their home, and calling the doctor to care for him. He also respectfully listens to Grandpa’s story about the medicine bag and accepts the artifact from him in a gesture of acceptance of family tradition. The importance of family relationships, however, is perhaps best illustrated by Grandpa’s commitment to passing on the medicine bag to
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Martin. He tells Martin the story of his own father’s vision quest, and the creation of the medicine bag. The story is clearly highly significant to Grandpa. Passing the medicine bag on to a male descendent is an important familial responsibility for Grandpa. As his own son, Martin’s grandfather, died in World War II and had no sons, Grandpa undertakes the journey to Iowa so that he can personally give Martin the medicine bag. Grandpa also reveals how important family is for him by his love for Martin’s family, and his continued grief for his lost son. In many ways, ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ is a story about the continuity of family from one generation to the next. In spite of the historical suppression of Native American traditions and the geographical distance separating Martin from his mother’s family in South Dakota, the familial relationship remains strong. The family becomes the vehicle for preserving important stories and the cultural heritage.
Native American Culture A closely related thematic concern in ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ is Native American cultural identity. Sneve offers several illustrations of this identity, first in her depiction of the stereotypical television Indian that Martin tries to identify with in front of his friends. A more potent exploration of the theme, however, is also quite subtle. In the story that Grandpa tells Martin about his father, Iron Shell, Grandpa says that his father was taken to an Indian boarding school against his will. Native Americans were taken away from their families and homes beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through more than half of the twentieth century in an effort to assimilate them into white culture. At the boarding schools, Native Americans were not permitted to speak their own languages or engage in spiritual and traditional rituals. The very purpose of the schools was to erase their identity as Native Americans.
Native American medicine bag (Image copyright Knumina, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
the course of the story, that his mother’s Native American heritage is also an important part of who he is. Coming to terms with his cultural identity is a necessary step in Martin’s maturation.
STYLE Characterization
That Iron Shell retained his cultural identity despite this treatment suggests that he was both brave and strong in the face of pressure. At the same time, the story demonstrates his ability to learn how to live in the white world without losing himself. This lesson is an important one for Martin. He, too, must choose how his Native American cultural identity can coexist with his white cultural identity. As he lives in the white world of his father, he must know how to get along and maintain his dual identity. At the same time, he learns, across
‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ includes examples of both rounded and flat characters, sometimes also referred to as dynamic and static characters. A rounded or dynamic character in a story is one who changes and grows from the beginning to the end, whereas a flat or static character remains essentially the same throughout. Martin and Grandpa in ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ are rounded characters. At the beginning of the story, Martin has a superficial appreciation of his Native American heritage, and he is embarrassed by his great-
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grandfather’s appearance and what he believes are odd ways. By the end of the story, as revealed by his actions, words, and thoughts, he has grown to value not only his great-grandfather but also the heritage Grandpa represents. In so doing, he has grown from a boy to a young man. Grandpa, on the other hand, although a rounded and welldeveloped character, changes more in the eyes of Martin than in reality. He is a wise, elderly man who wants to pass on his heritage to his grandson. He appears weak in the story, frail from his long journey and his advanced age. Yet by the end of the story the old man’s strength is apparent to not only Martin but also to readers as well. There are also static characters in ‘‘The Medicine Bag.’’ This is not a failing of the writer; rather, in a story of this length, not all characters can undergo significant change. Rather, flat characters serve a particular function in the story and serve to highlight the changes taking place in the rounded characters. In this story, Martin’s friends are flat characters. Their function in the story is to listen to Grandpa’s stories and be impressed by the elderly man. Their respect for Grandpa teaches Martin that he, too, can value Grandpa and not be ashamed of his own heritage. Mom and Dad are also flat characters. Dad’s role is to demonstrate a respectful, loving father who, as a white man, values his wife’s heritage. Mom is important to the story, because it is through her family that Martin can claim his Native American heritage. Thus, both rounded and flat characters contribute to the overall construction and thematic concerns of any story. By examining how rounded characters change and how flat characters function, a reader can broaden and deepen the experience of the story.
Symbolism
significance of the symbols. It becomes clear that the small stone is representative of the connection to the land felt by Native Americans. In addition, sage is important in many Lakota rituals and is considered a purifying and protective element. While the first two items are somewhat generic, the third, the shell of an iron pot, is highly specific and significant for Martin. Grandpa’s father had a dream about iron and later found a piece of a settler’s iron cooking pot while on his vision quest. He viewed both the dream and the iron shell to be symbolic, although he did not at first understand its meaning, particularly since the iron came from a white person’s cooking fire. Later, after he has been removed to an Indian boarding school run by white people, he discovers the skill of blacksmithing, a trade that provided him a living. Thus, for Iron Shell, the small piece of iron symbolized both the forceful influence of white people on his life and the direction his life would take. He learned to function in the white world, while still preserving his cultural heritage. Likewise, the contents of the medicine bag have symbolic meaning for Martin. He is a boy who struggles with his Native American cultural identity. He also attempts to understand how this identity can coexist with his white identity. Through his great-great-grandfather’s iron piece, he integrates the two identities that constitute who he is. Finally, the medicine bag itself is symbolic. It is simultaneously a physical object and something much more significant: Martin’s Native American heritage. By accepting the medicine bag from his great-grandfather and replacing the sacred sage two weeks later on the reservation, Martin demonstrates his acceptance of his Native American culture, heritage, and identity.
A symbol is an element or item in literature that stands not only for itself but also for something larger and more significant. The most important symbol in ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ is, not surprisingly, the medicine bag Grandpa brings to Iowa to give to Martin. The medicine bag was constructed by Iron Shell, Grandpa’s father, in preparation for a vision quest. The bag, made of elk skin, contains several symbolic items, including a small rock from the butte on the Rosebud Reservation, sage leaves, and a small fragment of an iron cooking pot. That Grandpa will only tell Martin about the medicine bag and its contents when they are alone, and that he does so ceremonially, adds to the
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Native American History: The Lakota As writer and storyteller Joseph Bruchac reminds readers in his 2003 book Our Stories Remember: American Indian History, Culture, and Values through Storytelling, ‘‘Native America is made up of many cultures, hundreds of them. There is not just one history of the American Indian but countless histories.’’ Thus, attempting to provide a coherent history of Native Americans and First
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1970s: About 8,000 members of the Rosebud Sioux tribe live on the Rosebud Reservation, and 1,400 live off the reservation. Today: Over 20,000 Rosebud Sioux tribal members live on the Rosebud Reservation and 3,664 live off the reservation.
Today: Native Americans continue to enlist in the U.S. military at a greater rate than do their white counterparts.
1970s: Native Americans continue to be sent to Indian boarding schools run by the federal government in an attempt to assimilate them into U.S. culture.
1970s: Many Native Americans enlist in the U.S. military to fight in the Vietnam War, following a trend established in World War I and World War II.
Today: Half of all Native American schools are operated by tribes, and include Native American languages, history, and culture in their curricula.
Nations people in territory that is now the United States and Canada is nearly impossible.
Knee. U.S. soldiers, attempting to disarm a group of Lakota seeking protection, opened fire on the group at close range, and supported by machine guns, killed anywhere from 144 to 350 Lakota, including women and children. Some reports suggest that a gun went off accidentally, and this sparked the incident. In any event, the day is one memorialized by the Lakota with great sorrow. In addition, Wounded Knee was the final battle, if it can be called such, between the Native Americans and the U.S. government. The resistance to American incursion on Native American territory ended here.
It is possible, however, to examine the one group of Native Americans, the Sioux (also known as the Dakota), highlighted by Sneve in ‘‘The Medicine Bag.’’ There are three major divisions among the Sioux: the Santee, or Eastern Dakota; the Yankton, or Western Dakota; and the Tetonwan, also known as the Lakota. The three groups share a similar language as well as common traditions and beliefs. The Lakota form the largest group within the Sioux nation, comprising seven main bands. Each band has an associated reservation. The Sicangu Lakota, the band to which Sneve and the characters of ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ belong, are associated with the Rosebud Indian Reservation. In English, the Sicangu Lakota are called the Rosebud Sioux tribe. The Rosebud Reservation is located in the south central part of South Dakota.
Indian Boarding Schools
A tragic but important historical event involving the Lakota took place on December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek, now located within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the home of the Oglala Lakota, located just to the west of the Rosebud Reservation. The year 1890 is significant to ‘‘The Medicine Bag,’’ because it is likely that Grandpa, one of the main characters, was born around that year. He lived, therefore, in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre, sometimes known as the Battle of Wounded
In ‘‘The Medicine Bag,’’ Grandpa tells the story of his father, Iron Shell, who was sent to a boarding school far away from his home and family, against his will. This event is based on historical fact. In the 1870s, in response to ongoing conflicts between white settlers and Native Americans, the U.S. government began setting up the boarding schools, reasoning that the best way to fix the ‘‘Indian problem’’ was to assimilate Native Americans into white culture. Students at the boarding schools were not permitted to speak their own languages, nor were they allowed to follow their own traditions. Instead, they were trained in manual skills and forced to cut their hair, according to many sources such as Indian Country Diaries, posted on the Public Broadcasting System Web
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Prairie sage brush (Image copyright Bruce Amos, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
site in 2006. A contributor to Indian Country Diaries quoted a boarding school student: ‘‘[Long hair] was the pride of all Indians. The boys, one by one would break down and cry when they saw their braids thrown on the floor.’’ Just as Sneve writes in ‘‘The Medicine Bag,’’ students such as Iron Shell were very homesick for their families and culture. For many, it was a terrible and traumatic experience. Noted legal scholar Matthew L. M. Fletcher writes in his 2008 book American Indian Education: Counternarratives in Racism, Struggle, and the Law, ‘‘Indian boarding school experiences are some of the most horrific examples of the attempt to assimilate Indian people into the melting pot of American society.’’ Likewise, in Our Stories Remember, Bruchac comments, ‘‘It is hard to exaggerate how important, how traumatic, and how significant the Indian boarding school experiment was.’’ The Indian boarding school system, according to Fletcher, did not completely come under Native American control until the mid-1970s, about the
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same time that Sneve composed ‘‘The Medicine Bag.’’ Charla Bear, also discussing Indian boarding schools in a series of reports for National Public Radio in May 2008, suggests that the new model of boarding schools is now strengthening Native American culture and languages by including such subjects in their curricula.
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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Although ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ has been widely anthologized and is frequently taught in literature classes, there is surprisingly little critical work on the story, or on Sneve’s work in general. Nevertheless, reviews of Sneve’s work have been generally positive over the years. For example, in a 2008 review of Sneve’s young-adult book Lana’s Lakota Moons, reviewer Patricia Moore calls the book ‘‘beautifully written.’’ Likewise, Candace Smith in a
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brief 2000 review of Grandpa Was a Cowboy & an Indian and Other Stories appearing in Booklist writes, ‘‘With deceptively simple language and effective imagery, the tales will bring Native American traditions and values to twenty-firstcentury readers.’’ Apart from reviewer comments, few scholars have written about Sneve’s work. A notable exception is Norwegian teacher Helga Hoel who presented a paper on Sneve’s work at the 2003 Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology; the paper was later published in 2004 in Spra˚k og Spra˚kundervisning, a Norwegian academic journal. Noting that Sneve married a third-generation Norwegian, Hoel remarks that Sneve ‘‘stands at different crossroads as a modern Native American embracing her past with pride, as an individual of mixed-blood heritage and as a mother of bicultural children.’’ After analyzing several of Sneve’s works, including ‘‘The Medicine Bag,’’ Hoel concludes, ‘‘Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s writing for children is important not only for providing good role models for young Native Americans, but also for providing an understanding of what it means to be a modern Native American in contemporary society for the rest of us.’’ Additionally, critic Jim Charles, writing in the Winter 2001 issue of the ALAN Review, uses ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ to introduce some of Sneve’s most important themes. He writes, ‘‘‘The Medicine Bag’ focuses on the importance of culture in the formation of healthy identity. It speaks to the need for intergenerational harmony in healthy adolescent development. Fundamentally, it is a story about respect.’’ Finally, commenting on Grandpa Was a Cowboy & an Indian and Other Stories, Paulette Fairbanks Molin writes in her 2005 book American Indian Themes in Young Adult Literature, ‘‘This collection has great appeal to a wide range of intergenerational readers.’’
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CRITICISM
In Completing the Circle (1998), Sneve offers an autobiography and a history of her family. To research the book, Sneve drew on oral history, legends, archival records, and published sources. Mary Englar’s The Sioux and Their History (2005) is a book written for young people that discusses the origin, history, and customs of the Sioux Indians. The official Web site of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe (http://www.rosebudsiouxtribe-nsn.gov) is a well-organized and well-written site that offers a wealth of information concerning the history of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, including their history, customs, and experiences. Sneve is an enrolled member of this tribe, and in ‘‘The Medicine Bag,’’ Grandpa is also a member of the Rosebud Sioux. The National Register of Historic Places sponsors a National American Indian Heritage Month each year, described in detail at http:// www.nps.gov/history/NR/feature/Indian. The site includes articles, history, and photographs. Dee Brown’s 1970 book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a history of Native Americans during the last part of the nineteenth century. The book has become a classic in the years since it was published. High Elk’s Treasure (1972), written by Sneve, tells the story of a thirteen-year-old boy living on a reservation in South Dakota. Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek (1992) offers a collection of short stories about growing up Latina in the United States that portrays life on the Texas/Mexico border in a vivid fashion.
Diane Andrews Henningfeld Henningfeld is a professor emerita of literature who writes widely for educational publications. In this essay, she illustrates how ‘‘The Medicine Bag’’ provides an excellent illustration of the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story.
One of the most popular, recognizable, and enjoyable genres of storytelling is the bildungsroman, sometimes known as the coming-of-age
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story. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (2003) notes that this kind of story can also be called an apprenticeship or formation story. All stories that take this shape follow certain conventions. In the first place, the protagonist is a young man or woman. Over the course of the story, the young person grows from childhood to maturity. Often, by reaching maturity, the protagonist understands what his or her role will be in the world. To accomplish this, the protagonist goes through a series of developmental changes. Sometimes these changes can be intellectual, as a student moves from a place of ignorance to knowledge through study or school. Occasionally these changes can be psychological, as the protagonist learns about the interworking of human relationships or comes to know more about his or her own mind. A third kind of development can be spiritual, as a young person grows in understanding about what constitutes meaning in life. In many coming-of-age stories, the protagonist learns what it means to be human. In general, these changes take place because of external circumstances introduced into the story by the writer. There are many fine examples of this genre in contemporary literature and film. One that will be familiar to many students is the film Star Wars. In this movie, young Luke Skywalker must develop physical, intellectual, psychological, and spiritual skills in order to fulfill his destiny as a Jedi warrior. Sneve’s story ‘‘The Medicine Bag,’’ while not on the scale of Star Wars, shares many of the same characteristics as the protagonist Martin matures. As the story begins, readers are alert to Martin’s youth. Although at the same time, he seems on the verge of growth; he refers to his sister Cheryl as his ‘‘kid’’ sister, clearly identifying her with a childhood that he feels he has left. Further, when he talks about his great-grandfather, Grandpa, he understands the difference between Grandpa and the stereotypical depiction of Native Americans on television. Although he may understand this distinction, he immaturely exaggerates stories from his visits to the reservation for the benefit of his friends. His goal is to impress his friends, not to tell the stories accurately. For this reason, when Martin looks outside one day and sees his great-grandfather walking down the middle of the street, he is mortified. He does not want anyone in his neighborhood to see Grandpa, because he is ashamed of the elderly man’s appearance. However, readers can begin to
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see Martin’s growth from this very early moment: although he would like to run and hide so that no one will associate him with Grandpa, he does the right thing and goes to help him with his luggage. In addition, he is aware of the inappropriateness of his own embarrassment, suggesting that he is open to changing his behavior and feelings. Thus, from early in the story, readers know that Martin must overcome his own immature vision of Native American culture and life to obtain a more mature vision, one that will allow him to incorporate an important part of his heritage into his life. Although Martin needs time to mature, the events of the story force him to grow up quickly. The first night Grandpa is in Martin’s home, he tells everyone that he has brought an important artifact to give to Martin, a medicine bag that Grandpa wears around his neck at all times. The bag has powerful spiritual significance for Grandpa. Martin, however, can only imagine how embarrassed he will be if he has to wear the old bag in gym class, where his classmates will see it and know that he is different from the rest of them. Again, however, Martin is not rude to his Grandpa. Although he thinks he could never wear the bag, he steps forward to receive it, demonstrating his willingness to grow, even if reluctantly. Grandpa waves Martin away, saying that it is not yet time for him to have the bag. It is as if Grandpa knows that Martin must grow more before he achieves a maturity worthy of the medicine bag. Martin’s next opportunity for growth comes when his friends corner him about visiting Grandpa. Martin has avoided letting his friends meet the old man, but finally he has no choice. Again, he demonstrates immature embarrassment over the meeting. Over the course of the visit, however, he grows in understanding that his Grandpa has something important to teach his friends, and by extension, Martin. Finally, Grandpa tells Martin the next day that he will give Martin the medicine bag. Martin’s response this time is not embarrassment nor disgust, as it had been earlier. Instead, he seems frightened, and has troubling dreams. Again, he overcomes his fear, and goes to Grandpa’s bedside after school. At this point in the story, Sneve inserts an additional coming-of-age story. She allows Grandpa to share with Martin the story of the medicine bag’s creation. In the story-within-astory, Iron Shell, Grandpa’s father, is a young
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Native American spiritual offering at the medicine wheel (Image copyright Sascha Burkard, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
man trying to achieve manhood himself through the vision quest. A vision quest is a demanding and often grueling experience in which a young Native American goes out into the mountains or prairie alone, to find his or her purpose in life. In this story, Iron Shell prepared for his vision quest by creating the medicine bag and purifying himself through sweat baths. Then he went off by himself to the high country, where he prayed and fasted. These preparations helped him to grow spiritually, so that he would be ready for the special dream that came to him. However, when it came, it was a dream of the white man’s iron. Later he found a piece of iron in a settler’s campfire. Iron Shell had matured enough to realize that although he did not understand the guidance he had been given, it was important to him. Not until much later did he understand the significance, when he was at an Indian boarding school where he learned the blacksmithing trade. Iron Shell’s coming-of-age occurred when he realized that he could maintain the old ways and the Lakota
culture and function in the white world as a blacksmith.
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The purpose of the story-within-a-story is to give Martin a model of how someone can honor tradition while living in the modern world. Martin learns through the story his Grandpa tells him, and when it is over, he is ready to accept the responsibility and the honor of wearing the medicine bag. Martin’s coming of age is complete when he returns to the Rosebud Reservation after his greatgrandfather dies. When he stands alone on the prairie of the reservation and places a piece of sage in the medicine bag, he follows Grandpa’s instructions and repeats a form of vision quest, just as Iron Shell has done before him. By the end of ‘‘The Medicine Bag,’’ Martin has grown from a child embarrassed by his cultural identity to a young man who honors and embraces his Native American traditions. Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Medicine Bag,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
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Dawn Karima Pettigrew In the following review, Pettigrew paints Sneve’s work as using direct and informative language. ‘‘When I was young, I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it.’’ The words of Apache leader Cochise summarize the start of one of the great struggles for the American West. As white settlers and military encroached on their lands, Apache defiance led to war and to reservations. The Apaches teaches young readers about the six groups of the Apache—Western Apache, Jicarilla, Mescalero, Kiowa-Apache, Lipan and Chiricahua. Sioux author Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve presents the creation stories, ceremonies and warfare of this nation with direct, informative language. Suitable for classroom or family reading, The Apaches offers facts about a culture often villified by Saturday-afternoon Westerns. ‘‘Women,’’ ‘‘Children,’’ ‘‘Raiding and War’’ are especially interesting sections. While Sneve treats historical events and traditional customs with well-researched care, she also includes a ‘‘Today’’ section. By portraying modern Apache people as vital and successful, this section combats the stereotypes of Native Americans as vanishing. Artist Ronald Himler’s detailed paintings illustrate regalia, leaders and lifeways. The Apaches introduces elementary-school children to a bold Native nation.
and vital elements—of how all the people lived and continued to live—that wouldn’t appear if told from a man’s perspective. Completing the Circle reads as if Sneve were sitting beside you retelling the stories of the people, the times, the legends, and the legacies. You’ll meet Rose Ross, Sneve’s mother; Flora Clairmont Driving Hawk, her paternal grandmother; Hannah Howe Frazier; her great-grandmother; and learn about the Santee and Maggie Frazier, Hannah’s mother-in-law. Experience the kinship these women shared through the generations, their hardships, their struggles to survive and adapt to the intrusions of the white world and its ways. They triumph in maintaining their own identities in the face of these changes. Sneve, a mixture of Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota, is the author of three other books. She won the University of Nebraska North American Indian Prose Award in 1992.
Source: Dawn Karima Pettigrew, ‘‘The Apaches: A First Americans Book,’’ in Whispering Wind, Vol. 30, No. 3, August 31, 1999, p. 33.
Sierra Adare In the following review, Adare describes feeling that Sneve sits right next to the reader while telling the story. In writing about her grandmothers’ lives, Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve uses a quilt of words the way her grandmother crafted the star quilt that covers Sneve’s bed from pieces of fabric. Sneve draws on her memories, her grandmothers’ stories, tribal history, and traditional stories to weave together this glimpse of life. Sneve writes, ‘‘I began with the stories I had heard as a child and read as an adult because they gave me valuable insight into the nature of Indian woman.’’ But she goes beyond that, telling these stories from a woman’s point of view stressing different
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Source: Sierra Adare, ‘‘Completing the Circle,’’ in News From Indian Country, Vol. 13, No. 14, July 31, 1999, p. 36.
Alex Karoniaktatie Jacobs In the following review, Completing the Circle is a recommended read to help bridge the generation gap. Winner of the 1992 North American Indian Prose Award, this 100 page volume makes a good companion piece to Johnston’s book of residential school life. While Ms. Sneve, a well respected Lakota woman who writes predominantly for young Native children, does not write about boarding schools, she fills in other parts of Native life from the same era when Native people were still outsiders to American society. She talks of the Urban Relocation Program during the Termination days as her family was among those relocated with mixed emotions of returning to the reservation. Sneve, in finding the roots of her own family and especially the womenfolk of her relations, dives into Lakota and Plains history with such calm and grace that even the tragedies are well told stories and necessary so as to understand what happens later in reservation life. The nomadic horse life of the Plains warrior people was given up so quickly to the new farming life of the reservations that culture and tradition broke down. Women and children would feel the effects but in different ways than the men who would no longer be warriors as abuse and alcoholism grew. She relates how men used to take more than one wife, often sisters, because as part of the
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warrior and horse life, men were few and women would share the work in the villages. Christianity and reservation life changes all of this and not necessarily for the better, because the culture no longer dictated the sharing and caring for each other, many women became abandoned to fend for themselves. Sneve relates all this history and survival and emotion by the act of returning home and quilting with her female relations. This book and Johnston’s Indian School Days need to be read by Native People, young and old alike. It is true that today’s children did not go through many painful experiences that previous generations have. We actually want them to go to school, even boarding schools! Their problems are different and they now share many of these problems with other children regardless of race; yet the old-timers are now telling their stories so that the young will know how much was sacrificed so that the young have options and choices today. These are histories that young people should share, perhaps they can better deal with today’s complex problems by understanding that their place in the world today depended so much on the sacrifice and sheer will for survival of past generations. Source: Alex Karoniaktatie Jacobs, ‘‘‘Completing the Circle’ - Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve,’’ in Akwesasne Notes, Vol. 2, No. 1, March 31, 1996, p. 104.
SOURCES Bear, Charla, ‘‘American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,’’ in National Public Radio (NPR), May 12, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16 516865 (accessed August 24, 2009). ———, ‘‘American Indian Schools a Far Cry from the Past,’’ in NPR, May 13, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=17645287&ps=rs (accessed August 24, 2009). ‘‘Bildungsroman,’’ in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, edited by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003, p. 39. Bruchac, Joseph, Our Stories Remember: American Indian History, Culture, and Values through Storytelling, Fulcrum Publishing, 2003, pp. 9–13, 19, 39. Charles, Jim, ‘‘Interrelated Themes in the Young Adolescent Novels of Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve,’’ in The ALAN Review, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter 2001, http://scholar.lib. vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/v28n2/charles.html (accessed August 24, 2009).
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Fletcher, Matthew, L. M., American Indian Education: Counternarratives in Racism, Struggle, and the Law, Routledge, 2008, pp. 1–4. Gibbon, Guy E., The Sioux: The Dakota and Lakota Nations, Blackwell Publishers, 2003, pp. 3–8. Hoel, Helga, ‘‘Writing at a Crossroad: Examples from Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s Fiction for Children,’’ in Spra˚k og Spra˚kundervisning, No. 2, 2004, http://home. online.no/helhoel/sneve.htm (accessed August 24, 2009). ‘‘Indian Boarding Schools,’’ in Indian Country Diaries, http://www.pbs.org/indiancountry/history/boarding2.html (accessed August 24, 2009). Molin, Paulette Fairbanks, American Indian Themes in Young Adult Literature, Scarecrow Press, 2005, pp. 140–41. Moore, Patricia, Review of Lana’s Lakota Moons, in Kliatt, Vol. 42, No. 4, July 2008, pp. 26–27. Morgan, Thomas D., ‘‘Native Americans in World War II,’’ in Army History: The Professional Bulletin of Army History, Fall 1995, reprinted in the U.S. Army Center of Military History, http://www.history.army.mil/html/topics/natam/ index.html (accessed August 24, 2009). Smith, Candace, Review of Grandpa Was a Cowboy & an Indian and Other Stories, in Booklist, Vol. 97, No. 4, October 15, 2000, p. 420. Sneve, Virginia Driving Hawk, ‘‘The Medicine Bag,’’ in Grandpa Was a Cowboy & an Indian and Other Stories, University of Nebraska Press, 2000, pp. 3–14. ‘‘Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve,’’ in Red Room—Where the Writers Are, 2009, http://www.redroom.com/author/ virginia-driving-hawk-sneve/bio (accessed August 23, 2009). ‘‘Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve,’’ in Voices from the Gap, University of Minnesota, http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artist pages/sneve_virginia_driving_hawk.php (accessed August 24, 2009). ‘‘Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve Papers,’’ in South Dakota State University Archives, http://lib.sdstate.edu/archives/ mss/ma19.html (accessed August 23, 2009). ‘‘White House Names Humanities Honorees,’’ in Black Issues in Higher Education, Vol. 17, No. 23, January 4, 2001, p. 18.
FURTHER READING Buscombe, Edward, ‘‘Injuns!’’ Native Americans in the Movies, Reaktion Books, 2006. Buscombe traces the origins of the stereotypical movie image of the Native American in a highly readable and interesting format. Deloria, Philip Joseph, and Neal Salisbury, eds., A Companion to American Indian History, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
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This book includes twenty-five original essays by leading scholars in the field of Native American studies, including chapters on religion, family, education, and gender. Petrillo, Larissa, Being Lakota, University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Petrillo’s work provides a description of modern Lakota life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Taylor, Mildred D., Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Bantam, 1976.
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Written about the same time as ‘‘The Medicine Bag,’’ this Newbery Medal-winning young-adult novel is the coming-of-age story of a young African American woman in Mississippi in the 1930s. Walker, Alice, ‘‘Everyday Use,’’ in In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. This short story by noted African American writer Alice Walker explores issues of embracing and valuing cultural heritage.
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A Mystery of Heroism Stephen Crane’s short story ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ was first published in the Philadelphia Press in August 1895, just months after the original publication of his first and biggest success, The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Like the latter, ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ describes an episode of the Civil War. The story tells how Fred Collins, an ordinary infantryman, is encouraged by his fellow soldiers into crossing the field of battle to fetch a drink from a nearby well. The question of heroism is a key theme in The Red Badge of Courage. This short story also poses questions about the true meaning of heroism. Does heroism stem from the intentions of the hero, his motivation, or his deeds? Which deeds truly deserve to be labeled heroic? To the casual observer Fred Collins’s actions may appear heroic, but Crane makes it clear that Collins is not on a heroic quest but rather a fool’s errand motivated by his own vanity.
STEPHEN CRANE 1895
‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ can be found in Great Short Works of Stephen Crane, a 2004 Perennial Classics publication.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Crane was born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, the fourteenth and youngest child of Reverend Jonathan Crane and his wife, Mary Crane. Crane’s father was a Methodist minister, and the family moved frequently as he
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Now on his own, with no employment, Crane shared an apartment in a New York ghetto with two medical students. Observing the poverty and squalor of the neighborhood, he began work on his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In 1893 Crane published the novel at his own expense, but it attracted little notice. Shortly thereafter, at the home of a friend, Crane found some magazines chronicling the Civil War. Fascinated, he began writing what would become his most famous work, The Red Badge of Courage. The novel was first published in serial form by the Bacheller-Johnson Newspaper Syndicate in December 1894. It was first released as a book in October 1895. Unlike his first novel, The Red Badge of Courage was an instant success. The book was both a popular and critical triumph for Crane, and almost overnight he became a literary celebrity. The Black Riders and Other Lines, a book of Crane’s poetry, was published in 1895, as well as ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism,’’ a Civil War short story.
Stephen Crane (The Library of Congress)
was assigned to different churches in New Jersey and New York. After Reverend Crane died in 1880, the family eventually settled in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Crane attended Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, studying for a career in mining engineering. The subject held little interest for him, and he left the college after just one term. With a literary career in mind, he enrolled at Syracuse College in New York. However, after six months he declared college ‘‘a waste of time’’ and left to begin a career as a journalist and author. Crane’s much older brother, Jonathan Townley Crane, Jr., was a well-established reporter for the New York Tribune and the Associated Press, and Stephen had helped him with his reporting while he was in college. After leaving Syracuse College, he continued to write for the Tribune, and the paper also published a collection of his stories. However, in 1892 Crane wrote an ironic article about a workers’ parade in Asbury Park, inadvertently offending the Junior Order of United American Mechanics. In the uproar that followed, the Tribune fired him.
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In 1896, Crane was hired as a war correspondent to cover the Spanish-American War, involving Cuban insurrection against Spanish rule. He was aboard the S. S. Commodore on his way to Cuba when the ship sprang a leak and sank. Crane escaped with the ship’s captain and a few other men in a small dinghy. After rowing for thirty hours in the small craft, the men were finally rescued after swimming ashore at Daytona, Florida. Crane would later write one of his most well regarded short stories, ‘‘The Open Boat’’ (1898), about this incident. While in Florida, Crane met Cora Taylor, who ran a hotel in Jacksonville. When he traveled to Greece in 1897 to cover the Greco-Turkish War, he took Cora with him. They lived together as husband and wife for the rest of Crane’s life, though they were never legally married. The couple spent some time in London after the war, where Crane became friends with Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, and other prominent literary figures. By 1898 Crane’s health had begun to deteriorate, and he suffered from the early symptoms of tuberculosis. He continued to write, though the quality of his work was uneven, and his illness grew progressively worse. In May 1900, in a desperate attempt to save Crane’s life, Cora convinced him to travel to a health resort in Badenweiler, Baden, Germany. Crane died there on June 5, 1900, at age twenty-eight.
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PLOT SUMMARY Crane begins ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ by setting the scene, describing the field of battle. At the top of a hill the artillerymen rush about, firing and reloading their guns, while below the hill the infantrymen of A company await their turn to fight. The infantrymen look onto ‘‘a fair little meadow,’’ and just beyond the meadow there is a house and a well decimated by the explosions of the battle. As the men of A company look on, they see the regiment’s bugler killed by one of the many exploding shells, while an officer rides by on his horse, cradling an injured arm.
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
Amid all this chaos, Fred Collins of A company tells his fellow soldiers that he is thirsty. ‘‘I bet there’s water in that there ol’ well yonder!’’ he says. However, the once pleasant meadow between Collins and the well is now being torn apart by a volley of enemy shells. What little is left of the house beyond the meadow is destroyed, and some of the artillerymen and their horses are being killed.
A twenty-one-minute reading of ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ produced by Jimcin Recordings (1986) is available as an audio download at www.audible.com. Several other works by Crane are also available. ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ has never been made into a movie, but in 1959 a film version of Crane’s Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage was released, starring Audie Murphy. Before working as an actor, Murphy was the most decorated soldier of World War II. The movie is available on DVD from Warner Home Video; it is also available as a video download through Amazon’s ‘‘Video on Demand’’ service.
Collins’s fellow soldiers begin to tease him, telling him he should go ahead now and get a drink of water from the well, assuming that no one would be foolhardy enough to try such a stunt. Collins takes offense at their ribbing, threatening to do just that if they do not stop. Meanwhile, the regiment’s officers discuss the progress of the battle; one predicts that the enemy’s infantry will soon attack the hill.
Hero or not, he begins walking across the meadow toward the well.
Infuriated by the taunts of his comrades, Collins gets up, approaches his captain, who is talking with the colonel of the regiment, and asks permission to go get water from the well across the meadow. Astonished, the captain and colonel attempt to reason with him. The colonel asks, ‘‘Don’t you think that’s taking pretty big risks for a little drink of water.’’ Collins answers, ‘‘I dunno w’ether ’tis.’’ The colonel tells him that if he wants to go, he may do so, adding that he should take some of the other soldiers’ canteens with him to fill up as well.
As Collins heads toward the well, a line of infantrymen emerges from a forest beyond the meadow and begins firing. Collins ‘‘could see nothing but flying arrows, flaming red.’’ He runs for the house, which he views ‘‘as a man submerged to the neck in a boiling surf might view the shore.’’ Finally reaching the well amid exploding shells and rifle bullets, he begins to fill the canteens. No longer dazed, he is now too terrified to wait for the canteens to fill up. He opts instead to fill a bucket he finds nearby and begins running back to A company.
Somewhat stunned that he has actually taken his threat this far, Collins moves about in a daze as his fellow soldiers prepare him for his trip to the well. He is too dazed to feel afraid and wonders if perhaps this absence of fear means that he is a hero. However, he rejects this notion, reasoning that
Along the way, he assumes that he will be killed at any moment; he imagines how he will fall, the way he has seen fellow soldiers fall. Then Collins encounters the officer whose arm had been injured earlier. Having been hit by another shell, the man lies dying on the ground, with one leg trapped beneath his dead horse. He asks Collins for a drink of water. Too afraid to delay his return, at first Collins refuses, but then he turns back and attempts to give the officer a
Heroes had no shame in their lives, and, as for him, he remembered borrowing fifteen dollars from a friend and promising to pay it back the
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next day, and then avoiding that friend for ten months.
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drink. In his terror, he spills water all over the officer’s face. He then rushes on to his regiment, which cheers his arrival. The bucket of water is first grabbed by two lieutenants, who begin fooling around with it, one deliberately jostling the other while he tries to drink. The bucket falls to the ground, spilling all the water.
CHARACTERS
The Colonel The colonel of the regiment gives Collins permission to go to the well. Crane illustrates the colonel’s condescending nature by the way he talks to Collins: ‘‘Look here, my lad—Collins was not a lad—don’t you think that’s taking pretty big risks for a little drink of water.’’ The colonel makes only a token effort to discourage Collins from a potentially fatal (and unnecessary) excursion, showing that he views low-ranking officers like Collins as expendable.
The Captain Like the colonel, the captain of Collins’s company is surprised by Collins’s request but does little to talk him out of it, merely asking him, ‘‘Can’t you wait?’’ Both the captain and the colonel are unsure whether Collins is really serious about his request.
Fred Collins Fred Collins is a Civil War infantryman on the field of battle. His unsophisticated speech (‘‘I bet there’s water in that there ol’ well yonder!’’) and simplistic view of what constitutes a hero indicate that he is just an ordinary country boy, no different than the other foot soldiers of the regiment. Collins is aware of being ordinary. When he briefly fancies himself a hero, he quickly dismisses the idea, listing reasons why it cannot be true and concluding that ‘‘he was an intruder in the land of fine deeds.’’ Crane only indirectly indicates which side of the Civil War conflict Collins is on; he looks toward his comrades and sees ‘‘the long blue line of the regiment,’’ indicating that Collins is a soldier for the Union, not the Confederacy.
Collins’s Fellow Soldiers The fellow officers of Collins’s regiment play a key role in the story by goading Collins to act with their teasing and jibes. Clearly believing that Collins would never be foolish enough to attempt to cross the war-torn meadow, they repeatedly urge him to make the trip: ‘‘Well, if yeh want a drink so bad, why don’t yeh go git it?’’ Their speech reveals them to be from similar backgrounds as Collins himself. They are astonished when he actually decides to make the trip to the well: ‘‘‘I never thought Fred Collins had the blood in him for that kind of business,’’’ says one comrade. Two lieutenants of the regiment, engaging in the same sort of jesting that sent Collins on his mission in the first place, spill the hard-won contents of the water bucket at the end of the story.
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THEMES Heroism In ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ and many of his other short stories (including The Red Badge of Courage) Crane grapples with the definition of heroism. What makes a hero a hero? Is the conventional definition of heroism truly valid? Crane uses Collins’s opinions about heroism as a way of poking fun at the conventional idea of what constitutes a hero. Still in a daze after deciding to cross the meadow, Collins feels no fear, first assuming that this must mean he is heroic ‘‘because human expression had said loudly for centuries that men should feel afraid of certain things, and that all men who did not feel this fear were phenomena—heroes.’’ Just as quickly as he comes to this conclusion, however, he rejects it. Collins feels he cannot be a hero because ‘‘heroes had no shames in their lives,’’ and Collins can think of a few transgressions of which he is ashamed. Through this use of irony Crane demonstrates the overblown, unrealistic definition of heroism cherished by society. If the only heroes are people who have never felt fear, never made mistakes, and never been ashamed, clearly there are no heroes at all. A further irony is the idea that Collins fancies himself a hero at all simply because he feels no fear. Collins does not consider the motivation behind his actions, which could hardly be less heroic: first, he is thirsty, and, second, he wants to shut up his comrades, who goad him into action. None of the men, including Collins, are dying of thirst. The only moment of his journey that could be considered heroic is when he returns to the dying officer to give him a drink of water. Here, finally, Collins considers someone other than himself and is motivated by compassion, not pride.
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Look up the dictionary definition of hero. Do you think this definition is adequate? Make a list of five people you consider to be contemporary heroes. Do they fit the dictionary definition? Do you believe Fred Collins would agree with your choices? After considering these questions, write your own definition of hero. Watch the movie Hero (1992) starring Dustin Hoffman. How does the movie challenge our definition of the term ‘‘hero’’? Would Fred Collins have considered either Bernie LaPlante or John Bubber heroes? Write your own short story featuring an unlikely character performing a heroic act. Research the Civil War and provide answers to the following questions: What was the average age of a soldier in the Civil War? How many soldiers lost their lives in that war? Now research the same questions for World War I, World War II, Korea, and the Vietnam War (U.S. soldiers only). Using
The emptiness of Collins’s foolish gesture is symbolized by the spilled bucket; in the end, Collins has risked his life for nothing, not even the drink he pined for at the beginning of the story.
War Collins’s pointless journey could be considered a metaphor for the pointlessness of war in general. Crane makes no judgment calls as to which side of the conflict is right or wrong. In fact, aside from one reference to the ‘‘long blue line’’ of Collins’s regiment, there is no mention of who is fighting for which side. There is no glory in Crane’s description of the deaths that occur; no one sacrifices himself to save others; no one ‘‘saves the day.’’ In fact, at the end of the story the outcome of the battle is unclear. Nor does Crane specify the historical time or location of
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charts and graphs or a PowerPoint presentation, compare your findings.
Read the young-adult Civil War novel Rifles for Watie, by Harold Keith. How does Jeff, the main character, view the life of a soldier at the beginning of the novel? What does he learn from his battle experiences? How is this similar or different from what Fred Collins learns in ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’? Create a Venn diagram to compare the two works.
What do you think might happen to Fred Collins after the end of this story? Do you think he will survive the battle? Will he fight the enemy bravely? Run away? Write a continuation of the story that concludes with the end of the battle.
Which states fought for the Union and which for the Confederacy? Draw a map of the United States and designate by color those states that fought for the North and the South.
the battle, simply providing a description of the landscape. All this vagueness leads the reader to assume that this battle is typical of a dozen other battles, and that the outcomes of many of them are as fruitless as Collins’s journey to the well. Just as Collins has no compelling reason to risk his life, nations sometimes rush into war without a clear plan or rationale, resulting in the loss of many innocent lives.
Pride The main motivation behind Collins’s perilous quest for water is not thirst but pride. When his comrades tease him about going to the well, Collins is insulted by the implication that he is all talk and no action. To save face, he repeatedly insists that if they do not stop provoking him, he will indeed make the trip. When his comrades
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A company of cavalry men firing their carbine in a Civil War re-enactment in California (Image copyright Jose Gil, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
persist with their teasing, Collins has two choices: to swallow his pride and concede that he has no intention of risking his life for a drink of water, or to actually risk his life to save face. Continuing his quest, Collins ‘‘was vaguely conscious that a chasm, the deep valley of all prides, was suddenly between him and his comrades.’’ He has no clear idea why he is venturing forth. Crane writes, ‘‘As a matter of truth, he was sure of very little. He was mainly surprised.’’ Here Crane demonstrates the destructive power of pride, goading Collins into foolish action, just as nationalistic or religious pride can lead people to wage war.
of water is in itself ironic. In a story of war the reader expects men to risk their lives for something greater, more noble, such as freedom. It is also ironic that Collins gets so upset over a little teasing from his comrades when he clearly has bigger things to worry about, such as fighting the enemy. Crane sets up visual irony as well when Collins is shown running back toward A company with the bucket of water:
STYLE Irony Crane’s work often makes use of irony (a contradiction between what appears to be, or what one expects, and reality). In this story there are many ironic elements. First of all, the story of a man’s journey through heavy artillery fire to get a drink
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In running with a filled bucket, a man can adopt but one kind of gait. So, through this terrible field over which screamed practical angels of death, Collins ran in the manner of a farmer chased out of a dairy by a bull.
Crane utilizes dramatic irony—an incongruity between what the character believes or perceives and what the reader knows to be true—in the passages in which Collins ponders the definition of a hero. Collins makes assertions that the reader can easily see are flawed. He states that heroes are men with no shame in their lives, and that all men who do not feel fear are by definition heroes. One of the greatest ironies in ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ is the spilling of the water bucket at the
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end of the story. It is already ironic that Collins takes such a huge risk for such a meager reward, and when his fellow soldiers squander that hardearned reward by horsing around with the bucket, the irony is even greater. Through the use of irony Crane encourages his readers to question their own ideas about what heroism is.
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Literary Impressionism While some term Crane a realist because of his choice of subject matter and his realistic battle descriptions, others feel that Crane’s writing represents a transitional style between realism and impressionism. Impressionism focuses less on objective detail and more on a character’s perceptions, emotions, and thoughts. When Crane describes the battlefield, he does so objectively:
Dialogue Crane uses dialogue to distinguish between the classes of men fighting in the battle. The men of the infantry speak in a dialect that defines them as belonging to the lower class. Collins tells his fellow soldiers, ‘‘Dern yeh! I ain’t afraid t’ go. If yeh say much, I will go!’’ One of his comrades answers, ‘‘You’ll run through that there medder, won’t yeh?’’ In contrast, the colonel addresses Collins as ‘‘my lad’’ and when he says ‘‘you,’’ Crane spells it normally, not ‘‘yeh,’’ as with the infantrymen. The dying officer in the meadow also speaks more formally: ‘‘Say, young man, give me a drink of water, will you?’’ Though class lines are drawn in terms of the dialogue, the dying officer illustrates that death is the great equalizer; in battle the shells do not discriminate in their destruction.
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[The meadow’s] long green grass was rippling gently in a breeze. Beyond it was the grey form of a house half torn to pieces by shells and by the busy axes of soldiers who had pursued firewood.
However, when he reveals Collins’s thoughts on the nature of heroism, the writing verges on stream-of-consciousness, a technique that attempts to reproduce the random flow of thoughts passing through a character’s mind: ‘‘This, then, was a hero. After all, heroes were not much. No, it could not be true. He was not a hero. Heroes had no shames in their lives. . . . ’’ Crane’s early experience as a newspaper reporter probably contributed to the realistic aspect of his writing. (After reading the battle descriptions in his earlier works, many were amazed to learn that Crane had never actually seen or experienced combat himself.) However, when describing the inner life of his characters, Crane experimented with more impressionistic methods.
Realism Realism is a literary movement that came about in the late nineteenth century. Realist writers, as the name implies, sought to describe reality in terms of objective detail, dwelling less on the thoughts and feelings of the characters and more on fact. Unlike the Romantic writers who preceded them, realists were more likely to use the common man as a character in their works. Crane is considered by many to belong to the realist category. His description of the Civil War battle in this story is objective and unsentimental. His main character is a common man without any of the extraordinary characteristics usually found in a romantic hero: he is not noble, brave, or even especially smart. Crane interrupts the drama of the raging battle periodically with Collins’s outbursts: ‘‘Thunder! I wisht I had a drink!’’ The childish exchange between Collins and his fellow soldiers, while others are dying all around them, illustrates that these are not exalted, heroic defenders of freedom but ordinary, flawed men more focused on themselves than on abstract concepts such as freedom or individual rights.
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Civil War By 1860, conflict between the North and the South over states’ rights, slavery (in both newly acquired territories and in existing states), and the economic dominance of the North had led to bitter debate. Emotions ran high and voices of compromise and reason were often ignored. Before Lincoln was even elected, some Southern states had already declared that they would secede if a Republican became president. Lincoln was not an abolitionist; he had promised the South repeatedly that he would not disturb the institution of slavery in states where it already existed. He did, however, oppose the spread of slavery into newly acquired territories. For Lincoln, as well as for most Northerners, the Civil War was not fought to end slavery but rather to preserve the Union. In fact, though the spread of slavery was opposed by the Union, racism was widespread in both the North and the
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1860s: The National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 provide for a uniform national currency, federal chartering of banks, and the financing of the Union’s efforts in the Civil War. Of over 1,600 American banks existing in 1865, six fail that year (about .3 percent). 1890s: The Panic of 1893 throws the country into a severe economic depression. Of about 7,600 American banks, 326 fail in 1893 (over 4 percent). In the period from 1893 to 1896, 674 banks fail in the United States.
Today: Less than 1 percent of the American population claim farming as their principal occupation.
1890s: The total percentage of Americans who are illiterate has dropped to 13.3 percent, including 7.7 percent of the white population and 56.8 percent of black and other ethnic groups.
Today: The economic downturn of the late 2000s is caused in part by reckless sub-prime lending by many banks. From 2008 to August 2009, over 100 banks fail in the United States.
Today: Official statistics put the percentage of illiteracy in the United States at just 1 percent. However, a 2003 survey reveals that one in seven Americans (about 14 percent) are incapable of reading anything beyond a children’s picture book.
1860s: Farmers like Fred Collins make up 58 percent of the labor force in the United States. 1890s: The percentage of Americans who make their living by farming has dropped to 43 percent.
South. Few Northerners were willing to look upon African Americans as equals. On the other hand, many were outraged that the South would endanger the republic for which those who had fought in the American Revolution had sacrificed so much less than a hundred years earlier. The South, for its part, feared total economic domination by the North, which was enjoying great economic expansion. From a psychological standpoint, they were tired of the North’s criticism of slavery and the Southern way of life. Despite assurances from Lincoln and others, they feared that the North would soon seek to abolish slavery. On April 12, 1861, Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, after learning that Lincoln had sent supply ships to replenish the fort’s food stores. In response to the attack, Lincoln began recruiting troops, which prompted the last four Southern holdouts to secede from the Union, interpreting the recruitment as an act of
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1860s: According to the 1870 census, about 20 percent of the American population over fourteen are illiterate, including 11.5 percent of the white population and nearly 80 percent of black and other ethnic groups.
aggression. Thus began the Civil War, which lasted four years and resulted in the loss of over 600,000 lives. After the Union victory at Antietam (a site near Sharpsburg, Maryland), Lincoln announced his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which declared all slaves in rebel states ‘‘forever free.’’ Crane modeled much of his novel The Red Badge of Courage after the Battle of Chancellorsville, which was fought in Virginia in 1863. Though the South won this battle, it sustained losses almost as heavy as those of the North, including famed General Stonewall Jackson. On April 9, 1865, at the courthouse in Appomattox, Virginia, General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant of the Union. Just five days later, at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., fanatical Southern patriot John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head. Lincoln died the next morning.
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between the country’s wealthy and poor. Crane had observed (and written about) the devastating effects of poverty while living in a New York ghetto after being fired by the Tribune. Though Crane received financial support from his older brothers while living in the ghetto, the great success of The Red Badge of Courage must have been especially welcome to Crane in such difficult financial times. Crane wrote ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ and several other Civil War stories in part to capitalize on the success of his novel.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW Unfortunately, Crane’s life was so tragically brief that critics were still taking the measure of his talent when he died. He was considered by many to be a promising newcomer, a writer whose best work was probably still ahead of him.
Manassas battlefield monument in Virginia (Image copyright Israel Pabon, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
Economic Depression In 1893, the bankruptcy of the Reading Railroad began a downward spiral in the nation’s economy. In the late nineteenth century, the railroads were one of the America’s largest employers, and the economic influence of the railroad industry was huge. Though there were other weaknesses in the economy—agricultural industries had already been experiencing a downturn—the failure of the Reading Railroad hastened the country’s descent into an economic depression. More and more railroad lines went bankrupt, causing a chain reaction in the steel and banking industries, and a corresponding plunge in the stock market. During this period (1893–1896) unemployment rates were as high as 20 percent. In 1895, when both ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ and The Red Badge of Courage were released, the country was deep in the throes of this economic crisis. Years of worker exploitation by the ‘‘robber barons’’ of industry had widened the gulf
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Before 1895, there were a few mentions of Crane in the press as an up-and-coming writer, thanks in part to the patronage of well-known authors Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells. It was the publication of The Red Badge of Courage, however, that put him on the literary map. The book, originally presented in serial form in newspapers of the Bacheller syndicate, was a popular success. There were many positive reviews, and critics often singled out for praise Crane’s realistic depiction of the war experience. According to Linda Davis in her book Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane, a reviewer in the Detroit Free Press states that the novel presents ‘‘so vivid a picture of the emotions and the horrors of the battlefield that you will pray your eyes may never look upon the reality.’’ In his introduction to a 2004 collection of critical essays on the novel, contemporary critic Harold Bloom writes: ‘‘Anyone who has gone through warfare, from the time of the novel’s publication (1895) until now, has testified to Crane’s uncanny accuracy at the representation of battle.’’ In their book The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871–1900, Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino quote a letter Crane wrote to a friend, in which he exults that almost all the reviews are favorable ones: ‘‘About six in the patch are roasts. . . . New York, throughout, has treated me worse than any other city.’’ Crane’s work was even more favorably received in England. Clement Shorter of the Illustrated London News, is quoted in The Crane Log as claiming that ‘‘most of the unfavourable
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criticism of Mr. Stephen Crane’s ‘Red Badge of Courage’ have come from his own country. Here its merits have been fully recognised.’’ Crane’s volume of poetry The Black Riders which was released the same year as The Red Badge of Courage, was not as well received. It garnered some scathing reviews, and Crane’s poetry was even parodied in the press. In a New York Times Book Review article written after Crane’s death in 1900, John Hilliard laments that ‘‘the slim little volume of verse was the particular target of nearly every critic, joker, and parodist in the country.’’ While there were some encouraging reviews, the overall critical reaction was a disappointment for Crane, who felt that the book represented his best work. Reviews for much of Crane’s work were mixed; his style, which was unconventional for the nineteenth century, seemed to inspire both great admiration and bitter scorn. The New York Tribune, his former employer, published several harsh reviews. He received much praise for his war stories, but his grim novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets stirred controversy. Some were offended by the subject matter, while others praised Crane’s realistic depiction of city life but felt the novel was too pessimistic in its outlook. Besides The Red Badge of Courage, the short story ‘‘The Open Boat’’ is probably Crane’s most admired work. A reviewer in the New York Times Book Review states, ‘‘Mr. Stephen Crane never wrote a stronger or more impressive story.’’ Though ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ was not often singled out for praise, it was part of a collection titled The Little Regiment and Other Episodes from the American Civil War that received some positive notices. A review of the book in the New York Times Book Review praises Crane’s ‘‘unusual intuitive power and strong sympathy for humanity’’ and calls Crane’s depictions of war ‘‘remarkably vivid and convincing.’’ However, the reviewer writes that while these same admirable qualities are present in ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism,’’ ‘‘the mere story is crude and obscure.’’ As is so often the case, admiration for Crane’s writing increased following his death as critics looked back on his body of work. In hindsight, his work can be seen as marking a transition from stark realism to psychological impressionism.
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CRITICISM Laura Pryor Pryor is a freelance writer with over twenty years’ experience in professional writing, with an emphasis on fiction. In this essay, she compares and contrasts the main character of Crane’s short story ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ with Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage and Jim in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad first met on October 15, 1897, beginning a warm friendship that lasted until Crane’s untimely death in 1900. The two men discussed their work, reviewed each other’s writings, and exchanged literary advice. Though Conrad was fourteen years older than Crane, he began writing late in life, following a long career at sea. Crane achieved literary success before Conrad. Early in his writing career, Conrad was even accused of trying to imitate Crane. Given this close relationship, it is not surprising that both men examined some of the same themes in their work. In Conrad’s novel Lord Jim and Crane’s story ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ and The Red Badge of Courage, the two authors explore the ideas of heroism, bravery, and the testing of young, inexperienced men confronted by perilous situations. All three main characters—Fred Collins (‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’), Henry Fleming (The Red Badge of Courage) and Jim (Lord Jim)—cherish fanciful notions of heroism, bravery, and battle based on little evidence. Fred’s idea of a hero is a man who feels no fear and has never been ashamed; by his own account, he is disqualified by failing to repay a loan and occasionally being irritable with his mother. Henry has grandiose visions of ‘‘people secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess.’’ After enlisting, he feels ‘‘growing within him the strength to do mighty deeds of arms.’’ Likewise, in his imagination, Jim confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and . . . kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.
All three are woefully unprepared for real battle or hardship. The three young men cope with their situations in different ways, however. Fred invents a reason to put himself in harm’s way before the war itself necessitates it. To silence the teasing and jibes of his fellow soldiers, who dare him to cross the war-torn meadow and draw water from
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is Crane’s most famous work. Like ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism,’’ it tells the story of a young man named Henry Fleming who has enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War. Fleming waits anxiously to see combat, wondering if he will be brave enough to fight or if he will turn and run.
Puffin Graphics published a graphic novel of The Red Badge of Courage in 2005. Artist Wayne Vansant’s illustrations help bring the novel to life for younger readers, though some of the more subtle psychological nuances are lost in this version.
Leone in the 1990s. When rebels attack his village, twelve-year-old Beah flees, is briefly homeless, and is eventually recruited by the rebel army. The army not only teaches him to kill but provides him with cocaine, to which he becomes addicted. The story of how Beah is rescued by United Nations agents and is rehabilitated is both fascinating and inspiring.
Drew Gilpin Faust’s critically acclaimed book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) looks at how the American people coped with the aftermath of the Civil War. Through letters, Civil War-era stories, funeral sermons, and other sources, Faust paints a portrait of a country torn by grief. She also shows that the ways in which the country dealt with this grief shaped American culture for years to come.
Crane was an admirer of Leo Tolstoy’s writings, and his descriptions of war were often compared to Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. It tells the story of three aristocratic Russian families and is set against the backdrop of the 1812 invasion of Russia by Napoleon.
In A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007), Ishmael Beah relates his experiences in a very different civil car in Sierra
Crane was close friends with writer Joseph Conrad and often sought his advice on his work; Conrad similarly conferred with Crane on his own projects. Conrad’s most famous work is Heart of Darkness (1899). (The film Apocalypse Now is based on this book.)
the well, he actually carries out his threat to do so, shocking all involved—including himself. Though on the surface it appears that Fred is simply taking the dare to save face, Crane hints at a deeper motive when he writes that Fred ‘‘was not sure that he wished to make a retraction, even if he could do so without shame.’’
Uncertain of himself and how he will perform in the battle to come, Fred subconsciously creates a test of his mettle by crossing the meadow for a drink of water. His test, unfortunately, is inconclusive; terrified by the shells and gunfire, he spills much of the water he collects. His one moment of heroism occurs when he stops to give
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Crane’s short story ‘‘The Open Boat’’ (1898) is considered one of his best works. Crane based the story on his own harrowing experience aboard the S. S. Commodore in 1896.
Crane was a war correspondent during the Spanish-American war. His book Wounds in the Rain (1899) contains a collection of stories he wrote based on his experiences in this war. Irene Hunt’s Newbery Award-winning novel Across Five Aprils (1964) tells the story of the Civil War through the eyes of nine-year-old Jethro Creighton, whose brothers and a favorite school teacher have left home to fight on opposing sides of the war. Young Jethro stays behind to help take care of the family farm. In the course of four turbulent years he becomes a young man.
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a drink to a dying soldier. Here Fred chooses to face danger not for a whim but for the sake of compassion. In this he succeeds. Henry’s journey toward self-knowledge is a longer one; he swings wildly from extreme selfdoubt to swaggering egotism and denial, finally arriving at a middle ground. Tortured by uncertainty (will he fight bravely? will he turn and run?), at first Henry is impatient for battle to settle the question of his potential as a hero. The battle arrives, but like Fred’s ‘‘test’’ it does not settle the question. Henry fights well at first, but when a second wave of rebel soldiers attacks, Henry turns and runs when he sees others do so, thinking the battle is lost. When Henry discovers that most members of his regiment stayed to fight and held their ground—including a good friend who ends up dying in front of him—he is horrified. Unlike Fred, Henry fails the test of compassion. When a tattered and injured fellow soldier begins questioning him about his lack of injuries— Henry is retreating with the wounded because he has run away from the battle—he deserts him even though the man is dying of his own very real wounds. Later, after rejoining his regiment, Henry makes up a story about being shot in battle, and when no one learns the truth, he congratulates himself, rationalizing that he was wise to turn and run. Clearly, Henry’s talent for self-deceit is greater than Fred’s: ‘‘Indeed, when he remembered his fortunes of yesterday, and looked at them from a distance he began to see something fine there. He had license to be pompous and veteranlike.’’ Fred, however, sees himself as ‘‘an intruder in the land of fine deeds.’’ Though Jim’s denial of reality lacks Henry’s grand egotism, he clings to it far longer. His identity is so defined by his romantic ideals of sea life and exotic adventure that he is unable to acknowledge his own flawed nature. Though he is tortured by his desertion of the Patna and its passengers—believing the ship is sinking, Jim jumps into a lifeboat with its unscrupulous captain and crew—like Henry he finds ways to rationalize his behavior; his main regret is that he squandered his chance to be a romantic hero (‘‘My God! What a chance missed!’’). He considers himself a tragic, wronged figure caught up in the incident. Unlike Fred and Henry, Jim clings to his romantic image of himself to the very end; his inability to face reality and recognize his own limitations ultimately leads to his death.
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None of these men fit the conventional image of a hero: the brave, selfless, flawless (yet modest) human being. If one’s definition of a hero is, like Fred’s, a person with no fear and no transgressions to be ashamed of, then there are no heroes. This idea of a hero is a romantic illusion, the same one cherished by Jim to his death. He offers himself up to be killed in heroic fashion, though he knows it will devastate Jewel, the woman he loves. As the narrator Marlow puts it, ‘‘He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.’’ Both Fred and Henry believe that throwing themselves in harm’s way will prove their heroism. When given another chance to fight, Henry charges into battle at the front of his regiment, while Fred braves the shells and bullets to fetch water from the well. Yet this does not prove them to be heroes. Henry is still haunted by the image of the tattered man he deserted, and Fred still feels compelled to bring water to the dying officer. Neither Fred nor Henry can stop these men from dying, but both come to recognize that bravery without compassion is a hollow victory. Henry, who earlier fancies himself a ‘‘tremendous figure’’ and ‘‘a knight,’’ finally comes to terms with reality: ‘‘He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.’’ Jim, on the other hand, is kind and compassionate only to the extent that it does not threaten his image of himself as a romantic ideal, ‘‘as unflinching as a hero in a book.’’ Ironically, the only way for him to maintain such an ideal is to die. In the end, Crane and Conrad demonstrate that there are no heroes, or at least no men who live in a permanent heroic state. Rather, there are just ordinary men who, faced with extreme circumstances, achieve heroic moments.
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Source: Laura Pryor, Critical Essay on ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
William Crisman In the following excerpt, Crisman discusses Crane’s previous experience as a war journalist and its influence on his fiction works. Stephen Crane’s career as a war correspondent in the Spanish/Cuban-American War and the body of fiction that came from it have often been taken as an apologetic compensation for Crane’s method of composing The Red Badge of Courage. Though at time of publication
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but two of Crane’s Cuban war stories (‘‘The Price of the Harness’’ and ‘‘The Sergeant’s Private Madhouse’’), journalists or journalism become objects of the fiction as well, and even in ‘‘The Sergeant’s Private Madhouse’’ the characters have been charged with being infected by journalism. Additionally, as Willa Cather pointed out, most of the Cuban stories do not merely present cliche journalism ‘‘much tainted by the war correspondent idiom of the times.’’ The craft of reporting itself, rendering event into language, gains center attention.
Old broken scuttle in front of the cracked wall of a well (Image copyright Vladm, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
In three of Crane’s Cuban war stories, the tales are narrated by a reporter. Sometimes this narration draws emphatic attention to itself. In ‘‘An Illusion in Red and White,’’ the reader encounters nothing but a quoted narrative by a reporter to another reporter. Sometimes the reporter-narrator is more elusive, and thereby in his own way perhaps even more obtrusive. The reader is surprised to learn, for instance, that the ‘‘narrator’’ of ‘‘This Majestic Lie’’ is not only a reporter but an indefinite group of reporters that, like some journalistic colonial animal, calls itself ‘‘we’’ and gathers ‘‘our’’ dispatches. In a third variation on this pattern, the narrator of ‘‘Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo’’ never makes his profession clear but simply makes known that he is a non-soldier among soldiers, leaving his identity as a reporter a ghostly, unstated given.
This fiction is ‘‘journalistic’’ in much more than the usually intended sense of being ‘‘mere sketches’’ jotted down by Crane as reporter. In all
When Crane’s Cuban tales lack a journalistic narrator, they sometimes have a journalistic main character. Most famously, in the one universally acknowledged fictional masterpiece of the Cuban war, ‘‘the correspondent’’ becomes something of the hero in ‘‘The Open Boat.’’ The main central reporter can, conversely, be a comic buffoon, like the title character in ‘‘The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins,’’ or a callous, unsympathetic ‘‘madman for the purpose of distributing the news’’ like the journalist Shackles (‘‘The Revenge of the Adolphus’’; Shackles also appears in this character in ‘‘Virtue in War’’ and ‘‘God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen’’). Indeed, Thomas A. Gullason suggests that William B. Perkins is not only a journalist but also the representative journalist as Pulitzer and Hearst created him. A final group of stories projects no journalist figure but rather journalism itself as a shadowy background force. In ‘‘The Clan of No-Name,’’ for instance, the Spanish colonel is finally motivated only by how he will appear in ‘‘the official report’’, just as the
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mistaken for a Civil War veteran’s first-hand account, that seminal modern war novel was wholly imaginary; Crane in fact sometimes recalled that what interviewing he did to construct his story was worthless. His real reporting in newspaper and fiction during the Spanish/ Cuban-American War, then, becomes in the minds of many readers an attempt to discover in reality what Crane had invented in the imagination, a personal, expiatory quest that produced at best only slight art apart from ‘‘The Open Boat.’’ This view might change, however, if critics shifted its initial assumption. Dropping the emphasis on any attempt on Crane’s part to ‘‘make up’’ for not being in the Civil War might illuminate a different intent and expose a different subject matter in his Cuban war fiction.
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opposing, insurgent, leader in ‘‘Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure’’ is highly sensitive to his image ‘‘in the Newspapers.’’ The purpose of this catalogue is not simply to demonstrate how often journalism is an object in Crane’s war tales but also to indicate the variety with which it appears, having almost never the same form twice. Crane plainly takes journalism not merely as a topic but also as an aesthetic element to be varied and integrated into his fiction in multiple ways. If journalism becomes so thoroughly involved in the process of fiction, the suspicion arises that Crane is using it as a way of thinking about fiction. As Michael Fried says, journalism in these stories becomes ‘‘exemplary for literary writing as such.’’ ‘‘Reporting,’’ the uses of ‘‘reporting,’’ and problems with ‘‘reporting’’ overlap quite naturally between journalism and fiction writing. When such reporting concerns the act of communicating itself, as it does in ‘‘Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo,’’ one can hardly avoid Christopher Benfey’s conclusion that Crane is interested in journalists and fiction writers as alike in being ‘‘trafficker[s] in codes and signals . . . ’’ Source: William Crisman, ‘‘Distributing the News: War Journalism as Metaphor for Language in Stephen Crane’s Fiction,’’ in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 2, Autumn 2002, pp. 207–28.
Louis A. Renza In the following review, Renza asserts that Crane’s novel is a paradox because he fails to portray the common soldier’s realistic point of view, instead focusing on how later generations will depict the realism of the war. In certain ways, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is concerned more with a later American generation forgetting the Civil War than with a realistic depiction of how that war was actually fought from the viewpoint of the common soldier. Such forgetting paradoxically occurs through the way Americans remembered—and continue to remember—the Civil War: the emphasis of major campaigns won or lost or, to use the title of a text regarded as one of Crane’s major sources, on ‘‘battles and leaders of the Civil War.’’ The Red Badge, of course, obfuscates both battles (is the scene Chancellorsville?) and leaders (Fleming’s army ‘‘superiors’’ go unnamed except for ‘‘MacChesnay,’’ an unknown regiment colonel). The major cause of the war also is virtually forgotten, perhaps,
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because of middle-class, post-Reconstructionist sentiments; the only sign of it appears with the ‘‘negro’’ teamster who ‘‘sits ‘mournfully down’ to lament his loss of an audience’’ (Kaplan 277). In Crane’s novel, even the warring parties have lost their political specificity, being reduced in cultural memory to visual metaphors, the ‘‘blue’’ and ‘‘gray’’ armies, as if mere figures in a game. One can regard such forgetfulness as a duplication of Crane’s general vision of epistemological solipsism. In the novel Fleming never knows what his fellow soldiers are thinking (‘‘His failure to discover any mite of resemblance in their view points made him more miserable than before’’ [2:428]) or, from one moment to the next, how to regard his desertion. Critics continually debate the issue of his growth, arguing either that he achieves it or, relying on manuscript evidence, that Crane frames his protagonist’s own sense of growth (‘‘He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood’’ [24:538]) in an ironic light. How, then, can a later generation fully appreciate the social struggles that an earlier one experienced? More recent critical arguments make the novel’s war setting an allegorical representation of the social turbulence, especially the class warfare, wrought by postbellum industrial capitalism in the 1890s: ‘‘The battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to [Fleming]’’ (8:458). That social war, unlike the Civil War, was one that Crane witnessed first-hand as a muckraking journalist and depicted in the earlier Maggie. In the interests of ‘‘national reconciliation,’’ popular contemporary works treated the war as a ‘‘spectacle’’ or ideological trope that, besides preparing people to accept American imperialis, projects on the international stage, could effectively distract the American public from the social ‘‘civil war’’ then occurring (Kaplan 271, 279, 285). Critics have often noted how Crane’s narrative style mimics a visual realism purveyed by contemporary models of photography and Impressionistic painting (see Nagel 250–51). But instead of combining them to achieve a more comprehensive realistic effect, Crane’s literary Impressionism calls attention to the representational medium, smudging images of reality with subjective associations indigenous to language. The sun, in that famous line at the end of chapter 9, is ‘‘like a wafer’’—an objective observation? a religious or, in context, an antireligious allusion? a sign of Fleming’s transitory, mood-influenced perception of nature?
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In exposing the vulnerability of photo-realism to indeterminate, interpretive codes, Crane also contests the mass media’s attempt to change how one recollects historical events like the Civil War. He challenges the pervasive publicization or photo-pictorialization by the mass media of private experience defining the American public sphere by the 1890s. The American Civil War, after all, was one of the first wars to receive extensive mass media coverage, notably including the use of photographs, Matthew Brady’s being the most famous. Fleming, in fact, personifies this media in the way he constantly sees things as if he himself were a camera eye: ‘‘Each blade of the green grass was bold and clear. . . . His mind took a mechanical but firm impression, so that afterward everything was pictured and explained to him, save why he himself was there’’ (19:510). He even sees himself ‘‘pictur[ed] . . . as the central figure in blazing scenes’’ (15:495), ‘‘his public deeds . . . paraded in great and shining prominence’’ (24:535) back home. But in Crane’s narration, these pictured media accounts become overexposed (‘‘save why he was there’’), are quickly forgotten with changing events, or otherwise, like the officers whom Fleming sees ‘‘neglect[ing] to stand in picturesque attitudes’’ (5:444), keep going out of focus. Public or media pictorialization preempts Fleming’s—an army private’s—private experience of the war (compare Cox 316). It also blocks an artist like Crane, who as a correspondent himself trafficked in the attractive power of the mass media, from being able to imagine the Civil War as it was actually lived. The Red Badge of Courage thus comprises a realistic account of Crane’s struggle to render a realistic account of that war. It is the same battle that modern Americans must fight to remember it precisely, in the face of the documentation and photographic records that the mass media use to make the Civil War entirely a public spectacle. In the end, the novel gives credence to Whitman’s observation in Specimen Days (1882), ‘‘Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors . . . of the Secession war . . . ’’ (778). Source: Louis A. Renza, ‘‘Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage,’’ in Explicator, Vol. 56, No. 2, Winter 1998, p. 82.
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Many critics have attempted to extrapolate a coherent ‘‘philosophy’’ from the disparate currents of Stephen Crane’s fiction. Crane is pessimistically naturalistic in his famous description of human beings in ‘‘The Blue Hotel’’ as ‘‘lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, icelocked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb.’’ Yet, in ‘‘The Open Boat,’’ the theme of brotherhood coexists with and seriously modifies the prevailing vision of a stark and indifferent universe. In many of Crane’s narratives and journalistic essays, man figures, contradictorily, as heroic, enduring, selfdestructive, absurd, and locked into contingency. Almost without fail, Crane’s characters see their limited field of vision through distorting lenses, and often they act from subliminal urges that they never fully understand. In one of his best known poems, Crane cries out against life as a ‘‘cluttered incoherency’’ and appeals to a God who may be a reality or a mere rhetorical convenience. In The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane, Patrick K. Dooley confronts the paradoxes and tensions in Crane’s fiction and poetry and concludes that his ‘‘contributions to philosophy were considerable.’’ At the outset of his compact, well-argued, and discerning book, Dooley documents Crane’s responsiveness to the ferment of ideas in such late nineteenth-century American journals as the Arena, McClure’s, and the Century and his interest in the new ‘‘realism’’ being practiced by Hamlin Garland and, most conspicuously, William Dean Howells. Although Dooley does not contend that Crane was influenced by the pragmatic philosophy of William James, he maintains that Crane’s work embodied many of James’s ideas about the nature of reality and truth. Like James, Crane rejects the concept of a block universe, and like James, he subscribes to the belief that in the fluid, ever-changing world that human beings inhabit, there are many provisional truths, rather than absolute and everlasting Truths. Still, Dooley makes clear that whatever ideology Crane espoused, whether that of the muckrakers, Darwinists, or pragmatists, he was primarily an artist who avoided didacticism. In fact, Dooley’s sustained analyses of ‘‘The Open Boat’’ and ‘‘The Monster’’ reveal his sensitivity to the literary techniques through which Crane conveyed his philosophy.
In the following article, Gargano contends Crane’s fiction does not follow a single philosophy; instead, it explores all aspects of the human nature.
Although The Pluralistic Philosophy devotes a chapter to Crane’s metaphysics and epistemology and extols his contribution to philosophy, Dooley rather belatedly concedes in his last chapter that
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he uses the word ‘‘philosopher’’ in ‘‘a non specialist’s sense.’’ Indeed, one cannot help wondering how Crane, who thought it pretentious to call his verses or ‘‘lines’’ poems, would have reacted to being praised as a philosopher of any sort. Nevertheless, Crane did strive to get beyond the pietistic decorums and social formulas of his age to some fundamental truths about nature and mankind. As Dooley demonstrates with many apt illustrations, Crane was preoccupied almost to the point of obsession with the perils that beset the human search for self-realization. Crane recognized that reality is too vast and heterogeneous to be encompassed by any individual intelligence, that the beneficent and instructive Nature of the romanticists and transcendentalists has no soothing message for humanity, and that human beings are least absurd and pathetic (and may even rise to a measure of grandeur) when they see life from multiple points of view and in terms of the ‘‘widest possible context.’’
FOR STEPHEN CRANE THE TASK OF THE LITERARY REALIST CALLED FOR CREATIVE RESPONSE TO EXPERIENCE IN ALL MODES, INCLUDING THOSE THAT ARE LITERARY AND VISUAL.’’
The Pluralistic Philosophy is noteworthy for offering a useful guide to an understanding of Crane’s dramatization of the sheer multiplicity of life and humanity’s often pitiable and occasionally admirable moment of existence in the processes of time and the universe’s unfolding drama.
Never reductive, Dooley does full justice to Crane’s development from the early depiction of unqualified human failure in ‘‘Maggie’’ and ‘‘George’s Mother’’ to the unassertive but quietly pervasive humanism of ‘‘The Open Boat.’’ Dooley persuasively ascribes the enlargement in Crane’s vision to his experience in the American West, where, in contrast to the claustrophobia and oppressiveness of the Bowery and city life in general, conditions acted as a ‘‘tonic’’ that encouraged men to freer, bolder, and more courageous action. Without overlooking the widespread corruption that hampered attempts to aid the Nebraska farmers during a particularly bitter winter, Crane praises the resoluteness of the survivors. Moreover, some of his western tales show that human effort can give a favorable turn to seemingly unfavorable situations. Finally, Crane reserves a special respect for soldiers, ordinary men, and even ‘‘roughs’’ who accept their fates and act with dignity and efficiency, and he treats with obvious disdain all manner of pretension and self-importance. Dooley makes a strong case for seeing in Crane’s tolerance and compassion a genuine humanism and a belief in a limited deity who needs human assistance to accomplish his ends. In defense of Crane’s theism, however, Dooley stops short of attributing to him any acceptance of such Christian orthodoxies, precious to Crane’s parents and grandparents, as life after death and a judgment day in which the just and victimized are solaced and predators and persecutors are held responsible for their outrages.
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Source: James W. Gargano, ‘‘The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane,’’ in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 1, Winter 1995, pp. 127–30.
George Monteiro In the following essay, Monteiro asserts that Open Boat is not solely based on Crane’s personal experience, but that he also drew upon his creative response to literary and visual sources. Only the most primitive critical response would insist that Crane’s fictional treatment of his experience of shipwreck off the Florida coast on New Year’s Day 1897 could have been drawn directly and transparently from immediate life, that the author, moreover, had only to recall the details of existence aboard the small open boat, along with his moment-by-moment reactions to his plight and situation, to produce his ‘‘tale intended to be after the fact,’’ as he described the story. In this note I shall attempt to show how in two key instances in ‘‘The Open Boat’’ Crane drew upon memories of his reactions to three texts: one poetic, one expository, and one visual. POETIC AND VISUAL
In an early review of The Open Boat and Other Stories, the London Academy called Stephen Crane ‘‘an analyst of the subconscious.’’ To give ‘‘a faint notion of the curious and convincing scrutiny to which, through some forty pages, the minds of the crew are subjected’’ in the book’s title story, the anonymous reviewer quotes two passages: the first is the ‘‘If I am going to be drowned—if I am going
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to be drowned’’ question that the correspondent poses to himself at various moments; the second is the correspondent’s meditation on the ‘‘soldier of the Legion’’ dying in Algiers. It is the second instance that interests us here. Having long since enlisted in what he called the beautiful war for realism, the young author nevertheless had reached back for a schoolboy’s memory of Mrs. Caroline E. S. Norton’s poem, ‘‘Bingen.’’ ‘‘A verse mysteriously entered the correspondent’s head,’’ writes Crane; ‘‘he had even forgotten that he had forgotten this verse, but it suddenly was in his mind’’: A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was dearth of woman’s tears; But a comrade stood beside him, and he took that comrade’s hand, And he said: ‘‘I never more shall see my own, my native land.’’ These, the opening lines of Mrs. Norton’s poem, with some twenty words silently omitted at the very middle of the verse, Crane drew upon to render the emotional state of his castaway narrator. It was the pathos of the soldier, dying far from his homeland, in the throes of defining his hopeless situation and his unavoidable fate that came suitably to the writer’s hand. Crane tells us that the correspondent ‘‘had been made acquainted’’ with the soldier dying in Algiers ‘‘in his childhood,’’ even as Crane had probably discovered Mrs. Norton’s poem, its title expanded to ‘‘Bingen on the Rhine,’’ in his grade-school reader. (Over the years at random I have picked up copies of three such readers—National Fifth Reader (1870), Lippincott’s Fifth Reader (1881), and Swinton’s Fifth Reader (1883)—and in what must be a measure of the poem’s popularity, each one of them prints ‘‘Bingen on the Rhine.’’) It is equally clear, however, that Crane’s knowledge of Mrs. Norton’s poem went beyond the unadorned reprintings in grade-school texts, for his description of the dying soldier and the setting for his death elaborate on Mrs. Norton’s text. Crane expands, The correspondent plainly saw the soldier. He lay on the sand with his feet out straight and still. While his pale left hand was upon his chest in an attempt to thwart the going of his life, the blood came between his fingers. In the far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms was set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues.
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There is nothing in the lines Crane quotes to validate the correspondent’s view of the dying soldier, though the clause ‘‘the blood came between his fingers’’ expresses concretely what the poem, in a clause omitted by the correspondent, states more abstractly as ‘‘while his lifeblood ebb’d away.’’ It could be argued, of course, that in having the correspondent elaborate on the original lines of ‘‘Bingen,’’ Crane was merely exercising a writer’s legitimate license. It is more likely, however, that Crane was also familiar with a particular reprinting of Mrs. Norton’s poem, an edition in 1883 featuring illustrations by William T. Smedley, Frederic B. Schell, Alfred Fredericks, Granville Perkins, J. D. Woodward, and Edmund H. Garrett. Published in Philadelphia by Porter and Coates, this edition appeared more than three decades after the first publication of the poem and six years after the poet’s death. Crane’s paragraph of ‘‘elaboration,’’ it seems likely, draws directly on two illustrations by Smedley keyed into the lines ‘‘a Soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers’’ and ‘‘His voice grew faint and hoarser.’’ Since the soldier does not hold his hand over his heart, as Crane has it, it is unlikely that Crane had Smedley’s illustration before him as he wrote—though it is possible, one should note, that the ‘‘light’’ patch just below the soldier’s throat might well have been remembered by Crane as the soldier’s ‘‘pale left hand.’’ But the soldier’s feet, both in story and illustration (if not in the poem), are ‘‘out straight and still.’’ And the soldier’s death in both story and illustration (though not in the poem) plays itself out against ‘‘the Far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms. . . . set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues.’’ It should surprise no one that we have here still another instance of Crane’s translation of visual experience into the stuff of fiction. EXPOSITORY
The major lines of Crane’s imagination were set by his familial concerns with matters of religion and warfare, particularly as that imagination shaped his early work. Indeed, . . . Crane saw the events aboard the ‘‘open boat’’ and subsequently out of it and in the ocean as ironically bringing to question the tenets of Christian consolation. This he did in the broadest context, playing off the configuration of events against the trope of the Pilot-God and his Ship-World. Parables of man (a pilgrim) sailing in a lifeboat (belief in Christianity) on the rough seas (life in
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the world), dating from the Middle Ages, were abundant in Crane’s time in religious tracts and emblem books. Such parables also appeared in textbooks used in the public school system. These later, however, were demythologized. There were no longer any Christian referents in stories of shipwreck in the grade-school readers issued by Lippincott’s and Swinton’s. Typical of these is the following excerpt, the concluding paragraphs of an account entitled ‘‘A Ship in a Storm,’’ taken from a typical grade-school reader: On the dangerous points along our sea-coast are light-houses, which can be seen far out at sea, and serve as guides to ships. Sometimes the fog is so dense that these lights can not be seen, but most light-houses have great fog-bells or fog-horns; some of the latter are made to sound by steam, and can be heard for a long distance. These bells and horns are kept sounding as long as the fog lasts. There are also many life-saving stations along the coast where trained men are ready with lifeboats. When a ship is driven ashore they at once go to the rescue of those on board, and thus many valuable lives are saved.
This account stresses not loss of life, but the saving of it. The efficacy of strategically placed lighthouses and life-saving stations is indicated, the implication being that man is capable of mitigating and diminishing the dangers posed for him by a destructive sea. Many valuable lives are otherwise saved because of man’s foresight in creating and skillfully deploying life-saving stations. This is the lesson of this gradeschool account, and it is a lesson remembered (and subsequently tested) by the correspondent and his companions—babes in the wood—in the open boat. ‘‘There’s a house of refuge just north of the Mosquito Inlet Light, and as soon as they see us, they’ll come off in their boat and pick us up.’’ ‘‘As soon as correspondent.
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‘‘We’re not there yet,’’ said the oiler, in the stern.
Nor would they ever get to it if they were thinking of a life-saving station, for there was not a one on that coast of Florida. (And if they returned their thoughts to houses of refuge, there was none within twenty to thirty miles in either direction, north or south.) Since there were no life-saving stations on the entire Florida coast, what prompted the cook and the correspondent to think that they might be close to one? And on what basis would the cook later say, ‘‘We must be about opposite New Smyrna. . . . Captain, by the way, I believe they abandoned that lifesaving station there about a year ago.’’ To which assertion the captain answers only, ‘‘Did they?’’ It is possible, of course, that the author of ‘‘The Open Boat’’ did not know, just as his cook did not and just as, possibly, the oiler and the captain did not, that there were no life-saving stations off the coast of Florida. It is further possible that the notion that there would be such stations, even to the extent of the cook’s ‘‘remembering’’ the existence of one at New Smyrna, did not derive from personal experience but was the legacy of an elementary-school textbook. It is no wonder that they argue over the very existence and the probable location of those stations whose crews will save them, elation and despair following one another as they become sure and less than sure about the accuracy of their senses and the soundness of their information. Ultimately, of course, they will have to jettison their hopes for rescue by those who man such stations because there are no such stations anywhere near them. They will brave the unpredictable waves and the surf as each man is forced to strike out for himself. A concluding point. The grade-school account had begun with the observation that the sea can have two opposing appearances: it can be blue and calm, the setting for joyous peace; and it can be turbulently destructive to human life. Something like this notion had impressed Crane. In a little poem collected in ‘‘War Is Kind’’ he wrote,
‘‘The crew,’’ said the cook. ‘‘Houses of refuge don’t have crews,’’ said the correspondent. ‘‘As I understand them, they are only places where clothes and grub are stored for the benefit of shipwrecked people. They don’t carry crews.’’ ‘‘Oh, yes, they do,’’ said the cook.
To the maiden The sea was blue meadow Alive with little froth-people
‘‘No, they don’t,’’ said the correspondent. ‘‘Well, we’re not there yet, anyhow,’’ said the oiler, in the stern.
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‘‘Well,’’ said the cook, ‘‘perhaps it’s not a house of refuge that I’m thinking of as being near Mosquito Inlet Light. Perhaps it’s a lifesaving station.’’
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Singing. To the sailor, wrecked, The sea was dead grey walls Superlative in vacancy Upon which nevertheless at fateful time, Was written The grim hatred of nature. In ‘‘The Open Boat’’ Crane had written wryly of those on shore who, certain of the nature of sport in a boat, waved gaily at the men in the dinghy in false recognition of their playful holiday at sea. For Stephen Crane the task of the literary realist called for creative response to experience in all modes, including those that are literary and visual. Source: George Monteiro, ‘‘For the Record: Text and Picture in ‘The Open Boat,’’’ in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 11, No. 2, July 1984, pp. 307–11.
Paul Witherington In the following essay, Witherington contrasts ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ with Red Badge of Courage. ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ is Crane’s first short story about war, and one of his strongest. Following close after The Red Badge of Courage, it seems to share with that novel a basic structure and idea. Both works generate irony by detaching the pattern of initiation, the traditional learning experience, from its expected setting, the combat itself. That is, Fielding’s pattern of flight from the front lines and Collins’ run for water are somewhat irrelevant to the actual battle itself though not, of course, to the psychological aspects of war that Crane wishes to show. The unexpected way in which each man receives his badge of status emphasizes a more complex view of courage than the traditional trial by combat and suggests, as a corollary, the futility of war and the absurdity, if not of war itself, of the ways war is traditionally regarded. But Fielding’s status as a hero is left ambiguous at the end of The Red Badge of Courage, for even if courage exists, it exists by accident as often as by volition. In ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ the resolution is more definite: courage does exist, though because of its nature it is rarely achieved or recognized.
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WHAT BEGINS AS A CONVENTIONAL HERO’S INITIATION AND APPEARS TO END IN AN ABORTIVE AND ABSURD GESTURE IS ESTABLISHED FINALLY BY CRANE’S COMPOUND IRONY AS A GENUINELY HEROIC SEQUENCE OF EVENTS.’’
events of the story enact the meaninglessness of heroism, and although recent criticism honors Crane’s symbolism and humor, it echoes essentially that same view. George W. Johnson suggests that the story is a parable of the artist in society, wherein courage is at best the endurance of the dilemma between demands of individuality and convention. ‘‘The ‘mystery’ of Collins’ exploit lies in his acceptance of a meaningless code,’’ Johnson says, for in giving help to the dying officer Collins ‘‘acts without mercy or meaning.’’ Eric Solomon concludes that Crane’s irony demonstrates the ‘‘absurdity of any emotion in war.’’ According to Solomon, ‘‘the ‘heroism’ of the title is parodic; the ‘mystery’ is realistic.’’ A close reading of the story, however, argues for reshaping Solomon’s statement. Collins’ heroism is realistic because it is established on a level transcending simple bravery: a mystery in the spiritual sense. What begins as a conventional hero’s initiation and appears to end in an abortive and absurd gesture is established finally by Crane’s compound irony as a genuinely heroic sequence of events.
Without attending to the differences between the works, critics misread ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism,’’ assuming it is a microcosm of the novel it resembles. A standard view has been that the
The atmosphere of that phase of initiation usually called a descent into hell or a confrontation with death (depending on whether the mode is mythic or naturalistic) is fundamental to Crane’s irony. The preparations for Collins’ ‘‘walk squarely up to the face of death’’ are made with appropriate heroic ceremony, and the entire episode is charged with the supernatural. Collins seems to be ‘‘a man dreaming,’’ and in this mood the whistling shells and explosions become spirits of the air challenging his path, ‘‘fiends who directed all their wild rage at his head,’’ demons with their ‘‘flying arrows, flaming red,’’ and angels ‘‘of calamity’’ or ‘‘of death.’’ The well he comes to suggests the entrance to a lower (or inner) world, in which he confronts his own image expressing ‘‘a
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great appeal and a great curse.’’ Lying with his head hanging into the darkness, immobilized by fear, he is ‘‘for an instant . . . no more than a dead man,’’ surrounded by hellish smoke, thunder, and ‘‘crimson light.’’ His recovery is like a man ‘‘withdrawing his head from a furnace.’’ This reading of the well scene is pat, of course, to illustrate the process by which Crane mocks Collins’ early pretensions to heroism by bracketing the ‘‘descent and return’’ romance with a broader, unheroic view. The colonel and captain come to a rare agreement, as Collins is preparing for the adventure, that they cannot ‘‘for the life of them tell whether Collins wanted to go or whether he did not.’’ As the hero leaves the well, myth is humorously subverted by Crane’s setting the traditional motif of escape from the labyrinth in a rural metaphor: ‘‘Collins ran in the manner of a farmer chased out of a dairy by a bull.’’ Descriptions during the quest also undercut its seriousness. The hero’s cap seems continually trying to leave his head, the ‘‘stupid’’ water flows in an ‘‘indolent gurgle’’ when he tries to fill the canteens, and in the distance a ‘‘color sergeant fell flat with his flag as if he had slipped on ice.’’ The hero himself is unconscious of his activity to the point of dullness, for although he knows that what he is doing should be significant, it somehow lacks ‘‘form and color’’; it is not the stuff of ‘‘history and legend.’’ It is obvious that Collins’ experience at this stage of the story—but only at this stage—is absurdly unproductive, that the motifs of initiation are used in ways showing its invalidity. Collins’ quest is part of a larger effort of all the characters to defend against the disorder of war and the fragility of life by creating all manner of ceremony and busywork—‘‘strange repetitions’’— to distance themselves from the hazardous instant. The argument of privates Smith and Ferguson ‘‘which involved the greatest questions of the national existence,’’ the playful young lieutenants, and the seemingly dazed reactions of the officers all point to self-protection. In addition, the animate and inanimate are continually confused, apparently by design. The ‘‘machinelike movement’’ of troops is juxtaposed with the batteries ‘‘arguing in tremendous roars,’’ for example, to show the inversions imagined by those who deliberately dissociate themselves from human vulnerability, hoping by de-animation of themselves to lose the pain of individual consciousness, but reflecting by their animation of the articles of war the wish to make sense out of its senselessness.
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Collins’ drama of detachment is similar, but more elaborate. He expects the run for water to order his environment by earning him the privileges of one who has braved the dare of his peers and been initiated into a secure inner circle, but he learns in the course of his ramble that initiation into often has the effect of separation from. Thus ultimate control by ritual comes only at the cost of humanity itself, a conclusion foreshadowed by the early incident of the tense officer who ‘‘screamed out an order so violently that his voice broke.’’ For Collins the moment of extreme tension between the wished-for separation and the knowledge of what is thereby sacrificed comes when he ends the first part of his run from the well and finds himself distanced from his regiment as if they were on ‘‘the edge of an impossible star.’’ But distance cannot blur the historical demands of involvement beneath his feet, the ‘‘deep wheelruts and hoofprints in the sod.’’ This climactic moment stands in-between the empty form of ritual Collins has just completed and the true content of heroism to which he is introduced immediately thereafter. Just as Collins’ romantic initiation is bracketed earlier by the absurdity of its context, so now his entire earlier experience in turn is bracketed by his fruitful experience with the lieutenant. What seemed merely a joke on Collins’ failure in understanding is now shown as the prelude to a higher understanding. When he turns back to answer the dying officer’s call for help he is fulfilling a union which has been suggested twice before in the story. First mention of this lieutenant comes early in the story amid a series of what seem then to be unrelated events. He is wounded and holding his arm ‘‘as if this arm was not at all a part of him, but belonged to another man.’’ Amid the disorder of the troops, the officer’s grim smile and precise movements toward the meadow must unconsciously appeal to Collins as a rallying point, for although he doesn’t seem to notice the lieutenant, he speaks at that instant of the possibility of water in the well beyond the meadow, and his quest takes shape. Some time later the lieutenant is again mentioned after he has been wounded a second time and lies face downward in the meadow, trapped under his horse. As before, the next incident is a comment by Collins, who accepts at this moment the dare to go for water. The abrupt bringing together of experiences seems to imply a magnetism between the men. Crane says thereafter, ‘‘[Collins] had blindly been led by
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quaint emotions, and laid himself under an obligation to walk squarely up to the face of death.’’ That ‘‘face of death’’ is the lieutenant’s, not some vague aspect of danger as might be indicated by a superficial reading. The real test that is defined in the third juxtaposition of the men, their actual meeting, is not physical or ritual courage so much as moral courage, that ‘‘quaint’’ emotion that acted upon Collins but remained unrealized until his actual confrontation with the human face of death.
water Jesus spoke of at Jacob’s well as that after which one would not thirst again (John iv. 13–14). As if to punctuate this point ironically, Crane says of the lieutenant before he receives the water, ‘‘the officer was as a man gone in drink.’’ Like Collins, the lieutenant tries at first—by his proud ride into the meadow—to detach himself from his pain and succeeds only in separating himself from life. His heroism, less evident than Collins’, is that of lifting himself from his posture of death to face ‘‘the unspeakable noises of war.’’
Contrasts between Collins’ earlier adventure at the well and his encounter with the officer emphasize the validity of the later experience. First, Collins exchanges the ‘‘five or six canteens’’ he started with for the old wooden bucket he finds at the well. The exchange of metal for wood signifies a turn from the artificial to the natural, the giving up of an infertile form. The choice of one larger vessel over several smaller ones anticipates the larger, unique ceremony that follows. In fact, Crane’s indefiniteness on the number of canteens suggests that for Collins, at first, the form of the quest is more significant than the return with water; after all, the men do not really need it. Second, the words describing Collins’ moment of decision indicate a change of purpose. Earlier, at the well, ‘‘as he lay with his faced turned away, he was suddenly smitten with the terror.’’ Now ‘‘Collins turned. He came dashing back. His face had now turned grey, and in his eyes was all terror.’’ The segments I have italicized show his change: the averted face has become the confronting face, and the particular terror—undefined because particular—has become a general, uniting terror.
Thus the ‘‘mystery’’ of Crane’s title is ambiguous. On one level it expresses the knowledge obtained through the rites of a secular initiation; it is what Collins learns of physical courage, a limited discovery. On another level it is the unknowable, the mystery of God in man and the moral heroism of confronting one’s humanity even in its most threatening aspects. To Collins at first ‘‘it seemed . . . supernaturally strange that he had allowed his mind to maneuver his body into such a situation.’’ When compassion—his ‘‘quaint emotions’’—overtakes the formal aspect of the quest, though, he regains his psychic balance. The communion of officer and soldier, and of the dying and living, also suggests an experience more universal than that of the limited war scene, as Collins’ words here indicate: ‘‘Turn over, man, for God’s sake!’’
But the encounter is no less meaningful for the officer than it is for Collins. Because of the soldier’s fear the water is splashed on the lieutenant’s face and—presumably—he gets none of it to drink. The spilled water would suggest an ironic baptism if it were not for the genuine emotion that precedes the rite. Even as Collins turns back toward the lieutenant, that officer seems to recover the spirit, if not the substance, of life. ‘‘His arm bent like a twig. His head drooped as if his neck were of willow.’’ As he rises for the water, he faces the ‘‘unspeakable noises of the swirling missiles,’’ smiles, and takes ‘‘a little primitive breath like that from a child.’’ The lieutenant’s movements prior to the pouring of water indicate that this ritual is valuable primarily as a commemoration of what has already been accomplished by kindness. He has already received, in a sense, the real water, the
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The final contrasts of ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism’’ cap it with irresistible irony. The dying lieutenant’s childlike ‘‘shadow of a smile’’ is countered by the ‘‘welcoming roar’’ of the regiment ‘‘wrinkled in laughter.’’ The officer’s ‘‘breath like that from a child’’ as he prepares for the water contrasts with the ‘‘skylarking young lieutenants’’ who childishly play over the bucket ‘‘in their fashion.’’ The dying officer asks calmly for water, whereas the playful lieutenants grab the bucket, and the unintentional spilling of water by Collins is followed by the rowdy spilling later. Finally, the lieutenants simply glare at each other, like the two officers of ‘‘The Upturned Face’’ who are always looking at each other because they cannot confront the corpse they are burying and therefore the inhumanity they are living. But the lieutenant dying in the meadow turns his face toward the war. The empty bucket at the story’s end is by no means a cause for pessimism, for the ironically unfulfilled aspects of Collins’ original quest serve to highlight his spiritual quest. The fact that Collins’ real heroism is unnoticed and the fact that he drops out of the final scene indicate
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Crane’s realism in recognizing the rarity of that courage and the greater rarity of its recognition, but that it exists for the two major characters— and for Crane—seems beyond doubt. Source: Paul Witherington, ‘‘Stephen Crane’s ‘A Mystery of Heroism’: Some Redefinitions,’’ in English Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2, February 1969, pp. 200–18.
Review of In An Open Boat, and Other Tales, in New York Times Book Review, May 7, 1898, p. 309. Review of The Little Regiment and Other Episodes from the American Civil War, in New York Times Book Review, October 31, 1896, p. 4. ‘‘Tracking the Nation’s Bank Failures,’’ in Wall Street Journal Online, http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/ info-Failed_Banks-sort.html (accessed August 28, 2009). Wertheim, Stanley, and Paul Sorrentino, The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871–1900, Macmillan, G. K. Hall, 1994, pp. 143, 150, 185–91.
SOURCES ‘‘Ag 101: Demographics,’’ in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/demographics. html (accessed August 28, 2009). Bloom, Harold, Introduction to Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Stephen Crane’s ‘‘The Red Badge of Courage,’’ edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 2004, pp. 1–6. Cazemajou, Jean, Stephen Crane, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers Series, No. 76, University of Minnesota Press, 1969. Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim: A Tale, edited by Jacques Berthoud, Oxford University Press, 2008. Crane, Stephen, ‘‘A Mystery of Heroism,’’ in Great Short Works of Stephen Crane, HarperCollins (Perennial), 2004, pp. 259– 68. ———, The Red Badge of Courage, in Great Short Works of Stephen Crane, HarperCollins (Perennial), 2004, pp. 3–126. Davis, Kenneth C., ‘‘Apocalypse Then’’ and ‘‘When Monopoly Wasn’t a Game,’’ in Don’t Know Much about History, Crown Publishers, 1990, pp. 135–250. Davis, Linda H., Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane, Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Garraty, John A, ‘‘The War to Save the Union,’’ in The American Nation: A History of the United States to 1877, Vol. 1, 5th ed., Harper & Row, 1983, pp. 361–92. Grossman, Richard, ‘‘U.S. Banking History, Civil War to World War II,’’ http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/grossman. banking.history.us.civil.war.wwii (accessed August 28, 2009.) Hilliard, John, ‘‘Stephen Crane: Letters to a Friend about His Ambitions, His Art, and His Views of Life,’’ in New York Times Book Review, July 14, 1900, pp. 466–67. ‘‘A History of American Agriculture, 1776–1990,’’ http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfarm4.htm (accessed August 28, 2009). ‘‘120 Years of Literacy,’’ in National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp (accessed August 28, 2009).
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FURTHER READING Berryman, John, Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography, Cooper Square Press, 2001. This landmark biography of Crane by critic and poet John Berryman, first released in 1950 and later revised, was instrumental in reviving interest in Crane’s work. Berryman examines not just Crane’s life but also his creative process. McPherson, James, The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, Oxford University Press, 2003. This one-volume history of the Civil War was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. McPherson provides a thorough description of both the military aspects of the war, and the social and political climate that gave rise to the conflict. Robertson, Michael, Stephen Crane, Journalism and the Making of Modern American Literature, Columbia University Press, 1997. Robertson examines how journalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped shape American literature, and vice versa. He focuses mainly on Crane’s nonfiction, based on his work as a war correspondent and newspaper reporter. Sorrentino, Paul, ed., Stephen Crane Remembered, University of Alabama Press, 2006. Sorrentino has collected the personal reminiscences of seventy-five of Crane’s friends, family members, and colleagues to provide a more complete portrait of Crane both as an individual and as an artist. Stallman, R. W., and E. R. Hagemann, eds., War Dispatches of Stephen Crane, New York University Press, 1964. Stallman and Hagemann have assembled this large collection of Crane’s war reporting. Crane reported on the Greco-Turkish War in 1897 and the Spanish-American War in 1898.
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Once Upon a Time Nadine Gordimer’s ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ is set in a white suburb in the author’s country of South Africa. It is a story in two parts: the first is a first-person account by a writer who has heard a frightening sound in the night, and the second is the bedtime story she tells herself as she lies awake. In the bedtime story, a parody of a fairy tale, a husband and wife who are ‘‘living happily ever after’’ address their fear by continually increasing the security at their house until they are living behind a high wall topped with razor wire—but their safety devices bring their own dangers. The story features white people who fear the black people they have oppressed for generations, but its theme of how fear makes one ‘‘a victim already’’ is universal.
NADINE GORDIMER 1989
As has been true for most of the author’s work, the implied criticism of apartheid, or government-imposed racial segregation, in ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ led to its being more widely read outside South Africa than within it. The story first appeared in a shorter form in the South African alternative newspaper the Weekly Mail, in its issue of December 23, 1988–January 12, 1989, with the title ‘‘Once Upon a Time: A Fairy Tale of Suburban Life.’’ In its current form, it ran in the Winter 1989 issue of the American journal Salmagundi, and then in Gordimer’s fifteenth collection of short stories, Jump and Other Stories (1991).
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In 1949, Gordimer married Gerald Gavronsky, and saw the publication of her first book, Face to Face: Short Stories. In 1950, her daughter Oriane was born, but the marriage did not last, and in 1954, she married Reinhold Cassirer, her husband until his death in 2005. In 1955, her son Hugo was born. During these years, South Africa had become increasingly segregated under the system known as apartheid. Gordimer’s early stories and novels reveal her awakening political awareness, and several of her books, beginning with A World of Strangers (1958), openly challenged apartheid and were banned in South Africa, meaning it was illegal to distribute or quote her work.
Nadine Gordimer (AP Images)
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Gordimer was born on November 20, 1923, in Springs, a small mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa. Her parents were Jewish immigrants who lived, as most white families in South Africa did, separate from and ignorant of the lives of blacks. Gordimer wrote her first story when she was nine, and after she was removed from school at the age of eleven for health reasons, she spent most of her time alone, reading and writing, until she was sixteen. Many years later, Gordimer learned that her mother had fabricated the ‘‘heart condition’’ that kept her an invalid—a discovery she did not share with others until after her mother’s death. Gordimer published children’s stories during her teens, and in her twenties she began publishing rather conventional adult stories in South Africa and then in the New Yorker and other important American magazines. At twenty-two, she spent one year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where for the first time she met artists and activists—white and black—and began to question the politics of South Africa.
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During the 1970s and 1980s, Gordimer spent months at a time in the United States and Europe, teaching as a visiting professor and speaking about apartheid. Back in Johannesburg, as a member of the African National Congress (ANC), the radical and banned anti-apartheid party of Nelson Mandela, she participated in demonstrations, held illegal gatherings of blacks and whites in her home, and hid ANC members facing arrest. She and her husband considered leaving South Africa, but they decided to remain and work for its betterment. She wrote prolifically, favoring the short story, and won several international literary prizes, including the prestigious Booker Prize for her novel The Conservationist (1974). In 1990, Mandela was released after twenty-seven years in prison, the ANC was legalized, and the system of apartheid began officially to unravel. In 1991, Gordimer published Jump and Other Stories, which included the 1989 ‘‘Once Upon a Time.’’ Also in 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In a long career, Gordimer has published more than a dozen novels and more than five hundred short stories, including those in Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007), as well as essays and criticism. Her postapartheid work has continued to explore individuals facing moral choices and ambiguities.
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PLOT SUMMARY ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ is a short story in two parts; the first part is a first-person account by the narrator, who may or may not be read as Gordimer herself, explaining how she came to write the story that follows. She explains that she has been asked to write a story for children to be collected with others in an anthology, but that she has refused
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the request, explaining to the editor, ‘‘I don’t write children’s stories.’’ However, as she continues to address the reader she reveals that she was awakened the previous night by a noise. She lay awake for a time, analyzing every faint sound and shadow, wondering whether she was hearing the footsteps of a burglar. She does not have bars on her windows, she says, but she is not without fear, and there have been reports of violent crimes in her neighborhood. Being compelled to lie awake in fear made her ‘‘a victim already,’’ she says. Finally, she realized that what she was hearing was simply her house settling. Thousands of feet beneath her house is a gold mine, and when the rock faces underground occasionally break off, it sends shudders through the earth. She wonders whether what she heard was a collapse that trapped and killed a crew of miners. Unable to get back to sleep, she says, ‘‘I began to tell myself a story; a bedtime story.’’ The bedtime story begins in the language of a fairy tale: ‘‘In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his wife who loved each other very much and were living happily ever after.’’ The nameless couple have a young son, a cat and a dog, and the stereotypical white suburban lifestyle, with a swimming pool and a camper, a housemaid and a part-time gardener. They belong to the local Neighborhood Watch group and have a brick wall around their yard with a sign on the gate reading ‘‘YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.’’ Apparently, their greatest fear is of the ‘‘people of another colour’’ who live outside the suburb. These people are kept out of the neighborhood except when they come to work as housemaids and gardeners, but there have been riots where they live, and the couple’s homeowner’s insurance covers them against the risks of fire, flood, and theft, but not against riot damage. The husband feels secure in their home, but the wife worries that ‘‘such people’’ will come to their home and swarm in, so the husband has electronic gates installed. Their son and his friends, typically imaginative boys, enjoy making the walkie-talkie attached to the gates part of their games of cops and robbers. But after one of the neighbors is burglarized, the couple’s housemaid begs the husband to increase security further, and at his wife’s insistence he has bars put across the windows and installs burglar alarms. The neighbors have also installed alarms, and at night, when the boy’s cat tries to climb in the window, it sets off a chain reaction of alarms. The residents, however,
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have become accustomed to the sounds of alarms in the night, and because they no longer notice the noise it is easier for burglars to break in, which in turn makes everyone more fearful. As unemployment rises, more of ‘‘these people’’ begin spending time in the suburb, looking for work or for shelter. The wife, feeling sorry for them, brings them tea and bread, but this time it is the husband who becomes suspicious, fearing that the people the wife is feeding will come back and rob them. The worry the couple feels, it should be noted, is not without merit. Throughout the story there runs a thread of glimpses of violence and crime; every action the family takes to increase security is a reaction to learning of a new break-in or riot or killing. The husband’s mother, called a ‘‘wise old witch,’’ gives the family a Christmas present of money to make their brick wall higher, and she gives the boy a Space Man suit and a book of fairy tales. Now, when the husband and wife go for evening walks with the dog, they no longer appreciate their neighbors’ gardens; instead, they spend the time comparing the variety of barricades. Fearful when they notice the cat’s ability to scale the wall, they decide to have rolls of razor wire—from a company called ‘‘DRAGON’S TEETH’’—installed along the top of it. At last, the family appears to be safe, behind a shining circle of wire. Again, the family is ‘‘living happily ever after.’’ One evening, the mother reads her son a bedtime story from his fairy-tale book. The next day, pretending to be Prince Charming rescuing Sleeping Beauty from behind a thicket of thorns, he crawls into the razor wire. The more he struggles to get out, the more he is caught and hurt. By the time the adults manage to cut him out and carry him to the house, he is dead, referred to now as ‘‘the bleeding mass of the little boy’’ and ‘‘it.’’
CHARACTERS The Boy The boy, like all of the characters in the storywithin-the-story, is never named, is not described, and does not speak. He is anonymous, faceless, silent, meant to allow the reader to see him as a representative of countless boys in his situation, rather than focusing on him as a unique individual. Little is known about the boy. He is ‘‘little,’’ as the narrator says several times, and he loves the pet cat, who sleeps with him, and the dog. He has
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the imagination common in young children; he enjoys pretending to be an astronaut or playing cops and robbers with his friends and having his mother read fairy tales to him. He does not understand the fear that leads his parents to increase security at their home: for him, the security microphones simply make good imaginary police walkie-talkies. At the end of the story, the little boy pretends to be a prince ‘‘who braves the terrible thicket of thorns’’ to rescue a princess; instead of thorns, however, he crawls into the razor wire his parents have had installed on top of the wall to keep him safe.
razor wire, it is the housemaid and the gardener who hear his screams and run to free him; as she helps carry the boy’s body into the house she is described as ‘‘the hysterical trusted housemaid.’’
The Gardener The gardener works for the husband and wife. He is an ‘‘itinerant gardener,’’ which means he has several customers whose gardens he tends as needed. The narrator makes the point that the gardener has been ‘‘highly recommended by the neighbours’’; he is a black South African working in a white suburb, and the subtle implication is that in the minds of the whites, many or most blacks cannot be trusted or relied on. Apparently, the gardener and his colleagues do their jobs well, for in the days before everyone had high walls around their yards the family was able to admire ‘‘this show of roses or that perfect lawn’’ as they strolled through the neighborhood. When the little boy becomes trapped in the wire, the gardener and the housemaid are first to hear his screams. Screaming himself, the gardener cuts his hands trying to rescue the boy, and weeps when the rescue comes too late.
The Housemaid The housemaid works for the husband and wife. Like the gardener, she is a black South African working in a white suburb, but the narrator continually refers to her as a ‘‘trusted housemaid,’’ ‘‘absolutely trustworthy.’’ Perhaps because she works longer and steadier hours at the family’s home, unlike the gardener, who only works occasionally, she is more susceptible to the same fears that the husband and wife feel. After another housemaid is tied up by burglars, the husband and wife’s housemaid is the first to urge the husband to have window bars and an alarm system installed. When the wife begins sending bread and tea out to the homeless and unemployed people who hang around in front of the house, it is the housemaid who calls them ‘‘loafers and tsotsis,’’ or street thugs, and persuades the family to stop offering food. Finally, when the boy crawls into the
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The Husband The husband is a middle-class white South African living in a suburb where only whites are allowed to live. He has a wife and a little boy, whom he ‘‘loved very much,’’ and with whom he is ‘‘living happily ever after.’’ His occupation is not mentioned, but he earns enough money to provide a nice house and yard, looked after by a housemaid and gardener, as well as a swimming pool and a ‘‘caravan trailer,’’ or camper. The husband knows more about what is happening outside the suburb—and fears it less—than his wife, and he tries to assure her that she need not be afraid. But he is in charge of the family’s financial decisions, and he wishes his wife to be happy, so he goes along with her requests for a speaker at the gate, window bars, and an alarm system. By the time unemployed blacks start hanging around on the streets of his suburb, the husband, too, begins to worry, and he encourages his wife to stop giving them food. He also begins to bring the little boy’s tricycle into the house each night, to protect it from thieves. It is the husband and wife together who examine their neighbors’ security devices, and together they select the razor wire for the top of the wall. When the little boy is killed in the wire, the husband and wife do not get to the boy as quickly as the housemaid and gardener do, and although the housemaid and gardener are described as ‘‘hysterical’’ and ‘‘weeping,’’ the husband does not reveal the same kind of emotion.
The Narrator The story opens with a first-person account by the narrator, a writer who has refused a request to contribute a children’s story to an anthology, saying, ‘‘I don’t write children’s stories.’’ She tells about being awakened by a sound that made her afraid. She imagined a burglar trying to get in, and lay awake as she interpreted every sound and every shadow as a threat. After a time, she realized that what she had heard was simply the house shifting, perhaps from an underground tremor caused by a cave-in in a gold mine far below the house. She also realized, she says, that her fears made her ‘‘a victim already,’’ although there was no break-in. Unable to sleep, she tells herself a bedtime story: the story of the husband and wife and little boy.
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The Wife The wife is a middle-class homemaker in a whitesonly suburb in South Africa. She has a husband and a little boy whom she ‘‘loved very much,’’ and a live-in housemaid and part-time gardener who are black but ‘‘trustworthy.’’ Typical of white South African women in the 1980s, she does not have much acquaintance with the black population, referring to them as ‘‘such people’’ and imagining that they will sweep through the suburb in hordes. Increasingly anxious, she asks her husband to add bars and alarms to their home. She is perhaps more ignorant than unkind: when she finds unemployed or homeless people on the street near her house she sends the housemaid out to them with bread and tea, until her husband and the housemaid persuade her that this is dangerous. And she is tender with her son, indulging his love for the cat and the dog, and reading him bedtime stories. One night, she reads him a story about a prince, leading to his encounter with the razor wire the next day. Like her husband, however, she shows much less emotion than the servants do when her son is horribly killed.
The Wise Old Witch The wise old witch is the husband’s mother. She does not have any magical powers, but like the wicked witch in many fairy tales, she offers gifts that seem pleasing but bring hidden dangers. At the beginning of the story, she breeds suspicion by warning the husband and wife to be careful whom they hire as housemaid and gardener. For Christmas gifts, she gives the husband and wife money to buy more bricks for their security wall, and she gives the little boy a Space Man costume and a fairy-tale book that feed his imagination.
THEMES Apartheid Underlying everything that happens in ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ is the specter of apartheid, or the government-directed racial segregation that was the law in South Africa from about 1949 to about 1990. Gordimer does not name the suburb where the story is set, nor the country where the suburb lies, just as she does not directly identify the races of the people who live in the suburb or the people who are kept out. Readers of Gordimer’s other work will quickly recognize South Africa in this story because it is by far the most common setting for her work,
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just as apartheid was, for the first decades of her career, her most common theme. Others will locate the suburb in South Africa by the reference to the migrant mine workers of the Chopi and Tsonga ethnic groups of Mozambique. Although the second part of the story adopts a fairy-tale quality that gives it a degree of universality, the story is clearly set in South Africa under apartheid. In the story, apartheid is seen as being damaging to both the whites and the blacks who are divided by it. The damage to the oppressed black population is easy to see: they are excluded from living in certain areas, and the restrictions are enforced through violence; their children are shot by the police; they are desperate for work and for food; they are continually distrusted. The narrator reveals these things offhandedly, as a way of explaining the family’s feelings; the oppression is so common it is part of the background. More importantly, the story shows how apartheid is damaging to the whites who in many ways benefit from it. A minority group, living in secluded islands of privilege (their nation’s economy, like the narrator’s house, built on a foundation supported by the exploitation of those Chopi and Tsonga mine workers), they are constantly on their guard, constantly afraid. The death of their little boy is only the outward manifestation of a more widespread problem: While they enjoy their wealth and seem to be ‘‘living happily ever after,’’ they are hardened and indifferent, unable to experience the connection to others that would make them fully human.
Fear The main element that ties together the two sections of ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ is fear. The husband, the wife, and the trusted housemaid are each, in turn, afraid of what might happen to them, and their fears lead them to literally build walls around themselves. Ironically, each increase in security seems to make the husband and wife feel less secure, and in the end their quest for safety is what kills their son. In the beginning, the fear does not enter the family from awareness or understanding. The husband and wife learn as newlyweds ‘‘not to take on anyone off the street’’; in other words, the husband’s ‘‘wise’’ mother encourages them to be suspicious of those seeking employment and suspicious of their own instincts in dealing with ‘‘people of another colour.’’ The housemaid is continually referred to as ‘‘trustworthy,’’ a word that emphasizes the idea that most housemaids cannot be
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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Read a few fairy tales that feature witches, perhaps from a collection of stories for children by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen or by the German folklorists the Brothers Grimm. Write a paper in which you explore how the role of the ‘‘wise old witch’’ in ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ compares with the roles of witches in other stories.
Read S. A. Bodeen’s 2008 novel The Compound, in which a family survives a nuclear war by hiding in an underground bunker. Write a paper in which you compare the roles of the father in ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ and the husband in The Compound. What are their motives and the results of their actions?
In his first inaugural address in 1933, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, ‘‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’’ (You may wish to listen to the entire speech, which is widely available on CD and in MP3 format.) Research the things that Americans might have been afraid of in 1933, and write a paper in which you explain how these fears compare with the fears Gordimer’s story warns against. A popular plot in science fiction stories shows people threatened by something they originally created to make them safer. One
trusted. With their reliable staff, their insurance, and their membership in the local Neighbourhood Watch, the husband assures the wife that there is ‘‘nothing to fear.’’ But it is not enough. Although there does seem to be a rising crime rate in the area, the fear seems to be like a contagious virus, passed along from person to person rather than by exposure to actual threat. Thus, the husband’s mother encourages the couple to be suspicious; the housemaid advises them to get window bars and an alarm, and to stop feeding the homeless people on the street; the husband and wife talk in the evenings about ‘‘the latest armed robbery’’; the
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example is director James Cameron’s Terminator franchise of films and other media, in which humans build artificial intelligence machines that eventually turn against them. Write a short story in which something invented to improve human existence causes more harm than good. You may wish to use some of the conventions of the fairy tale or graphic novel, or another genre you are familiar with.
Analyze advertisements for home security devices appearing in magazines, on television, and on the Internet. Prepare a multimedia visual presentation in which you show several of the advertisements. Debate whether the ads represent danger reasonably or exaggerate danger to create fear in potential customers.
Research how gold is mined in the Western Deep Level mines in Johannesburg, South Africa. Prepare a presentation in which you explain to your class the special considerations of mining so deep underground. Be sure to include descriptions of the ‘‘stopes and passages’’ of the mine, and explain why the narrator in ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ focuses on the possibility of an accident.
neighbors engage in a form of arms race, competing to see who can obtain the ‘‘ugliest but the most honest’’ security system. Their fear drives them inward, and isolates even the neighbors from each other, as their world gets smaller and smaller. At first they have rules to keep the wrong people out of the suburb, then they have a wall to protect the house and yard, then they are afraid to leave a tricycle in the yard. The narrator understands this fear and knows how dangerous it is. Unlike the husband and the wife, she does not have bars on her windows, but she says that she has ‘‘the same fears as people who
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Everyone dreams of a home with a white picket fence. (Image copyright Zimmytws, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
do take these precautions.’’ Lying in the dark afraid, she feels her heart beating rapidly, and she cannot fall back asleep. She knows what the husband and wife do not—that her fear makes her ‘‘a victim already.’’ Her bedtime story is meant as a cautionary tale, to remind herself just how dangerous runaway fear can be.
Imagination ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ reveals a complicated understanding of imagination. The narrator, of course, is a writer, and writers thrive on imagination. Out of the imagination of Nadine Gordimer has come ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’; out of the imagination of the narrator has come the bedtime story. In telling these stories, both Gordimer and her narrator are able to get at truths that can lie unspoken in nonfiction. However, for the characters in the story, imagination feeds anxiety and fear. The narrator, awakened in the night, does not know the source of the sound that woke her, but she imagines the worst. The husband and wife have not faced any actual threats to their property or their physical wellbeing, and the people whom they fear are not permitted in the neighborhood. ‘‘Yet,’’ says the
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narrator, the wife ‘‘was afraid that some day such people might come up the street and tear off the plaque . . . and open the gates and stream in.’’ With no more evidence than smudges on a wall, the husband and wife imagine that they have been threatened by ‘‘unemployed loiterers, that had no innocent destination.’’ As their imaginations expand, they ironically contract their own world with security devices. This is the danger of a society in which whites and blacks do not know each other—where they can only imagine. Even for the little boy, imagination is dangerous. He does not imagine burglary and racial threats, but rather pretends to participate in adventures involving cops and robbers or space men or mighty heroes. Sadly, the adults in his life have made even child’s play deadly. Pretending to be a prince, he sets out to confront the razor wire, with its sign reading ‘‘DRAGON’S TEETH’’ and its coils resembling a ‘‘thicket of thorns.’’ His imagination, generally a sign of childhood innocence, leads to his death.
STYLE Verisimilitude Most commonly, when reading short stories and novels, readers are expected to treat the material
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as though it were factual, to pretend—even with stories involving space travel or vampires—that the events described in the story actually happened. Readers sometimes describe this experience as being ‘‘caught up’’ in a story. They come to trust a story’s narrator, and they come to care about fictional characters as though they were real people. Critics use the term ‘‘verisimilitude’’ to refer to this sense that what happens in a story is true, or could be true. Gordimer’s two-part structure in ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ distorts this convention. In the opening section, readers meet the narrator, a writer who has been awakened in the night. Everything about this first section suggests that it is to be taken at face value. The language is simple and direct; the narrator appears to be merely reporting what happened to her, rather than using elevated diction or figurative language that might persuade or deceive. The first section, then, may be said to demonstrate verisimilitude. The second section, however, is clearly not meant to be read the same way. The narrator announces before she begins telling it that the story of the husband and wife is a ‘‘bedtime story,’’ not a factual recording of events. She uses artificial language borrowed from fairy tales (including the repetition of ‘‘living happily ever after’’) to reinforce the idea that this is fiction, not to be believed. By referring to the characters by their roles rather than by their names, she makes it harder for the reader to see the characters as individuals and to care about them. The narrator wants to use the story to deliver a warning about fear and victimhood. To accomplish this, she repeatedly reminds the reader that this story carries a lesson, preventing the reader from being so ‘‘caught up’’ in the characters that the lesson is ignored.
‘‘trustworthy,’’ emphasizing how easy it often is to tell good characters from bad in fairy tales. And she refers to the husband’s mother as a ‘‘wise old witch,’’ for no apparent reason other than that the convention calls for a witch. Of course, the bedtime story in ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ is not a proper bedtime story, and it is in no way intended for children. It is a parody of a fairy tale, in which ‘‘DRAGON’S TEETH’’ is the name of a security company, and the handsome prince is violently killed. The narrator tells the story to show herself what fear, such as she has experienced in the night, can lead to if it is not reined in. The critic Judie Newman, in her essay ‘‘Jump Starts: Nadine Gordimer after Apartheid,’’ explains that there may be more than meets the eye in the title of the collection Jump and Other Stories. In this collection, she writes, ‘‘Gordimer plays with one particular genre of the folktale— the ‘jump story,’’’ which is a brief tale with a sudden violent scary ending, such as children sometimes tell around a campfire. The abrupt twist at the end of the story, when the little boy is killed by something that was supposed to protect him, is frightening. But because the story is so clearly artificial and exaggerated, it offers a safe platform for exploring fear and victimization.
Folktale The ‘‘bedtime story’’ told by the narrator of ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ draws on many of the conventions of folktales or fairy tales to create its atmosphere of artificiality. The narrator has announced that she does not write children’s stories, and here she shows her lack of respect for the genre by gently mocking its language and structure. In the opening three sentences, she exaggerates the moral simplicity of fairy tales, reporting that the husband and wife ‘‘loved each other very much and were living happily ever after’’ with a boy ‘‘they loved . . . very much’’ and two pets that the boy ‘‘loved very much.’’ The narrator also repeats the word
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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Apartheid In the late 1980s, as Gordimer was writing and publishing ‘‘Once Upon a Time,’’ forty years of official racial segregation in South Africa were coming to an end. For many decades, the black population, which made up about 80 percent of the population, had been oppressed by a white minority, who made up about 10 percent. Under internal and international pressure, the government-instituted system of racial segregation known as apartheid was proving itself to be unsustainable. No one knew what would happen if black South Africans were made full citizens, but many whites feared that they would be overrun and punished if they gave up their control. Although people of different racial and ethnic groups had generally lived separate lives in South Africa since white British colonialists began settling there in the nineteenth century, the policy known as apartheid became law after the national elections of 1948, when the conservative Afrikaner National Party took power. The Party, fearing
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
Late 1980s: In the last years of the statesponsored system of segregation known as apartheid, South Africa experiences strikes, boycotts, and riots that result in hundreds of deaths. Today: Although South Africa is a democracy, heavy unemployment and increasing poverty have led to a large number of protest demonstrations and to some violence. Late 1980s: South African president Frederik Willem (F. W.) de Klerk is elected and calls in his first speech for negotiations toward a nonracist South Africa. Like the other presidents elected since South Africa attained independence in 1931, de Klerk is white, and he is elected by only white voters. Today: On May 9, 2009, Jacob Zuma, a black member of the African National Congress political party, is elected president of South Africa. He is the fourth president—and the fourth black president—elected since black South Africans were granted the right to vote in 1994.
Late 1980s: The metropolitan area of Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city, includes Soweto, an area set aside for black South Africans after they were required to leave areas designated for whites, and Lenasia, a section built during apartheid to house Asians. Today: Legally, South Africa’s four main ethnic groups—whites, blacks, Asians or Indians, and ‘‘colored,’’ or mixed-race people— may live anywhere they choose. In practice, most of the nation’s poorest citizens are black, and they live together in slum areas that are not racially integrated.
Late 1980s: The South African mining industry, focusing on gold, diamonds, and coal, has one of the worst safety records in the industrialized world. More than 500 miners die in a typical year. Today: Because of new safety regulations and because the government has closed several unsafe mines, a South African mine workers union reports that 2008 has the fewest mine deaths since records began in 1904.
that the white minority would lose control of the country, made new laws to protect their power. Every resident or visitor to South Africa was assigned to one of four racial groups—white, black, Asian or Indian, and colored or mixedrace—and required to carry an identification card that listed the assigned racial group. Gradually, federal law dictated where members of the different groups were permitted to live, to work, to go to school, even to swim on the beach. In 1949, the Mixed Marriages Act made it illegal for members of different groups to marry; in 1959, libraries were closed to blacks, and universities were required to obtain special permission before admitting black students. Blacks and colored citizens were not allowed to vote. In 1970, blacks were officially declared to be no longer citizens of South Africa, but citizens of ten black ‘‘homelands.’’
Apartheid was opposed by many people inside and outside South Africa. Protests within the country were sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent, and violent police response was common. The African National Congress (ANC), formed in 1912 to counter oppression of blacks in South Africa, called for strikes, boycotts, and other acts of civil disobedience beginning in 1949, led by Nelson Mandela and others. In 1960, after a protest in the town of Sharpeville led to sixty-nine people being killed by police, the movement became increasingly violent. Several opposition leaders, including Mandela, were imprisoned, and some, like the activist Steve Biko, were killed in police custody. About one-fifth of the whites in South Africa opposed apartheid; Gordimer became the most famous of the white artists who spoke out against it. Some of her novels were considered too critical of the government and were banned,
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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Although Gordimer herself has said many times that she favors the short story form for its ability to capture a wider variety of voices and themes, her hundreds of short stories have received much less attention from critics than her novels have, as is true for most writers of both genres. Short stories are favored in the classroom, and ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ is among Gordimer’s stories that have been widely anthologized in high school and college textbooks. Students undoubtedly know Gordimer more for her short fiction than for her novels. But only a few critics have discussed ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ at any length. The most important analysis is Michael Shurgot’s ‘‘Imagery and Structure in Nadine Gordimer’s ‘Once Upon a Time,’’’ published in Journal of Literary Studies in 2008. Drawing on Gordimer’s earlier fiction and her commentary about the approaching end of white dominance in South Africa, Shurgot finds in the story a ‘‘terrifying depiction’’ of an essential ‘‘dichotomy: the death of the white order imaged in the mangled child, and the violent birth of a new political order.’’ Vera P. Froelich and Jennifer Halle, analyzing the story in a 1998 article in the Explicator, also find a warning about the ‘‘impending self-destruction’’ of ‘‘her racist society.’’
Even an imperfect castle can be a safe home. (Image copyright Kachmarsky, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
meaning people in South Africa could not read or quote them, but she was widely read outside South Africa. Outside South Africa, other nations tried to pressure South Africa into abandoning apartheid. The United Nations officially condemned apartheid beginning in 1962, and later made it illegal for any country to sell weapons to South Africa. Athletes from South Africa were prohibited from participating in international competitions, including the Olympics. In the United States and throughout Europe, the stories of Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko were well known, and universities and other organizations were pressured by students and stockholders to sell off their investments in South African companies. By the late 1980s, the United States and twenty-four other countries had laws restricting trade with South Africa. Within the country, political violence increased, and in 1985, the government declared a state of emergency, further restricting the movement of anti-apartheid activists and subjecting them to imprisonment without trial. The economy suffered dramatically, increasing the internal pressure for change. In 1989, the year ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ was published, South Africa elected a new president, F. W. de Klerk, who began the process of ending apartheid.
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Most critics who have dealt with ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ have discussed it only briefly and in terms of its role in the well-received collection Jump and Other Stories. Karen Lazar’s 1992 analysis of gender and Jump and Other Stories, for example, mentions ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ as offering one example among many of the collection’s ‘‘sheltered, shallow white suburban wives.’’ A 1993 article by Jeanne Colleran, ‘‘Archive of Apartheid: Nadine Gordimer’s Short Fiction at the End of the Interregnum,’’ briefly mentions the story as depicting one of the ‘‘dead children’’ who ‘‘haunt the collection.’’ In 2001, Johan U. Jacobs described ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ as metafiction, a way for the author to comment on the collection as a whole in ‘‘Finding a Safe House of Fiction in Nadine Gordimer’s Jump and Other Stories,’’ while in the same year Judie Newman revealed the hidden meaning in the collection’s title, describing ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ as a ‘‘jump’’ story in ‘‘Jump Starts: Nadine Gordimer after Apartheid.’’
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CRITICISM Cynthia A. Bily Bily is a freelance writer and editor. In this essay, she considers how the whites in Gordimer’s short story ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ have more in common with the blacks they fear than they might imagine. At the heart of Gordimer’s ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ are two groups of people: the whites who live ‘‘in a suburb, in a city,’’ and the ‘‘people of another colour’’ who live elsewhere. In the story’s South Africa during the last years of the racial segregation policy known as apartheid, the differences between the groups are emphasized because it is one difference—the difference in skin color—that determines where one lives, works, and receives medical care and education. As different and isolated as the groups are from each other, the narrator uses small details in the story to draw connections between them. More precisely, the narrator suggests small ways in which the white members of this society are more similar than they might imagine to the blacks they desperately want to see as different. In the first paragraph of the story, the narrator tells that she has been invited to contribute to an anthology, and that the editor has suggested that ‘‘every writer ought to write at least one story for children.’’ The narrator imagines herself telling him, ‘‘I don’t accept that I ‘ought’ to write anything.’’ Immediately, readers of Gordimer’s work are alert to her emphasis on the word ‘‘ought,’’ because so much of her work has dealt with apartheid and the questions of whether one has the agency to make choices regarding one’s own life. The narrator feels, at this moment, free, but soon her imagery suggests the opposite. First, she describes her subconscious as an ‘‘echo-chamber,’’ or an enclosure that distorts. Next, she describes her heart beating furiously ‘‘against its body-cage,’’ before turning to an extended description of ‘‘the house that surrounds’’ her, built on unsteady ground. The sound she heard was ‘‘an epicentre of stress’’ and, she says, ‘‘I was in it.’’ Even the language she uses to describe the sleep that eludes her (‘‘I couldn’t find a position in which my mind would let go of my body—release me to sleep’’) suggests entrapment. It is no stretch to see that the husband and wife—and even the pet cat—also become entrapped behind the ‘‘prison architecture’’ and ‘‘concentration-camp style’’ of
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SOUTH AFRICA AT THE END OF APARTHEID IS AS UNSTABLE AS THE GROUND BENEATH THE NARRATOR’S HOME, AND EVERYONE IS AFRAID.’’
their security devices; their world becomes smaller and smaller as their walls grow higher. But the narrator emphasizes as well the limitations imposed by apartheid on South Africa’s black population. She compares her heart’s irregular beating to ‘‘the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones’’ of the migrant mine workers who might have perished in the geologic event that caused her house to shake. While she is enclosed in her house, these workers could be buried alive in a collapsed mine, ‘‘interred there in the most profound of tombs.’’ When thieves break into a neighbor’s house, it is the housemaid who is ‘‘tied up and shut in a cupboard.’’ The narrator is less interested in demonstrating the horrors of apartheid than she is in showing the similarities between oppressed and oppressor. Clearly, the signs screaming ‘‘YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED’’ look both out and in; the ‘‘DRAGON’S TEETH’’ bite both friend and foe. Though not much is shown of interaction among the family in the story, it is clear that the housemaid and the gardener, like the husband and wife, love the little boy ‘‘very much.’’ The husband and wife show their love by providing pets and toys for the little boy, reading bedtime stories, and erecting a fence around the swimming pool ‘‘so that the little boy and his playmates would not fall in and drown.’’ There are no scenes with the servants and the little boy together until the end, when the housemaid and the gardener are the first to hear the little boy’s screams and the first to reach him. The gardener screams with him and tears his hands trying to free him from the wire. The last image of the story is the four adults—‘‘the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardener’’—carrying the boy’s body back into the house, united in their terror and grief, the servants showing more emotion than the parents.
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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
Gordimer’s controversial novel July’s People (1981), set in a fictional South Africa after apartheid has been violently overthrown, was banned in South Africa during apartheid because it challenged the status quo. The book was eventually removed from the banned list, but after apartheid ended, the book was recommended for removal from school reading lists in South Africa because of its perceived racism. The thirteen stories in Gordimer’s postapartheid collection Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories (2007) return again and again to a search for identity, often thwarted by politics. Many of the characters are immigrants struggling to reconcile their histories with the hope of a new future. In Norman Silver’s 1992 young-adult novel No Tigers in Africa, a white teenager learns to understand apartheid and his role in it only after he and his family move from Johannesburg to London. Beverley Naidoo’s No Turning Back: A Novel of South Africa (1997) tells the story of a black teenager who runs away from an abusive home life and struggles with gangs, drugs, and homelessness in Johannesburg.
The most important connection between the whites and the blacks in ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ is shown through their fear. The narrator experiences it first; it is her fear of the strange sound in the dark that prompts her to tell the bedtime story. She has chosen, she says, not to install bars on the windows, or to keep a gun, but she has ‘‘the same fears as people who do take these precautions.’’ Yet she realizes what the husband and wife do not: her fear makes her ‘‘a victim already,’’ even if nothing worse ever happens to her than being awakened by her house settling. The husband and wife are afraid, of course. It begins with the wise old witch, who warns them ‘‘not to take on
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Some critics have praised Patricia Willis’s Danger along the Ohio (1997) for its exciting plot about three courageous children alone in the Ohio wilderness, while others have faulted what they see as a stereotypical presentation of Native Americans and the threats they pose.
Alvin Schwartz has gathered a selection of ghost stories, horror stories, and ‘‘jump’’ stories in the anthology The Scary Stories Treasury: Three Books to Chill Your Bones (2002), illustrated by Stephen Gammell.
Former president of South Africa Nelson Mandela has selected thirty-two stories from across the continent of Africa for Favorite African Folktales (2004). The stories illustrate the liveliness of a folktale tradition that predates the fables of Aesop and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Donnarae MacCann and Yulisa Amadu Maddy have put together a research study of the continuing role of racism in children’s literature and the South African educational system in Apartheid and Racism in South African Children’s Literature, 1985–1995 (2001).
anyone off the street,’’ and leads eventually to the electronic gates, and the alarms, and the added bricks, and the razor wire. The narrator focuses on the wife’s fears, but does not lose sight of how frightened black South Africans must also be. The housemaid voices her fears: she is afraid of being locked in a cupboard like her friend, and she discourages the wife from offering food to the ‘‘loafers and tsotsis,’’ or street thugs, because she is afraid they will rob the house. Though the husband and wife hear the evening news only as it might reflect on their own safety, the narrator points out that in the black townships there are riots, with ‘‘buses . . . being burned, cars stoned,
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and schoolchildren shot by the police.’’ South Africa at the end of apartheid is as unstable as the ground beneath the narrator’s home, and everyone is afraid.
they—as well as the miners working beneath the narrator’s house—have had many fewer opportunities to choose their professions than the husband and wife have had.
In ‘‘That Other World That Was the World,’’ a lecture Gordimer delivered as part of Harvard University’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1994, the author remembers that when she was young, her mother warned her never to walk past the camp where black miners lived, fearing that she would be unspeakably violated. Many years later, she learned that her friend the black South African writer Es’kia Mphahlele had been warned by his mother never to ride his bicycle past a group of white boys, fearing that he would be beaten. Acknowledging that Mphahlele’s fears were more realistic than her own, Gordimer nevertheless concludes that ‘‘the extreme unlikelihood that he or I was in any danger in the manner anticipated was part of the paranoia of separation that prevailed, matched each to the colour of his or her skin.’’
More importantly, the husband and wife and narrator have benefited from a system of white privilege all of their lives, and, if they have more to lose, it is simply because they have more. The things stolen from the neighbors’ homes are frivolities: ‘‘hi-fi equipment, television sets, cassette players, cameras and radios, jewellery and clothing,’’ as well as expensive single-malt whisky. The thieves, meanwhile, are often ‘‘hungry enough to devour everything in the refrigerator,’’ and the housemaid fears that she, like another trusted housemaid, will be tied up while protecting her employers’ possessions. A widower known to the narrator has been knifed after refusing to pay a man he had hired to do some chores; the laborer went without pay while the widower had enough extra to collect antique clocks. The narrator’s home is literally built above a gold mine, an important part of the foundation of the South African economy. That foundation, the narrator points out, is ‘‘undermined ground,’’ a play on words that emphasizes the oppression and moral corruption that have brought ‘‘uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance’’ that should hold up a society. The phrase ‘‘uneasy strain’’ is also resonant, as the narrator strains uneasily to hear in the darkness, and the husband and wife’s full-fledged fear begins with a sense of unease. The narrator’s house, like the house in which the husband and wife live, is unstable, built on ‘‘an epicentre of stress.’’
So, everyone is afraid, and everyone has cause to be. But in showing the connections between white and black in South Africa—in showing that fear strikes them both—Gordimer is not equating their suffering or their moral positions. Later in ‘‘That Other World That Was the World’’ (1995), Gordimer contemplates ‘‘The Defeated,’’ a story she published in 1952. In the story, a struggling working-class white shopkeeper, recently immigrated to South Africa, mistreats the black miners who are his customers. ‘‘In keeping with my ignorance at the time,’’ Gordimer writes, ‘‘the story makes too much of an equation between the defeated—the shopkeeper . . . [and] the black miners. . . . For the shopkeeper and the black miner were, in fact, not in the same social pit.’’ ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ pointedly refuses to make an equation between the fears felt by the whites and those experienced by the blacks. The whites, for one thing, have much greater control over their lives than the blacks do. The narrator and the husband and wife seem to have enough wealth that they could live somewhere else if they chose to. (Gordimer and her husband considered leaving South Africa, but chose to stay in their homeland.) The husband and wife are ‘‘living’’ in their city, while the ‘‘people of another colour’’ are ‘‘quartered’’ outside it. The housemaid and the gardener are forced to travel into the suburb if they wish to have employment, and the nature of the education system in South Africa means that
Gordimer does not suggest that stealing and murder are acceptable or that a wealthy person who is murdered by a poor burglar deserves what he gets. But she asks her readers to consider where the impulse to commit a crime comes from and what response to the threat of danger is appropriate. What good are possessions if they must be constantly guarded? How should uneducated, unemployed people obtain food? What does it mean to be safe? By making the story abstract and detached, a parody of a fairy tale, she is able to exaggerate both the threat and the response, to emphasize the unsustainability of the society that the whites have created, and to raise complex questions. Apartheid was created and maintained to keep people apart, to protect white power and privilege. By highlighting the connections between people ordinarily kept apart, Gordimer demonstrates
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that no amount of forcible separation and oppression can protect us from being human. It is obvious that people who have no control over where they live and work, who cannot vote for their leaders, and who receive inferior education and medical care would live in fear. In ‘‘Once Upon a Time,’’ Gordimer shows that the oppressors have created their own reasons to fear. In the end, the husband and wife cannot save themselves. No matter how they reinforce it, their house remains unstable and unsafe. Like the narrator, they are ‘‘neither threatened nor spared.’’ Source: Cynthia A. Bily, Critical Essay on ‘‘Once Upon a Time,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Judie Newman In the following excerpt, Newman offers a thematic analysis of the stories in Jump and maintains that Gordimer explores post-apartheid political and social concerns. . . . Nadine Gordimer’s collection Jump spans the period in which apartheid was dismantled, beginning with stories centered on defensive structures, whether external (the destabilization of neighboring states), or internal (portrayals of the laager). Along the way individual stories cast side glances at the 1986 repeal of the Mixed Marriages Act (‘‘The Moment’’), detainees (‘‘Spoils,’’ ‘‘Home’’), the underground (‘‘Safe Houses’’), township violence (‘‘Keeping Fit’’), the growth of ‘‘revolutionary tourism’’ (‘‘What Were You Dreaming?’’) until the collection closes with a final tale, ‘‘Amnesty’’ centered on the release of political prisoners, presumably in 1990, when the ANC, PAC, and SACP were unbanned and a general release of prisoners took place. Several stories are based on or allude to news items or real events: the secretion of a terrorist bomb in a pregnant sweetheart’s hand luggage, for example, or the conditions on the Mozambique/South African border which Gordimer reported on for a television documentary. In its reception, the collection tended to be approached by reviewers in terms of its historicity and representation of the real world, with Gordimer cast firmly in the role of the artist as a political figure dealing with the representational. Although Gordimer was actually on a lecture tour promoting Jump when she received news of the award of the Nobel prize for literature, the prize didn’t do much for the reviews of the volume. The collection was received as something of a disappointment, more the
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product perhaps of a ‘‘cultural worker’’ than of a Nobel-winning artist. Reviewers tended to detect an overemphatic tone, an excess of political gesture or humorless parable, and in particular a tendency to unbalance a tale by final sentences which spelled out a moral or added on O. Henry ‘‘twist.’’ Firdaus Kanga complained that ‘‘Gordimer writes a hectoring sentence, underlines a phrase that unbalances a whole story with its weight.’’ In ‘‘The Moment Before the Gun Went Off,’’ for example, the last sentence reveals that the young black accidentally shot by the Afrikaner was not his ‘‘boy’’ but his illicitly-conceived son. James Wood felt that this revelation produced the effect of a sudden bump in the last sentence which grounded and spoiled the story, drawing it into brute statement. ‘‘Some Are Born to Sweet Delight’’ concludes as a terrorist bomb blows a plane, the heroine, and her unborn child to smithereens. ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ ends as a white child is ripped to shreds on the razor wire designed to safeguard his fairy tale home. Conversely, however, critics noted a reflexive subtext in these apparently too obvious stories—a narrator-ascharacter, candidly admitting to the invented nature of the tale (‘‘Once Upon a Time,’’ ‘‘A Journey’’) or emphasizing the deceptive nature of the facts presented (‘‘My Father Leaves Home’’). The presence of the narrator continually reminds the reader that this is story, as she intervenes to annul the action and send it back into the realm of fiction. In several stories (‘‘A Journey,’’ ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’) Gordimer herself appears as a gray haired lady, watching on the sidelines. For some readers the multivocal form demonstrated a laudable attempt to end cultural monopoly by a full representation of the Other in a variety of perspectives and narrators, so that the voice of the white bourgeoisie no longer fills up the artistic space of fiction. For others, however, the volume simply failed to cohere. Gordimer’s critics, however, had missed a vital dimension of the collection—and one which makes it one of the most interesting of Gordimer’s formal experiments—the explicit connection between story and bodily action indicated in its title. Reviewers were less in touch with the genre of the short story than the author herself. In Jump, Gordimer plays with one particular genre of the folktale—the ‘‘jump story.’’ One example will suffice to indicate the major features of the genre. This one is from Tennessee:
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A woman went out on the porch of her lonely farmhouse and cried, ‘‘Come on my handsome
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THE CHILD HAS BEEN ‘JUMPED’ NOT BY AN OUTSIDE BOGEYMAN BUT BY THE VERY MEASURES WHICH WERE DESIGNED TO PROTECT HIM. THE STORY WHICH THE NARRATOR TELLS DEMONSTRATES THE RISKS OF STORYTELLING—AS WELL AS ITS POWER.’’
lover.’’ A deep voice answered from the forest, ‘‘I’m coming.’’ The woman returned to the house. In a few minutes she went out again and called, ‘‘Come on, my handsome lover.’’ The deep voice answered from the pasture, ‘‘I’m coming.’’ Again she went inside. And again she returned to the porch to call, ‘‘Come on, my handsome lover.’’ The deep voice answered from the garden gate, ‘‘I’m coming.’’ Finally the woman made her last call and received her answer. ‘‘Come on my handsome lover.’’ ‘‘I’m HERE,’’ said the voice—and a big black bear ate her up.
The story is designed to make the audience jump, quite literally. It is worth noting that this is a slightly unusual example, since it has an erotic element. More normally jump stories are scary in their subject matter; they are grotesque or involve the supernatural: a dismembered hairy toe seeking revenge upon the child who severed it from a giant, a ghost slowly climbing the stairs: ‘‘I’m at the bottom of the stairs.’’ ‘‘I’m at the landing.’’ ‘‘I’m outside the door.’’ ‘‘I’m at the foot of the bed.’’ This example usefully highlights the elasticity of the folk form, which depends more on performance, structure and audience, than upon static content. The Florida Public Library Youth Program, for example, promoting oral tale-telling as a route to increased literacy, included several jump stories of a traditional nature in its program, but also suggested the incorporation of various types of community involvement: ‘‘Have parachutists explain their equipment and talk about their experiences.’’ (In America, airborne firefighters are smoke-jumpers.) The form is not, of course, limited to one social or national group: it figures in the folk traditions of the Arab world, for example, as well as the AfricanAmerican. Folklore scholars will recognize it as a Formula tale: Motif Z13.1 (‘‘Tale-teller frightens listener: yells ‘Boo!’ at exciting point’’).
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Typically, however, the tale ends abruptly in physical contact with and consequences for the audience, usually as the storyteller tickles, grabs or pounces upon a listener. ‘‘Jump stories’’ tend to be macabre, orally performed by a storyteller, often in a group situation (hence Gordimer foregrounds the storyteller as deceptive performer, and offers the sense of a multivocal group or collective narration). Today they are probably most easily recognized in animal stories told to children (who are a dominant presence in Gordimer’s tales). In group narration the teller often pounces upon the child who looks most scared. ‘‘Little Foo-Foo,’’ in which a fairy turns a rabbit into a field mouse, is a common playgroup example, told to the under-fives. Why tell jump stories? Firstly there is an obvious aggressive element here. That ‘‘pounce’’ is reminiscent of the learning experience of the puppy or kitten, a play device which teaches lessons about the hunt. The story usually involves something or someone slowly creeping up on you, stalking before pouncing, and in selecting the most scared person present, picking off the weakest member of the group. We experience being the prey—the pounced upon—but the story also offers a script for predation, and in some stories (that bear, for example) it is the formerly hunted which pounces in its turn. The return of a dead animal or person, reclaiming bodily parts, also suggests links to the hunt, and to the guilty conscience of the hunter, with connections to taboo animals and totems. The story thus emphasizes the interchangeability of predator and prey, with the tables turned as victimizer becomes victim. It may be ‘‘only a game,’’ but it nonetheless offers a rehearsal of violence and victimization, in a secure context. That context also calls out for comment. Despite the scariness, it is arguable that there is an element of reassurance in the telling of the tale (as opposed to the content) in that it ends in bodily contact with a safe adult. Imagination leads into physical action in the boldest possible sense—but it is circumscribed within the frame of a secure situation. The story gives us a playful enactment of fear and pain, fright and tickle, say, but it is only play, and the pounce is often also the embrace of the family tale-teller. Above all, then, the jump story is irremediably physical. It involves the body, both in performance and often in content. ‘‘Cadaver Claims its Cannibalized Organs’’ is a representative Arab example. A Virginian recounts a tale in which a child is asked to retrieve
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bones from a graveyard, with the bones returning to frightening effect. Indeed it may not be stretching it too far to see Gordimer’s 1974 novel, The Conservationist, as an extended jump story, involving the return of a dead body to plague the protagonist, who is actually ‘‘jumped’’ (ambushed) at the close in a hallucinatory moment of horror. Certainly the submerged or repressed body which comes back to haunt the white imagination is generally recognized as a common motif in Gordimer’s work. One of her earliest published stories, ‘‘Is There Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?’’ (1953), in which a black man pounces upon a white girl, is based on ‘‘Little Red Riding Hood,’’ itself a jump story, though in this case the black man is arguably more the victim than he is the wolf. The genre, then, offers a demonstration of an artistic creation extending suddenly into the ‘‘real’’ world, with real physical effects produced on the body of the listener. It is therefore a perfect example of a story written with an eye to functioning as a weapon of struggle. It is a form which we might almost expect to have been adopted by the South African writer. It draws on oral tradition so is ‘‘of the people’’ in a way which more rarefied modernist or postmodernist writing is not. (Gordimer cheerfully published one of these stories, ‘‘A Journey,’’ in Playboy.) The macabre content allows a satiric purpose—the jump story exposes horror—and the structure (evident in the overall arrangement of Gordimer’s collection as well as within individual stories) dramatizes the postapartheid reversal of roles from victimizer to victim as the setting of the tales comes steadily closer to home. It is worth pausing for a moment to establish that the case for seeing the collection as based upon the genre of the jump story depends on more evidence than its title alone. In the tales, the O. Henry twists are often extended into an almost physical pounce, as if the reader were seized and physically inscribed in the action narrated. In this respect it is striking how many of the reviewers speak in terms of a sudden bump or start; of ‘‘the moment when the political and the personal connect to deliver a blow to the heart,’’ or of the endings which ‘‘strike at the gut.’’ In broad terms the collection emphasizes predation with its repeated images of the hunt (‘‘Spoils,’’ ‘‘Teraloyna’’) or the sexual chase (‘‘A Find’’), of children caught, seized or abducted (‘‘Jump,’’ ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’) or vulnerable to wild beasts. In ‘‘The Ultimate Safari’’ children fleeing a Renamo raid across the Kruger Park in almost equal terror of white police,
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bandits, and prowling beasts, huddling together by night in a squirming mass lest a lion ‘‘jump right into the middle of us.’’ Physical activity is thematically important—trekking to safety, parachute jumps, jogging, journeys—as is the suggestion that children’s games have suddenly turned to brutal reality—jogging to desperate flight, parachute jumping for fun leading to military activity, a ‘‘safari’’ to a struggle for survival, a child’s toy becomes a cache of plastic explosive. By demonstrating how a story can turn into an event Gordimer implicitly thematizes the connection between fiction and action. Hunters and hunted also cross over at several points. In ‘‘My Father Leaves Home,’’ the father as a child of thirteen flees pogroms in Europe only to become a member of an oppressive racist regime in South Africa. The narrator, on a pheasant shoot in her father’s original country, recognizes that in his treatment of blacks her Jewish father had turned from prey to predator. Watching the shoot the narrator stands aloof: ‘‘only a spectator, only a spectator please’’ she begs, but the shoot merges with the image of past pogroms, Cossacks on horseback riding down human beings, and her father shouting at his black laborer. As she comments, ‘‘I did not know that I would find, here in the wood, the beaters advancing, advancing across the world.’’ So are these stories essentially propaganda or parable, tales designed to pounce upon the reader to make one point with maximum force? As we might expect, things are a little bit more complicated than that. The dangers of too easy a continuum between fiction and action are dramatized in ‘‘Once Upon a Time.’’ The narrator has been asked to contribute to an anthology of stories for children, and refuses, despite the argument made to her that ‘‘every writer ought to write at least one story for children.’’ Like Ndebele and Sachs, the unnamed writer declares ‘‘I don’t accept that I ‘ought’ to write anything.’’ Awakened in the night by what sound like footsteps stealthily approaching, ‘‘moving from room to room, coming up the passage—to my door’’ the narrator finally recognizes that the sounds are merely the creaking of a house built on undermined ground. Nobody is about to pounce on her. Yet unable to sleep she begins ‘‘to tell myself a story; a bedtime story.’’ Satiric in intention, the tale opens with a family ‘‘living happily ever after’’ in an affluent South African suburb, their home surrounded by security devices and razor wire. When the mother reads the young son the tale of Sleeping Beauty, however, the little boy acts it out. He pretends to
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be the Prince, who braves the thicket of roses, and impales himself upon the shining ‘‘razor thorns’’ of the security fence. The story has impelled the child to action—but with fatal results. The child has been ‘‘jumped’’ not by an outside bogeyman but by the very measures which were designed to protect him. The story which the narrator tells demonstrates the risks of storytelling—as well as its power. In little, the tale dramatizes the central issue of the collection—the extent to which the writer should write certain types of story, the risks of too straightforward a connection between story and action, and conversely the costs of storytelling which is cut off from its social context. It is, of course, the European fairy story of white South Africa which has actually killed the child. . . . Source: Judie Newman, ‘‘Jump Starts: Nadine Gordimer After Apartheid,’’ in Apartheid Narratives, edited by Nahem Yousaf, Rodopi, 2001, pp. 101–14.
Graham Huggan In the following excerpt, Huggan contends that Gordimer has used the short-story form, as well as the novel, to articulate the consciousness of contemporary South Africa. Nadine Gordimer’s novels have done much toward ‘‘articulating the consciousness’’ of contemporary South Africa. What is not often realized, or not realized often enough, is that her short stories also contribute to this articulation, and that the short story is just as well-equipped as the novel to attempt it. Gordimer has proved herself over time to be one of the foremost exponents in the world of the modern short story. Yet her critics have tended, almost exclusively, to focus on her novels. Why should this be so? The main reason for the critical imbalance in favor of Gordimer’s novels might be brought down, perhaps, to a lowest common denominator: that critics have had and continue to have difficulty with the short story. The lack of theoretical groundwork does not help; for while theories of the novel abound, it has not been until relatively recently that short story theory has awakened academic interest, most noticeably in the United States. Recent theoretically-informed studies such as Susan Lohafer’s Coming to Terms with the Short Story (1983) and Bill New’s Dreams of Speech and Violence (1987) act as valuable correctives to those who persist in seeing the short story as a ‘‘minor’’ genre or, still worse, as an incipient or microcosmic form of the novel. Two collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century views of the short
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story, Charles E. May’s Short Story Theories (1976), and its ‘‘sequel,’’ Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey’s Short Story Theories at a Crossroads (1989), are also particularly useful, although it seems significant that most of the views provided in either collection are by short story writers rather than by short story critics. It is in May’s collection that Gordimer’s most succinct statement on the short story can be found: her essay ‘‘The Flash of Fireflies,’’ which first appeared in The Kenyon Review in 1968. . . . Gordimer outlines her approach toward the short story more clearly in her introduction to the 1975 edition of her selected short stories. The problematic ‘‘ultimate reality’’ to which she refers in her earlier essay, implying that her primary interest is in portraying ‘‘universal’’ aspects of the human condition, is this time more closely identified with her immediate social environment. ‘‘A writer is selected by his subject [sic],’’ claims Gordimer, ‘‘his subject being the consciousness of his own era.’’ The short story, in this context, is not political by design but by necessity: ‘‘ultimate reality’’ is indissociable from social reality. This does not mean that Gordimer’s short stories need subscribe to the ‘‘dreary’’ social realism she disparages in ‘‘The Flash of Fireflies’’ but rather that, irrespective of their artistic handling, they are the products of a specific set of social and historical conditions. Gordimer suggests further that, since the writer is ‘‘selected by his subject,’’ he or she is highly likely to inquire into the mode of production of his/her work, to explore both the social conditions which have given rise to it and the ideological presuppositions on which it is based. It is true of course that in her explicitly political novels (such as Burger’s Daughter, 1979) and her implicitly political ones (such as The Conservationist, 1974) Gordimer does just that, but the most succinct and, in my view, most pertinent expression of the limits of the ideology within and against which she writes is in short stories where an elided sub-text, submerged beneath the body of the presented text, implicitly challenges and undercuts the dominant narrative voice. . . . Let me return for a moment to the notion of ‘‘submerged consciousness.’’ Gordimer’s belief in the heightened manifestations which suddenly illuminate the narratives of short stories to produce ‘‘flashes of fearful insight’’ can be interpreted in this context as an attempt not merely to capture momentarily an ‘‘ultimate
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reality,’’ but to identify this reality with the emergent consciousness of a beleaguered social group (or groups). The two groups I have in mind, of course, are the blacks of South Africa and the women of South Africa and elsewhere.
to such a concept earlier in her career is beyond the scope of this discussion). The stories in Jump demonstrate precisely the inevitable limits of seeing and telling with a thoroughness unprecedented in her short fiction.
Source: Graham Huggan, ‘‘Echoes from Elsewhere: Gordimer’s Short Fiction as Social Critique,’’ in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 61–73.
. . . If one of Gordimer’s current concerns is the ironical and multivalent potential of this historical moment and its discourses, another is the predatoriness still present in South African society. Various critics have pointed to the striking lack of levity or humour in Gordimer’s work, its weightiness. Her repeated use of the idea of the hunt in this anthology suggests that moods of rapacity and ugliness in South African society may eclipse lighter moods (at least for this writer), even in the current era of apparent will-to-change. The topos of the hunt functions—sometimes allegorically, sometimes literally—as a way of investigating social relations and ways of being. Gordimer has gone along on several hunting trips over the years, and if her fictional recreations are anything to go by, her response to such trips is uneasy. During the 1960s several of her stories showed a love for the land and a strong awareness of being on the African continent. At this point Gordimer is strongly self-identifying as an African, and her identification has a striking sensory/existential component. In ‘‘The Gentle Art’’ (Friday’s Footprint) the narrative descriptions suggest awe at the sheer space, light and colour around her: ‘‘The enormous trees of Africa, ant-eaten and ancient, hung still, over the hut; down on the margin of the river in the sun the black-and-lemon chequered skin of a crocodile made a bladder of air in the water . . . At night there was nothing—no river, no hut, no crocodile, no trees; only a vast soft moonless darkness’’ (Selected Stories). This story’s main figure is a crocodile hunter described in very ambivalent terms: killer and profiteer he certainly is, but the reader is struck by his strength, knowledge of the landscape and affection for the creatures he hunts. . . .
Karen Lazar In the following excerpt, Lazar examines Gordimer’s attitude toward feminism, as evidenced in her short-fiction collection. . . . Gordimer always chooses the order of the stories within each anthology (she does not leave this to editors), and the title of the anthology. Her habit is to place the titular story at the start of each collection. The first story often sets the tone and establishes the salient questions and scenarios of each anthology. So Gordimer partially dethrones herself, removes herself from the text as the central or authoritative source of knowledge (a position that some of her earlier realism, with its linear, cohesive narratives, permitted her). This dethroning, this enunciating of fictional practice, suggest an endeavour on Gordimer’s part to newly acknowledge the difficulties and partialities of representation. In her Nobel Lecture in 1991, which considers the relationship between writing and being, Gordimer comments: . . . from what is regarded as old-hat psychological analysis to modernism and postmodernism, structuralism and post-structuralism, all literary studies are aimed at the same end: to pin down a consistency . . . to make definitive through methodology the writer’s grasp at the forces of being. But life is aleatory in itself, being is constantly pulled and shaped this way and that by circumstances and different levels of consciousness. There is no pure state of being, and it follows that there is no pure text, ‘real’ text, totally incorporating the aleatory. It surely cannot be reached by any critical methodology, however interesting the attempt. To deconstruct a text is in a way a contradiction, since to deconstruct is to make another construction out of the pieces . . . So the literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too.
This foregrounding of the ‘‘aleatory’’ and her recognition of the constitutive nature of interpretation, throw light not only upon the nature of literary criticism but also on the process of writing itself. For Gordimer, at least at this point in her thinking, there is no ‘‘pure text’’ (whether she held
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In ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ Gordimer borrows and subverts the genre of the bed-time story, making full use of the hyperbole inbuilt in this genre. In singsong, go-to-sleep-now language, the narrator recounts how a mother and a father spent time choosing how to make their house secure from a catalogue of safety bars, alarms and panic buttons: ‘‘Both came out with the conclusion that only one was worth considering. It was the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of pure concentration-camp style . . . Placed the length of
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walls, it consisted of a continuous coil of shining and stiff metal serrated into jagged blades’’.
Fiction,’’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4, December 1992, pp. 783–802.
Gordimer’s fairy tale possesses a particularly ghoulish South African ending: ‘‘Next day [the little boy] pretended to be the prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace . . . the shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor-teeth in his knees and hands and head he screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle’’. If one of the codes of the typical fairy story is to include the nemesis of the damned, in Gordimer’s sardonic code the nemesis for whites comes at the cost of a white child maimed from the inside of the fortress. An obsession with danger breeds more danger. Gordimer has a sharp eye for homegrown semiotics. The barbed wire in this story, the red headbands worn by the violent gang of men in ‘‘Keeping Fit’’, the ‘‘tiger-streaked hair’’ of the bored, monied housewife in ‘‘Safe Houses’’, testify to her close observation of the signifiers of South African living. . . .
Lourens, Carli, ‘‘South African Mine Deaths Fall to Lowest on Record,’’ in Bloomberg.com, January 9, 2009, http:// www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid= ar4YyIBcfeG8 (accessed September 10, 2009).
Source: Karen Lazar, ‘‘Jump and Other Stories: Gordimer’s Leap into the 1990s: Gender and Politics in Her Latest Short Fiction,’’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4, December 1992, pp. 783–802.
SOURCES Beck, Roger B., The History of South Africa, Greenwood, 2000. Colleran, Jeanne, ‘‘Archive of Apartheid: Nadine Gordimer’s Short Fiction at the End of the Interregnum,’’ in The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, edited by Bruce King, St. Martin’s, 1993, pp. 237–45. Froelich, Vera P., and Jennifer Halle, ‘‘Gordimer’s ‘Once Upon a Time,’’’ in Explicator, Vol. 56, No. 4, Summer 1998, pp. 213–15. Gordimer, Nadine, ‘‘Once Upon a Time,’’ in Jump and Other Stories, Penguin, 1991, pp. 23–30. ———, ‘‘That Other World That Was the World,’’ in Writing and Being, Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 114–34. ‘‘Jacob Zuma Elected President of South Africa,’’ in the Times (London) Online, May 7, 2009, http://www.time sonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article6238613.ece (accessed September 10, 2009).
Newman, Judie, ‘‘Jump Starts: Nadine Gordimer After Apartheid,’’ in Apartheid Narratives, edited by Nahem Yousaf, Rodopi, 2001, pp. 101–14. Perry, Alex, ‘‘Johannesburg Is Burning,’’ in Time International, Vol. 171, No. 22, June 2, 2008, p. 35. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address, Quill Pen Classics, 2008. Shurgot, Michael, ‘‘Imagery and Structure in Nadine Gordimer’s ‘Once Upon a Time,’’’ in Journal of Literary Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3, September 2008, pp. 54–67. Temple-Thurston, Barbara, ‘‘Chronology,’’ in Nadine Gordimer Revisited, Twayne’s World Author Series, No. 881, Twayne Publishers, 1999, pp. xiii–xxvii.
FURTHER READING Clark, Nancy L., and William H. Worger, South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, Longman, 2004. An introduction to the history of apartheid in South Africa, this book traces apartheid from its beginnings in 1948 through its dismantling in the 1990s to the repercussions still felt in the country in the twenty-first century. The volume includes primary documents from both supporters of apartheid and the opposition forces. Driver, Dorothy, Ann Dry, Craig MacKenzie, and John Read, Nadine Gordimer: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, 1937–1992, Hans Zell Publishers, 1994. Part of the Bibliographical Research in African Literature Series, this book thoroughly delivers on the promise made by its title, demonstrating the breadth of Gordimer’s writings from 1937 until just after she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gordimer, Nadine, Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008, Norton, 2010. This book is the first comprehensive collection of nonfiction by Gordimer, who observed firsthand the work of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Steve Biko, and other important South African figures. This collection includes insightful reporting, as well as travel writing and critical analysis of African and European literature.
Lazar, Karen, ‘‘Jump and Other Stories: Gordimer’s Leap into the 1990s: Gender and Politics in Her Latest Short
King, Bruce, ed., The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Although the word ‘‘Later’’ in the title has been rendered out of date by the passing of time, this volume collects fifteen critical articles about the fiction published roughly between 1970 and 1991, including Jump and Other Stories.
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Jacobs, Johan U., ‘‘Finding a Safe House of Fiction in Nadine Gordimer’s Jump and Other Stories,’’ in Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, edited by Jacqueline Bardolph, Rodopi, 2001, pp. 197–204.
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Roberts, Ronald Suresh, No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer, STE Publishers, 2005. The only full-length biography of Gordimer, this volume was begun with Gordimer’s assistance, providing the author access to letters and other documents. Gordimer has expressed disapproval with the completed product, particularly with Roberts’s analysis of her early political attitudes.
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Temple-Thurston, Barbara, Nadine Gordimer Revisited, Twayne’s World Author Series, No. 881, Twayne Publishers, 1999. Part of the Twayne’s World Author Series, this volume gives a solid analysis of Gordimer’s work and the South African political situation through 1998, though it does not discuss the stories from Jump and Other Stories. It includes an annotated bibliography and a chronology.
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Two Friends Guy de Maupassant was one of the most important French writers of the second half of the nineteenth century. His was one of the few voices of that era that opposed ‘‘progress’’ and the things it brought, such as imperialism and industrialization: he frequently ate lunch in the restaurant underneath the Eiffel Tower since it was the one place in Paris where he could not see the structure he considered a modern monstrosity. He was a follower of E´mile Zola of the naturalist movement, which proposed to reform literature, making it more ‘‘scientific’’ in its observations of the human condition. Maupassant’s short story ‘‘Two Friends’’ was written in 1882 at the height of his fame and success. ‘‘Two Friends’’ can be found in David Coward’s translation in the Oxford anthology Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories, but it is frequently included in anthologies drawn from the corpus of Maupassant’s more than 300 short stories. Maupassant is perhaps best known in English for his short stories including ‘‘The Necklace’’ (1884). He also wrote six novels, including A Woman’s Life (1883) and Peter and John (1888) and was a prolific essayist and travel writer. Maupassant’s importance rests on the output of a brief ten-year career, cut short by madness and then death caused by syphilis contracted early in life.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT 1882
In ‘‘Two Friends’’ Maupassant opposes, not war in general, but rather the specific deleterious effects of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 (in which he served in the provinces but did not see any action) on French culture and society. It
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concerns the fate of two ordinary Parisian men swept up into the war and destroyed by random events during the siege of Paris.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850, on his father’s country estate in Normandy on the English Channel coast of France. His parents, Gustave and Laure, were middle class, meaning they had sufficient inherited wealth to live without working. His mother had been a childhood playmate of Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), by then the leading novelist in France. A frustrated author herself, Laure de Maupassant seems to have intended her son for a literary career from the beginning. He became one of the most popular and prominent authors of his generation. Another important influence on Maupassant was the English author Algernon Swinburne, whom he met in 1868 when he saved the Englishman from drowning at a beach resort. Swineburne’s collection of curiosities, including a mummified human hand, made a tremendous impression on the young Frenchman and inspired many of the more fantastic elements in his works.
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After his parents separated (divorce was then illegal in France), Maupassant was enrolled in a seminary, but his amorous disposition made him unsuitable for the priesthood, and he quickly got expelled. Instead, he completed the course of study at a lyce´e, which prepares French students for the university. He then began to study law in Paris but in 1879 was called up by the army to serve in the Franco-Prussian War, a decisive event in his life and one that would supply the background for many of his most famous works, including the 1882 short story ‘‘Two Friends.’’ After the war, he worked in various government ministries and, under the tutelage of the novelist Gustave Flaubert, began to publish short stories and poems, and was introduced to the leading literary circles of the day, centered on the naturalist author E´mile Zola. In 1880 he published the short story ‘‘Boule de Suif’’ in Les Soire´es de Me´dan (Evenings at Me´dan, named after Zola’s estate), an anthology of stories about the Franco-Prussian War brought out by a group of Zola’s prote´ge´s. This story brought him instant literary acclaim and financial success, and he was bombarded with requests to publish short stories, reviews, essays, articles, and anything else he could produce. Over the next ten years he wrote more than 300 short stories and six novels, including in 1888 Pierre et Jean (Peter and John) considered his masterpiece and prefaced by an essay on his literary principles. Through Zola he met the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who in turn brought his writings to the attention of Leo Tolstoy, who authored the most important early piece of criticism on Maupassant. After 1890 de Maupassant went into a rapid decline due to the effects of syphilis (then incurable) which he had contracted some years earlier. An increasing paranoia is reflected in his later work such as ‘‘Le Horla,’’ a science fiction story concerning the covert conquest of the earth by invisible space aliens (an important influence on the American fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft). He was committed to an asylum after a suicide attempt on New Year’s Day 1892, and died in the hospital on July 6, 1893.
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PLOT SUMMARY Maupassant begins ‘‘Two Friends’’ with a description of conditions of privation inside the city of Paris after a few months of being besieged by the Prussian army during the Franco-Prussian war:
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‘‘Paris hung by a thread. Sparrows were rare on the rooftops. The rat population in the sewers had thinned. People were eating anything.’’ The first action of the story is a chance meeting of two old friends on a ‘‘bright January morning.’’ One of these is Morissot, a watchmaker whose business has come to an end for the duration of the siege. He is now in the National Guard, the militia that nearly every able-bodied male in Paris was enrolled in after the city was surrounded by the Prussians, although he has no special military duties and has not so much as seen a Prussian. He was issued a military uniform but has no more food than anyone else in Paris. While walking one day because he had nothing else to do, he ran into his old friend Sauvage, keeper of a sewing shop, who is also out of work and also in the National Guard. These two friends, in the days before the war, would spend every Sunday at a fishing spot on the Seine in the suburbs of Paris. To Morissot this is ‘‘the place of his dreams.’’ It is equally idyllic to Sauvage. They met through fishing and that remains the framework of their friendship. Sitting next to each other on the bank, ‘‘they got on famously without any need for words, for their tastes were similar and their feelings identical.’’ They needed to speak no more than pleasantries ‘‘to understand and respect each other.’’ Maupassant describes the reassuring sameness of their friendship through the changes of the seasons. Now, meeting for the first time since the siege had brought their fishing to an end four months earlier, the two friends go to a cafe´ and reminisce about their past happiness, becoming slightly drunk on absinthe (a highly alcoholic drink distilled from herbs, including wormwood and sometimes called the ‘‘green fairy’’). Although it is January, the day happens to be unusually mild and sunny, so the two friends decide that there is no cure for their nostalgia except to go at once on a new fishing trip. Although their fishing spot is between the French defense lines and the Prussian siege lines, Sauvage is sure they can get through to it since he happens to know Dumoulin, the colonel in command of that sector, who will pass them through the lines. But, in ‘‘a thrill of excitement,’’ they do not seriously consider the dangers involved in entering the no man’s land between the two armies.
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the colonel in that sector, once he is told the whole story of their fishing and chance meeting, passes Morissot and Sauvage through the lines and gives them a password for their return, but this perhaps improbable scene is not described in detail. Once they are beyond the French lines, the two friends walk through a familiar but eerily deserted landscape of vineyards and suburbs. When they come to a ridge, Sauvage points out, almost in surprise, ‘‘That’s where the Prussians are!’’ Suddenly, ‘‘they were reluctant to advance across open country, for they felt intimidated by the silence all around them.’’ Untrained as soldiers, they nevertheless now try to act as though they were, taking cover as they run as if they were advancing under fire. Maupassant’s description of their trying to shield themselves behind insubstantial grape vines is meant to make them appear faintly ridiculous. At last, Morissot and Sauvage reach the river and begin to fish just as they had always done. They have very good luck and are soon filling their creel with fish. This renewal of their friendship and the enjoyment of their pastime make them as happy as they had imagined it would: ‘‘A feeling of utter bliss crept over them, the bliss which comes from rediscovering a favorite pleasure which has been long denied.’’ But their elation goes far beyond mere happiness and seems to build up to a kind of transcendent ecstasy: ‘‘They stopped listening. They stopped thinking. The rest of the world had ceased to exist. They were fishing.’’
An hour later, the two friends meet again with their fishing tackle and actually start walking out to their spot on the Iˆle de Colombes (Dove Island), ordinarily a short train ride away from the central part of Paris. The narrator informs the reader that
The two friends’ reveries were interrupted when the fortress of Mont-Vale´rien on the hill above them began firing on the Prussian positions. As uncomprehending of this French aggression as of the larger fighting inflicted by each side upon the other, Morissot says, ‘‘They must be off their heads . . . to go around killing each other like that.’’ The two then discuss the larger issues of the war. Of the two main political currents in France at that time, Sauvage seems to be a monarchist and Morissot a republican. The two friends hold a long political discussion that the narrator reports rather than recounts: ‘‘And they launched into a friendly argument, sorting out the great political issues with the solid good sense of decent men of limited outlook, and ending up in complete agreement on one point: people would never be free.’’ The narrator emphasizes the fact by dwelling on the suffering that will occur among the families of the Prussian soldiers being killed by the shelling from the French guns in the fort that goes on throughout the scene and the rest of the story.
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It is at just this point that a patrol of Prussian soldiers captures the two friends, taking them completely by surprise. In their distracted discussion, they were surrounded and had guns leveled at them before they realized what was happening: ‘‘The fishing-rods dropped from their hands and floated off down river.’’ They were quickly bound and then taken across the Seine to a beastly looking Prussian officer who was nevertheless able to interrogate them in correct French. The Prussian explains to Morissot and Sauvage that considering where he found them, and considering the ridiculous activity they were engaged in—fishing within the field of enemy fire—that he would be within his rights to shoot them as spies. But what he is really interested in is the password the two Frenchmen must have to get back inside their own lines. The Prussian wants the password so that when his own unit attacks the French, they will be able to approach all the way up to the French line without being fired upon. In this way he hopes to save the lives of his own men. In any case, the Prussian demands to know their password and in exchange offers to spare their lives and let them go. When the Frenchmen refuse to speak, the Prussian emphasizes that they will be dead in five minutes if they do not. He further reminds them that if they do not care about their own lives, they must have family members who would suffer if they died (although, in fact, de Maupassant says nothing about the family of either Frenchman). Finally, the Prussian assembles a firing squad and tells them they have one minute to live. But then the Prussian takes Morissot aside and whispers to him that if he tells him the password now, he will still let them go and will pretend to Sauvage that he spared them out of pity, so that his friend need never know Morissot gave up the password. Morissot still responds with silence, so the Prussian tells Sauvage the same thing, reasoning that each was afraid of appearing a traitor in front of the other. But Sauvage also refuses to respond. Saying goodbye to each other for the last time, the two friends, Sauvage and Morissot, are indeed executed by the Prussian firing squad. The officer then orders their bodies dumped in the Seine. All the while, the French soldiers in the Mont-Vale´rien fortress continue their shelling, oblivious of what is transpiring down slope from them. As the weighted bodies sink, ‘‘the officer, as unemotional as ever, muttered: ‘And now the fish get their turn.’’’ He then orders one of his subordinates to
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fry the two friends’ fish for him while they are still alive. He waits impassively smoking his pipe.
CHARACTERS Morissot Morissot is the first character mentioned in ‘‘Two Friends’’ and is one of the title characters. He is ‘‘a watchmaker by profession forced into retirement for the duration’’ of the siege of Paris. He is therefore wandering idly around the streets of Paris, wearing his National Guard uniform, when he meets his old friend and fishing companion Sauvage. His idea of paradise is fishing with his friend in the Seine in the Paris suburbs. He attaches a special significance to the peace and freedom of fishing precisely because this pastime is now completely denied him by the conditions of the siege. After meeting Sauvage and getting slightly drunk with him, he agrees to his friend’s suggestion that they go fishing again, despite the siege. As they carry out their unlikely plan to go fishing in between the Prussian and French armies, Morissot more or less follows Sauvage’s lead. Morissot, however, is quicker to criticize the senselessness of the war, blaming the disruption of their lives on politics rather than on Prussia or on a particular faction within France. Nevertheless, a friendly political discussion that arises between the two friends reveals that Morissot is a monarchist, an adherent to one of the leading political factions within France at that time. He tells Sauvage, ‘‘With kings you got war abroad. With the Republic you got war on our own doorstep.’’ This refers to the generally successful wars in the Crimea, Italy, and the Far East in which Napoleon III had involved France, compared to the then current Prussian invasion of the Third French Republic. It rather ignores, however, that while France was a Republic at the time the siege of Paris began, this was because Napoleon III had been defeated on French soil and captured by the enemy. But this kind of thinking is what Maupassant means when he describes the two friends as being men of ‘‘limited outlook.’’ Whatever their disagreements, the two friends agree that government works against human freedom and happiness. Nevertheless, when Morissot is given the chance to save his own life (and thereby protect his own family) at the cost of betraying France, he chooses loyalty to the nation although it means death. Maupassant does not explore the
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inner process that leads to Morissot’s decision, leaving it to the reader to use his own understanding to explain the fact described in the narrative. Perhaps unexamined primitive feelings that associate the ‘‘fatherland’’ with the bonds of loyalty that exist within the family, the same feelings that led Morissot as a monarchist to favor the head of state over the state, welled up within him and made it impossible for him to betray the abstract idea of France (though he could have felt little loyalty to the actual government of France he had criticized so sharply).
The Prussian Officer The antagonist or villain of ‘‘Two Friends’’ is an unnamed Prussian officer whose men take the two friends captive. The only physical description of him is as ‘‘a kind of hairy giant.’’ He also smokes a porcelain pipe of a type then more popular in Germany than in France. He is nevertheless cultivated to the degree that he speaks ‘‘excellent French.’’ He is not humorless, though his wit seems to have a cruel, deceptive quality to it. When he sees the two friends’ creel full of fish, he observes, ‘‘Aha! I see you weren’t doing too badly,’’ as though he were engaged in friendly banter with men he intends to kill. After he does in fact kill them, his irony rises toward the sadistic, when he comments on their lifeless bodies dumped into the Seine: ‘‘And now the fish get their turn,’’ meaning that the fish who have so often been eaten by the two friends will now eat them. This sadistic note in his character seems to be emphasized by his final action in the story when he orders his cook to cook the fish from the mens’ creel: ‘‘Fry up these little chaps for me. While they’re still alive. They should be delicious.’’ There seems little way to understand this except as an unnecessary act of cruelty. On the other hand, the naturalist style adopted by Maupassant invites readers to make their own deductions about character from the actions shown rather than accepting judgments made by the narrative voice of the text. In that case, the Prussian officer’s apparent indifference to the deaths of the two friends, its failure to produce an emotional effect on him, might have explanations other than an innate barbarity. He could be too traumatized after months of killing in the war to be very concerned about these two particular deaths, which loom much larger in the consciousness of the reader than they may in his mind. It may also be that he is practicing the stoic detachment that was the ideal cultivated by nineteenthcentury soldiers, French and Prussian alike, and so
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does what is necessary despite any feeling against it, and certainly would not show any emotional conflict to the world. While the two friends may consider their treatment unjust, the officer shows considerable initiative and insight in seeing so quickly how he can exploit his captives to his own advantage. This applies even more to the larger issue of the story. From the French perspective, the Prussian is at best up to a dishonorable trick, trying to extract the password from the two friends for the sake of making a deceptive attack on the French lines and gaining an unfair advantage by underhanded means. While Maupassant might not have expected many of his readers to take the Prussian view of the matter, the same actions could just as well be interpreted from that perspective. In that case, the officer is doing whatever he can to save the lives of his own men when he must attack the French. Preserving honor by not ‘lying’ through using the falsely obtained password to keep the French from firing on them as long as possible might therefore seem less worthwhile than saving the blood of his comrades. Nevertheless, while Maupassant shows considerable sympathy for the Prussians, in lamenting the fate of any Prussian soldiers killed by the French bombardment that takes place during the story, and having the two friends observe that the slaughter of the war is equally senseless for both sides, the character of the Prussian officer does seem to be a negative portrayal. The incident of the fish, highlighted as the conclusion of the story, is very hard to read in a favorable light.
Sauvage The plot of ‘‘Two Friends’’ is set in motion when Morissot meets his old friend and fishing companion Sauvage. Sauvage is described as ‘‘a fat, cheerful little man.’’ He is ‘‘a haberdasher in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette,’’ which means (in the American meaning of the word) that he was a salesman of sewing notions. The description of him as a ‘‘fellow warrior’’ must mean that he has been inducted into the National Guard just like Morissot. He is just as keen a fisherman as Morissot and takes the same special pleasure in the peace, autonomy, and quiet that it brings. When Sauvage and Morissot meet on a fine January day in the fifth month of the siege of Paris, Morissot suggests they pass the time of their reminiscing by drinking absinthe, but once they are somewhat intoxicated, Sauvage takes the lead in all their later actions. He suggests that they go fishing despite the besieging Prussian army. He is
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the one whose contact, Colonel Dumoulin, lets them through the lines with a password so they may go to their old fishing spot and then return safely when challenged by the French sentries. Once they advance beyond the French lines and are in danger from the Prussians, Sauvage is the first to realize the imminence of the threat, though he dismisses it with a joke. He also presses forward despite the sudden realization of their danger, with Morissot following all the way.
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
During the political discussion between the two friends, Sauvage reveals that he is a republican, a member of the faction of French politics that wanted power to be vested in a legislature and an elected leader rather than in a hereditary monarch. The First French Republic was formed in 1792, during the French Revolution, and lasted until 1804. The Second Republic, established in 1848, was overturned by Louis-Napoleon who, as elected president of the Republic, subverted the constitution and became emperor as Napoleon III. After his defeat and capture by the Prussians in 1870, the Third Republic was established and was responsible for conducting the war that is taking place in ‘‘Two Friends.’’ While Maupassant says nothing about Sauvage’s motivation in choosing death rather than betraying his abstract patriotic duty to France, his political difference from his friend Morissot suggests his reasons might have been quite different. In a republic, all citizens are equal and are in some sense considered brothers under the slogan of ‘‘fraternity.’’ Thus, while Morissot’s loyalty to France may be strengthened by and based on innate human feelings of loyalty to one’s father expanded to a political scale, Sauvage’s loyalty to France may be supported by the emotions and attachments that exist in the relationships with siblings and friends.
Wilhelm Wilhelm is one of the Prussian soldiers who acts as the officer’s cook (marked out by wearing a white apron). He is the only character in the story whose first name is revealed.
THEMES Friendship The very title ‘‘Two Friends’’ suggests friendship as an important theme in de Maupassant’s story, and indeed the story revolves around the friendship of Morissot and Sauvage. The action of the
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Write a short story set at the time of one of the British wars in Afghanistan during the nineteenth century. Tell the story from the British viewpoint, but present one of the Afghan enemies as a fully developed, sympathetic character.
Make a PowerPoint presentation to your class about a trip or adventure you recently went on with friends. Be sure to describe any events or situations that are similar to the feelings brought up in ‘‘Two Friends.’’ How does Maupassant present a prejudiced view of the Prussian officer? Create a presentation comparing Maupassant’s techniques with those used to present a prejudiced view of African Americans in a film like Birth of a Nation (set in a time frame similar to that of ‘‘Two Friends’’). Illustrate your presentation with clips from the film. Read one of the Civil War short stories of Ambrose Bierce such as ‘‘A Horseman in the Sky’’ or ‘‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’’ (appropriate for young-adult readers) and write an essay comparing and contrasting its content, themes, and style with those of ‘‘Two Friends.’’
story begins when the two meet, and, made idle by the war, have nothing better to do than reminisce about their friendship in the days of peace. Their friendship was perhaps somewhat curious, but satisfying to them nonetheless. They would meet on Sundays and go to their favorite fishing spot on the Seine in the Paris suburbs and fish. During these times they were at once apart yet together, not talking but experiencing: ‘‘Morissot would say: ‘It’s grand here, isn’t it?’ and Monsieur Sauvage would answer: ‘No place like it.’ It was all they needed to say to understand and respect each other.’’ Driven by the desire to recapture those idyllic days of their friendship, the two set off for their old fishing spot, despite the fact that it is in
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Fisherman at sunset (Image copyright Martijn Smeets, 2009. Used under license from Shuttestock.com)
the no-man’s-land between the French and Prussian lines on the siege works surrounding the city. When they are inevitably captured, the Prussian officer recognizes that they are friends and, when interrogating them about the password needed to re-cross the French lines, he attempts to alleviate the pressure on them by taking each one aside and telling him, ‘‘Quick, the password. Your comrade will never know. I’ll make it look as if I felt sorry for you.’’ But it is precisely because of their comradeship, a more developed form of friendship, that neither would think of committing treason by aiding the enemy in front of the other. At the same time, though, their comradeship preserves their essential character as Frenchmen, which Maupassant seems to consider should be preserved even at the cost of death.
there, so their journey is no simple pleasure trip. What the two friends are after is not merely the sport of fishing, nor even the fish themselves as food (though under the conditions of privation that obtained during the siege that would no doubt have been most welcome for the friends and their families), nor even simple nostalgia. The friends attempt by their foolhardy act to negate the whole disaster of the war that is destroying the France they knew in peacetime. Though they certainly realize that there will be no fairy-tale ending with the Prussians vanishing like smoke in the wind, Morissot and Sauvage are risking their lives to make a statement against the war that is destroying the France they knew, and for the old France of peacetime. The quest to find this impossible place that no longer exists is itself a protest against the present more potent than words.
Questing The main action of ‘‘Two Friends’’ consists of the friends Morissot and Sauvage going on a fishing expedition as they did in the days of peace before the war and the siege of Paris. Since their old fishing spot is between the French and Prussian siege lines, they are quite literally risking their lives to go
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Although it is easy to read ‘‘Two Friends’’ as an antiwar story, the context of Maupassant’s whole body of work does not support so simple an assumption. Maupassant did not reject war out of pacifist convictions. Rather, he objected to
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particular instances of war. Worst of all was the Franco-Prussian War, which Emperor Napoleon III had needlessly provoked and which led to disaster for France. He objected to the French wars of colonial expansion in North Africa and Indochina because he viewed the colonial effort they supported as diluting France, as degrading French culture in the service of capitalism and industrialism. He would have been happy to embrace a war that supported and strengthened French culture. Paul Ignotus in The Paradox of Maupassant says of Maupassant’s attitude to war in his Franco-Prussian War stories: ‘‘War, as Maupassant saw it at that time, was not so much cruel as dull as hypocritical.’’ Increasingly, however, Maupassant wished to cast the Prussians as the symbol of France’s distress. In his last, never completed novel, Ange´, Maupassant revisited the Franco-Prussian War and extended his image of the Prussian officer corps into a stereotype: repellent and brutal, constantly clicking their jackboots.
of ‘‘Two Friends’’ rarely tells what any character is thinking, nor what he intends to do; nor does it dwell on any other motivation or event that would not have been observed by someone standing by and witnessing the events described. The tone of the story’s prose is close to journalism and rarely uses extravagant or figurative language. Even the stereotypical characterization of the Prussian officer is built entirely through describing his physical appearance and his actions. He is never called ‘‘beastly’’ or ‘‘sadistic.’’ The reader must infer these qualities from his actions.
STYLE Naturalism The generation of French authors before Maupassant, including such figures as Honore´ de Balzac and Maupassant’s mentor Gustave Flaubert, aimed at realism: the depiction of everyday life in realistic terms. This was opposed to the earlier Romantic movement, which emphasized the fantastic and the exotic, in language as well as in subject matter. E´mile Zola developed this tendency further into naturalism, which was generally embraced by Maupassant. Zola, imitating scientific materialism, believed that actions in real life were caused by the intersection of character, as shaped by heredity and earlier experience, with random events. Accordingly, he held that the plots of literary works must be determined by the same forces. Maupassant faithfully follows this dictum in ‘‘Two Friends.’’ Following some months of separation as a result of the siege, the two friends, Morissot and Sauvage, meet each other by chance. Their characters dispose them to follow a chain of actions that seems perfectly natural: they meet, they reminiscence about their happy days of fishing, and, somewhat intoxicated, they set off to recapture that happiness. The intersection of this natural course of action with unpredictable random events results in their deaths when they meet a detachment of Prussian soldiers. Maupassant also follows Zola’s naturalism in regard to his narrative style. The narrative voice
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Symbolism Another French aesthetic school of the late nineteenth century was symbolism, which held that meaning could be more powerfully communicated by the use of dramatic symbols that would evoke a spectrum of meanings in the reader’s mind that was drawn from the shared knowledge of myth and art, and from the innate commonalities of the unconscious mind. In general Maupassant had little use for this type of writing, but he nevertheless indulges in it in his description of the bombardment fired by the Mont-Vale´rien fort against unseen Prussian forces, which is built into a symbol of the futility of war. But even this is largely accomplished by the evocation of the concrete loss of the families of any Prussian soldiers who might be killed by the action (since their distant deaths could not be seen, they are left to the reader to infer or imagine).
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Franco-Prussian War ‘‘Two Friends’’ takes place during a spell of fine weather in January 1871, in the course of the German siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. The effects of the war and the siege dominate the action of the story. The war grew out of rivalry between France and Prussia, the two predominant military powers in western Europe in the nineteenth century, that originated in tension regarding the European balance of power following the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century. Open war broke out in July 1870 when Emperor Napoleon III of France decided that the possibility of a Hohenzollern prince, related to the king of Prussia, on the throne of Spain was unacceptable. The two powers quickly mobilized armies on their border. When France declared war on Prussia, the
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COMPARE & CONTRAST
1870s: France and Germany (Prussia) are the principal military powers in continental Europe and are constantly vying for dominance, with war breaking out in 1870 and again in 1914. Today: France and Germany are members of the NATO military alliance and the European Union, leaders in European unity. 1870s: Balloons have been used for observation on the battlefield since the wars of the French Revolution in the 1790s, but the siege of Paris is the first instance of balloons being used for communications and for the evacuation of civilian leaders and wounded soldiers. As a result, the first use of anti-aircraft artillery begins. Today: Air transport is as routinely a part of military mobilization as attack aircraft are to modern warfare.
other German states joined the conflict on Prussia’s side. Although the Prussian forces were led by Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of the Prussian general staff and one of the great pioneers of modern warfare. In addition to their superior leadership and organization, the Prussians had the advantage of new technology, especially the rail network and the new rapid-fire artillery produced by the famous Krupp works. Prussia also had recent experience of warfare in its 1866 victory over Austria. The French army, in contrast, was never able to fully deploy or establish regular lines of supply because of organizational difficulties.
1870s: It is possible to fish in the Seine because industrialization has had relatively little impact on Paris. Today: By the 1960s industrial use of the Seine has virtually wiped out local fish stocks in Paris, and any that survived are too toxic for human consumption. Beginning in the 1970s tremendous efforts are made to clean the Seine, aided by the departure of much heavy industry from Paris, but fish stocks still have not recovered to nineteenth-century levels.
1870s: National or racial stereotypes are a common literary device. Maupassant helps to create the stereotype of the sadistic Prussian officer. Today: The idea of racial or national stereotyping is generally rejected in literature because of its negative social effects.
completely destroyed or captured in the battle of Sedan, surrendering on September 1. Emperor Napoleon III was one of those captured. The French inside Sedan surrendered on October 27.
After indecisive fighting on the frontier in the Rhineland in early August, the French army retired because its supply situation was untenable. This movement allowed the Prussians to split the French in two. About 180,000 French soldiers retreated to the fortress of Metz. Entering a fortress was traditionally a tactic to increase the relative strength of a force, but in modern, mobile warfare it effectively rendered them useless. The remaining French field army of 120,000 men was
The French government in Paris deposed Napoleon III and declared the birth of the Third Republic. Completely victorious, the Prussians imagined the war was virtually over, but the new French government balked at ceding the culturally German French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine as the Prussians demanded and decided to continue fighting. Faced with this unreasonable reaction, the Prussians were at a loss since they certainly had no intention of permanently occupying or dismembering France. Given the possible hostility of eastern powers like Austria or Russia, it did not seem desirable to leave the entire Prussian army engaged in France indefinitely. The German government wanted Paris occupied at once, but the army refused, not only to minimize its own casualties, but to prevent unnecessary destruction and loss of civilian life. So by mid-September the city was put under
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A statue representing fishing on the bridge Alexandre III in Paris, France (Image copyright Mihai Cioian, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
siege. The main Prussian army remained in northern France and attacked and defeated newly organized French armies as they took the field. In this way the Prussians defeated another half million French soldiers, many of them youths, old men, and women. The last such action occurred on January 19, 1871, when a French column attempted to relieve Paris and the forces inside the city (alerted by carrier pigeon) attempted to break out. This attempt, too, was easily defeated by the Prussians. Among other factors, the French in Paris were hampered by mud due to several unseasonably warm days. Perhaps this is the mild weather mentioned by Maupassant in ‘‘Two Friends’’ (although Maupassant seems not to have researched the historical chronology of the war too closely, since the Mont-Vale´rien fortress, in French hands in his story, had been captured by the Prussians before January). Tiring of French reluctance to negotiate, the Prussians began to shell Paris on January 24 and the city surrendered on January 28, leading to a general armistice. The Germans staged a victory parade
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through Paris on February 17, and departed the country, with Alsace and Lorraine finally ceded to their possession. Prussia was actually the leader of a coalition in the war, consisting of the North German Confederation which was ruled by Prussia in all but name, and the southern German kingdoms of Baden, Wu¨rtemberg, and Bavaria, whose militaries had been part of the Prussian system since 1866. The Prussians took advantage of nationalist fervor generated by their victory to declare the foundation of the German Empire, which at last unified all of the German states into a single nation under the leadership of the Prussian head of state, now German Emperor Wilhelm I. The proclamation was made in the French palace of Versailles (for propaganda purposes) on January 18, 1871. After the end of the siege, the people of Paris, under the Commune (a sort of counter-government), revolted, demanding liberal reforms such as women’s rights, a widened franchise, and the forgiveness of at least the
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interest on debt accumulated by ordinary Parisians during the siege (when, of course, like Maupassant’s two friends, most of them could not work at their occupations). These demands were branded ‘‘socialist’’ by the French government, and the Commune was brutally suppressed by the army, resulting in 30,000 civilian casualties, far more that the Germans had inflicted throughout the entire war. French conservatives like Maupassant looked on the reforms demanded by the Commune as a symbol of the changes for the worse that modernity was bringing to France.
CRITICAL OVERVIEW The first great critic to review Maupassant was the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who thought that the French author tended to shy away from what he considered the necessary moral judgments within his works. Tolstoy was also deeply critical of what he viewed as Maupassant’s hostility to the peasants and working classes. Modern critics have not given much attention to Maupassant’s ‘‘Two Friends,’’ despite its popularity, but Algirdas J. Greimas’s booklength study of the story, Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text, is seen as one of the most important theoretical texts of the Paris school of semiotics (a theory of signs and symbols). Greimas argues that the meaning of the story is constructed as much by what Maupassant does not say as by what he does say and that the real meaning of the story is revealed in the process through which he chooses a certain form of expression for his ideas. This meta-narrative (abstract idea that is supposed to be a comprehensive explanation of an historical experience) reveals the real meaning of the story through characterization of the author’s beliefs concerning art, society, and the core meaning of humanity. The story, as the reader encounters it, really signifies this deeper meaning. Greimas’s conclusion is that Maupassant’s text consists of a carefully constructed network of evocative symbols that defy his chosen categories of prose and naturalism, that these terms are merely another layer of symbolism meant to guide the reaction of the reader. Our analyses, incomplete though they may be, lead us to the conclusion that Maupassant is almost as much a ‘symbolist’ writer as his contemporaries are; moreover, we also conclude that at the level of its paradigmatic and
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syntagmatic structures, the tale, as genre, can be considered as the equivalent, in prose, of a poem.
Greimas reveals style and genre as merely higher levels of signification, meant to guide the reaction of the reader. After this semiotic investigation of Maupassant’s work, subsequent criticism has examined ‘‘Two Friends’’ through various ideological lenses. Charles Stivale, in The Art of Rupture, has analyzed ‘‘Two Friends’’ in terms of gender. Working under the premise that Maupassant was notably misogynistic, Stivale sees the evil effects of the war in its transformation of gender roles: the victorious (masculine) Prussian officer is revealed as womanly in his cowardice and cruelty, while the conquered and captured (feminine) Frenchmen act with courage and resolve like men. Laurence A. Gregorio, in Maupassant’s Fiction and the Darwinian View of Life, sees the exposition of the then new theory of evolution through natural selection as the main theme of Maupassant’s work, exemplified in ‘‘Two Friends’’ in its presentation of the war as ‘‘a force of nature in that it dictates action as well as the environment in which characters find themselves engaged in a struggle for survival.’’
CRITICISM Bradley A. Skeen Skeen is a classics professor. In this essay, he examines Maupassant’s contradictory antiwar and antiGerman feeling presented in ‘‘Two Friends.’’ In ‘‘Two Friends’’ Maupassant presents two contradictory and unresolved tendencies. On the one hand he deals with war as a universal evil for which government (as a structure—not any specific government) is responsible and of which the common man is the victim. But he just as insistently portrays the Germans as cruel, warlike savages. It is as if the two beliefs exist in his mind, safely preserved by a cognitive dissonance that does not let him criticize one in light of the other. The interesting question about the Prussian officer is not whether his character is a stereotype, but how it became one if it does not represent a historical reality of the Franco-Prussian War. Maupassant sets out on his criticism of war with the aid of his two unlikely heroes, the friends Morissot and Sauvage. Tolstoy points out that Maupassant had little sympathy with his characters
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THE INTERESTING QUESTION ABOUT THE
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
PRUSSIAN OFFICER IS NOT WHETHER HIS CHARACTER IS A STEREOTYPE, BUT HOW IT BECAME ONE IF IT DOES NOT REPRESENT A HISTORICAL REALITY OF THE
Maupassant’s To the Sun is a travel book about his experiences in Algeria, translated into English for the first time in 2008 by James Wilson. Maupassant is sharply critical of French colonialism, but he also explores the landscape of Algeria as well as the cultural world of Islam. Horses with Wings (1993) by Dennis Haseley is a fictional account for younger readers about the evacuation of the French government from Paris by balloon at the beginning of the Prussian siege. Stephen Badsey’s 2003 The Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871 gives a detailed military history of the conflict. It includes information on aspects from the impact on soldiers to the impact of the conflict on the rest of the world. Because of the vast number of Maupassant’s works, complete editions that include minor works such as his verse and essays are rare. The most complete edition in English is the 1903 seventeen-volume translation The Life Work of Henri Rene´ Guy de Maupassant. John Steinbeck’s essay ‘‘Fishing in Paris,’’ originally published in the British satirical magazine Punch in 1954 and frequently reprinted in anthologies of his essays, humorously describes the social function of fishing in America, Britain, and France, in the last case drawing a picture very similar to that of Maupassant in ‘‘Two Friends.’’ The Franco-Prussian War took place during an unusually productive time for the visual arts in France. John Milner’s 2000 book Art, War and Revolution in France, 1870–71: Myth, Reportage, and Reality surveys the response of artists to the events of the war and the following Paris Commune both at the time and over the following generation.
FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR.’’
who happened to be of a lower social class than himself. Maupassant is very explicit about this in, for example, his short story ‘‘Madame Husson’s May King.’’ The bourgeois main character of that story openly despises ‘‘ the level of the many groups of the sickly, ill-favoured, and frankly stupid people of which the human race is composed.’’ Traces of the same prejudice may be seen in the characterization of Morissot and Sauvage in ‘‘Two Friends.’’ They are tradesmen put out of work by the dislocations of the war, and he presents them as idling loafers, spending their days getting drunk on absinthe. Though they have been taken into the National Guard as soldiers owing to the severe hardships of the siege of Paris, there is very little of the military about them, and they have never so much as seen a Prussian (the same was true of Maupassant in his post as a clerk in an army warehouse in Normandy). When they try to behave like soldiers in the field, they become ridiculous. There is something ridiculous, too, about their fishing expedition, no matter how sympathetically one may wish to view it. Nevertheless, the two friends are meant to exemplify France’s experience of the war. Morissot and Sauvage experience the war as futility. It has put them out of work. The first and only action that they see is on their final fishing expedition when they see the artillery of the French fortress of Mont-Vale´rien firing on Prussian positions encircling the city. And all the while, Mont-Vale´rien kept pounding away, its shells demolishing French houses, destroying lives, killing people, putting an end to so many dreams and expectations and hopes of happiness, opening wounds which would never heal in the hearts of wives, girls, and mothers far away in other lands.
The military effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the bombardment does not interest Maupassant.
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Rather, he uses the fighting as a symbol of waste. Its only effect is to destroy French property and break the hearts of the women of any Prussian soldiers it might kill. It certainly does nothing to save the lives of the two friends. Even as their bodies are dumped in the river, the gunners are unaware of what has happened to them but simply keep up their futile bombardment: ‘‘And all this time, Mont-Vale´rien kept up its pounding. But now there was a mountain of smoke hanging over its head.’’ Maupassant mocks the useless bombardment, implicitly contrasting its ineffectual smoke with the pillar of smoke that led the Israelites of the Exodus to Sinai. But Maupassant presents another view of the war as well. Following the dictates of Zola’s naturalism, Maupassant tells his story with little direct comment. His characterization of the effects of the bombardment is almost his only attempt to guide the reader’s reaction in the most obvious way. His feelings of hostility are nevertheless clearly expressed in other ways. Maupassant does not directly voice criticism of the Prussians, but he shows it in the description of the feelings of the two friends: ‘‘They had never actually seen Prussians in the flesh, but for the last two months they had felt their presence, all around Paris, destroying France, looting, murdering, starving the population, invisible and irresistible.’’ He makes an even sharper criticism of the Prussians only as Sauvage’s directly reported speech: ‘‘They’re worse than animals.’’ Nevertheless, this attitude is remarkably different from the expression of concern for the loved ones of fallen Prussian soldiers expressed by the narrator, yet the two attitudes are inextricably interwoven in the text.
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France. The Prussian is evil because he is a symbol of the evils that have befallen France. Maupassant’s objection to the Prussian officer in ‘‘Two Friends’’ is his objection to the war as it degraded, in his view, the life of France. This character is not meant to symbolize the German army or to express any particular hatred on Maupassant’s part for Germany or the Germans. Rather, the Prussian officer is a whipping boy for everything that Maupassant does hate in the world around him. If the story had been set during the French Revolution, the figure could just as well have been a revolutionary, or if set during the Paris Commune that followed the siege, a radical worker. Because he is meant to absorb all the hostility and aggression that Maupassant has to spew out, the Prussian officer is made a fit object for hatred. He not only kills the two friends for no really good reason, even from a military standpoint, but before their execution he tries in a low and insinuating way to make them betray France, which for Maupassant symbolizes everything good in the world. He attempts to bully them into it with lies and threats, and expects them to act the parts of cowards and liars themselves. Finally, after the two friends are dead, he does not hesitate to take their fish. He revels in his sadism, as if the execution whetted his appetite for cruelty. He orders the fish to be cooked alive so as to make them suffer. Besides its barbaric cruelty, it is above all a pathetic bullying act.
This criticism of the Prussians reaches its height in the unpleasant character of the Prussian officer responsible for the execution of the two friends. It is unlikely that Maupassant, a notable opponent of French imperialism at the time he was writing ‘‘Two Friends,’’ draws his stereotypical sketch of the officer out of nationalist feeling or anti-German chauvinism. After all, he views the bombardment from Mont-Vale´rien as a tragedy for both France and Germany. Can these two diametrically opposed tendencies be reconciled? Maupassant’s depiction of the Prussian officer, which is clearly inspired by hatred and meant to incite hatred, is an expression of his own feelings of hostility. He is not hostile to war per se or to the Prussians per se, but rather to the particular circumstances of the war as it interrupted life in
The actual conduct of the German army during the Franco-Prussian war was far removed from that of Maupassant’s Prussian officer. While there were certainly incidents of brutality, even against civilians, as there are in any war, committed by every army, the Prussians, as part of the aristocratic warrior ethos of the officer corps, were scrupulous in obeying the rules of war. The siege of Paris itself, for example, came about because of the German desire not to harm civilians or destroy the cultural treasures in the city. After the defeat of the main French field army at Sedan, the Germans could easily have occupied Paris, thanks especially to their superior artillery, but the city would have been destroyed and vast numbers of civilians killed. The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck wanted the army to do exactly that and assault the city, but the army refused on humanitarian grounds, instead cordoning off the city and neutralizing the French forces within it. So the real-life counterparts of the two friends owed their lives to the benevolence of the Prussian army.
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The stereotypical characterization of the Prussian officer, then, is no fair comment on the actual German soldiers who laid siege to Paris. Tolstoy believed that Maupassant had a talent for finding the bad where he wanted to see the good in his characters. In this case it seems he is purposely finding the bad and ignoring the good. Yet to the modern reader it does not seem an isolated fancy of Maupassant’s, but rather somehow familiar. This stereotypical Prussian officer does not mirror traditional French prejudice either, which, as Maupassant observed in ‘‘Madame Husson’s May King,’’ was directed rather against the English: ‘‘I may dislike the Germans and want revenge for their aggression in the late war, but I do not hate them with the instinctive loathing I feel for the English, who are the true, the hereditary, the natural enemy.’’ It has already been suggested that Maupassant made his Prussian a suitable object of hatred, so that he could accept all of the hatred that Maupassant had to heap upon him for a wide variety of causes, for loss and defeat, but not for nationalism. The officer’s character is an exaggeration of traits that the Prussians themselves thought admirable. He acts with a stoic detachment from circumstances, thinks about rational plans to achieve his objective, rather than considering things emotionally. He is quick and decisive and overly formal and correct in all his behavior. But these virtues are exaggerated into flaws. The officer is ‘‘as unemotional as ever’’ while he is ordering the execution, as it is carried out, and after they are dead. Added to this caricature is an inherent deceitfulness and sadism. The result is not a human being, but a monster. Indeed, when the narrator first describes the Prussian, he is ‘‘a kind of hairy giant,’’ in other words, something that is not human. This figure is a familiar stereotype for twenty-first-century readers, not from the work of Maupassant, but because it was later recreated quite independently. At the beginning of World War I, Great Britain and Germany were by no means natural enemies. King George V and Emperor Wilhelm II were cousins and were on excellent terms. The populace shared a Protestant bourgeois culture. Their forms of government were for all intents and purposes identical. Ordinary British citizens, and especially soldiers, however, viewed the French with some hostility as foreign: Catholic and Latin, traditional enemies from the Middle Ages and the Napoleonic Wars. Once the British government decided that it had to enter into war with Germany in 1914 for political reasons, and
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because of a treaty of alliance with France whose binding clauses had been kept secret from the public out of fear of popular disapproval, it decided to take steps to arouse hostility towards the Germans in ordinary British soldiers and civilians alike in order to gain their sympathy and support for the war. The British government therefore created a secret propaganda ministry. The first act of this ministry was to disseminate stories through the press as well as through the speeches of politicians and the king aimed at creating a new image of Germany and the German soldier in the minds of the British public. The same propaganda was eventually directed towards the United States, both to shift public sentiment toward joining the war, and then to whip up anti-German feeling after U.S. entry into the war. The initial propaganda concentrated on the ‘‘rape of Belgium,’’ the idea that the German invasion of Belgium at the beginning of the war was a war crime, was the cause of British entry into the war, and entailed the indifferent murder of thousands of civilians. The physical rape and mutilation of countless women, and the murder of innocents including children, were attributed to sadistic, inhuman German soldiers. The Germans were called ‘‘Huns,’’ after the barbarians who had destroyed Roman civilization. All of the ‘‘facts’’ in this image, however, were either wholly fabricated or exaggerated out of all recognition, as British propagandists such as Arthur Ponsonby readily admitted after the war. The idea was to present an image of an inhuman object of hatred on which the populace could project any latent psychological hostilities they harbored, and identify this figure with Germany. In other words, the British achieved on a massive scale, and for a political rather than an artistic purpose, the same manipulation of feeling as Maupassant, and by using precisely the same means. Maupassant’s inhuman hairy giant even finds an exact analog in the propaganda posters of World War I, which often showed a German soldier in the form of a giant ape, wearing the distinctive German spiked helmet or Pickelhaube, threatening a Belgian or English nurse collapsed on the ground out of terror before him. Maupassant’s stereotypical presentation of the Prussian officer was arguably a statement against war and for France rather than against Germany. Yet it took a form very similar to the later propaganda image of the Germans created to incite public hatred during World War I.
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IN THE END, MAUPASSANT’S BACKGROUND PERSONALITY, INTAKE OF TOXIC DRUGS, AND NEUROLOGICAL DISEASES INTERACTED. THE RESULT WAS A REPETITIVE AND ENRICHED HALLUCINATORY EXPERIENCE, WHICH WAS TRANSFERRED RELENTLESSLY TO HIS WRITING.’’
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pathology is necessary to experience such vivid experiences. In addition, Maupassant’s abuse of drugs, as illustrated in ‘‘Reves,’’ ˆ could have provided an additional element to outline his painstaking visual depictions. All these factors, in addition to his up-to-date neurological knowledge and attendance at Charcot’s lectures at ‘‘La Sal` petri ˆ ere,’’ armed the author for repetitive and enriched hallucinatory experiences, which were transferred relentlessly into his works from the beginning of his career. INTRODUCTION
Source: Bradley A. Skeen, Critical Essay on ‘‘Two Friends,’’ in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.
Luis Carlos A´lvaro
In the following excerpt, A´lvaro correlates Maupassant’s neurological illness and hallucinations to his writing subjects and style. Maupassant excelled as a realist writer of the nineteenth century, with fantastical short stories being an outstanding example of his literary genius. We have analysed four of his fantastical stories from a neurological point of view. In ‘‘Le Horla,’’ his masterpiece, we have found nightmares, sleep paralysis, a hemianopic pattern of loss and recovery of vision, and palinopsia. In ‘‘Qui sait’’ and in ‘‘La main’’ there is also an illusory movement of the objects in the visual field, although in a dreamlike complex pattern. In ‘‘Lui,’’ autoscopy and hypnagogic hallucinations emerge as fantastical key elements.
Guy de Maupassant was one of the greatest writers of French literature in the nineteenth century. He was considered a realist as much as a novelist and short story teller. In this sense he was a disciple of Flaubert, who directly undertook Maupassant’s training and taught him to cultivate literature as the art of writing only about natural things and elements that can be seen and perceived. Hence his writer’s vision was built up, and it has been said metaphorically that he was a ‘‘photographer’’ (Savinio, 1983) when it came to both characters and plots or scenarios. . . . It is also remarkable that Maupassant was up-to-date with regard to the accepted causes of diseases of the nervous system and the importance of topography as related to specific brain functions. In this sense it is assumed and accepted that he gained access to French neurological literature at the same time as some of his writings (Koehler, 2001). His characters also demonstrate his knowledge: in ‘‘Lui’’ (1883), the main character says: (I had been suffering from an hallucination, that was an incontestable fact. My mind had been perfectly lucid and had acted regularly and logically, so there was nothing the matter with the brain. It was only my eyes that had been deceived; they had had a vision.) . . .
The writer suffered from severe migraine and neurosyphilis involving the optic nerve, which led to his death by general paralysis of the insane (GPI). Visual loss and visual hallucinations affected the author in his last years, before a delirant state confined him to a nursing home. Our original hypothesis, which stated that he could have translated his sensorial experiences coming from this source to his works, had to be revised by analyzing some of his earliest works, notably ‘‘Le Docteur He´raclius Gloss’’ and ‘‘La main d’e´corche´’’ (1875). We found hallucinatory symptoms, adopting the form of autoscopy and other elaborated visual misperceptions, in stories written at age 25, when Maupassant was allegedly healthy. Therefore, we hypothesize that they may be related to his hypersensitive disposition, assuming that no
The author was also known to be syphilitic (Critchley, 1969), an ailment that would eventually lead to his death from general paralysis of the insane (GPI). Previously, he had suffered from severe migraines, and visual hallucinations and autoscopy have been described by his biographers as a part of his symptoms (Benı´ tez 1991, Fermigier 1986, Savinio 1983). Regarding migraine, it is worth considering the use and abuse of drugs used by Maupassant, which has been detailed by his biographers (Savinio 1983, Fermigier 1986). These drugs include alcohol, cannabis, opiates, and ether. The last is subject
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of his story ‘‘Reves’’ ˆ (‘‘Dreams’’) (1882), in which the narrator discloses the use of the drug as a painkiller for his neuralgias and headache: . . . (It is after having been affected by violent neuralgias when I have used this remedy, of which I have perhaps taken too much since. I had intense pains in my head and neck, and an unbearable heat of the skin, a feverish agitation. I took hold of a large bottle of ether and, while lying down, began to inhale it slowly.) . . .
Taking his ailments together with the aforementioned use of drugs and his detailed neurological background, we can suppose an explanation for the visions provided by the writer in some of his fantastical stories. In our view, the author was not necessarily reflecting the plot from a madman’s perspective but was simply transferring some of his sensorial experiences to his works. They thus become seen through the eyes of a literary genius. . . . CONCLUDING REMARKS
We have reviewed pathological visual perceptions and hallucinations in Maupassant’s fantastical short stories. The early writer’s experience with hallucinations becomes evident by taking into consideration the chronology of his stories: by 1875, at age 25 and allegedly in a healthy state, complex visual hallucinations can be tracked down in two of his former stories, ‘‘Le Docteur He´raclius Gloss’’ and ‘‘La main d’e´corche´.’’ We believe that at this point hallucinations are not a pathological condition, but an experience that emerged in this writer’s hypersensitive personality. This idea is particularly stressed in recent bibliography (Brasic, 1998), and has been likewise remarked for hypnagogic and hypnapompic hallucinations, two forms reported in up to 12.5% of the general population (Ohayon et al., 1996). Later on, by 1882, Maupassant himself reported using toxic substances with a potential hallucinogenic effect, which is described in ‘‘Reves,’’ ˆ a story wherein toxic effects are described and contrasted with the ones experienced by abusing other drugs. In addition to these two factors—personality and drug use—which enabled the author to have early and vivid experiences suitable to be transferred to his works, his medical condition probably played a key role in the elaborated hallucinatory experience of his later fantastical short stories. Concerning this aspect, it has been ascertained that he suffered from migraine, neurosyphilis, and general paralysis of the insane (GPI).
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Stroke could have been a complication. As a result of these ailments, the writer suffered from visual loss and vivid visual hallucinations in his last years. Therefore, a new source of sensorial experiences became available for the narrator, whose vividness and detail could be translated again to his works, particularly the painstaking later ones analyzed here. In the end, Maupassant’s background personality, intake of toxic drugs, and neurological diseases interacted. The result was a repetitive and enriched hallucinatory experience, which was transferred relentlessly to his writing. Maupassant attempted suicide before a severe delirant state confined him to a nursing home during the final months of his life in 1893. By reflecting on his own experiences, Maupassant provided a rich source for his stories. The same path has been described for other writers, notably Edgar Allan Poe, who greatly influenced Maupassant (Benı´ tez, 1991). Poe suffered from spells and attacks, which have been regarded as complex partial seizures, probably followed by postictal psychosis. Thus, different forms of epileptic symptoms mark both authors’ works. Although the majority of these symptoms are related to the motor area, one of them is visual: this being macropsia, appearing in ‘‘The Sphinx’’ (Bazil, 1999). It is believed to be epileptic by nature, as is the case in many literary depictions (Garcı´ a Albea, 1999). We have also discovered some motor phenomena in Maupassant’s case, although visual phenomena predominate. With regard to changes in size and alterations in the recognition of faces, we might be consigned to ‘‘Alice in Wonderland,’’ in which macropsia—this time resulting from migraine—has been described (Rolak, 1991). We have pointed out in ‘‘Le Horla’’ an inability to recognize a face, although this could as well be the result of a simple perceptual lacuna as a consequence of a scotoma. Nevertheless, the dominant form of visual phenomena in Maupassant’s writing is complex visual hallucinations. These do not fit in with epileptic seizures such as those found in some forms of temporal lobe epilepsy, the relevant symptom of which is this kind of hallucination (Penfield & Jaspers, 1954), or even other literary works with underlying visual hallucinations (A´lvaro, 2002). They could be ascribed to different forms of hallucinations and pathological visual perceptions, whose semiologic and neurological analysis is depicted. Source: Luis Carlos A´lvaro, ‘‘Hallucinations and Pathological Visual Perceptions in Maupassant’s Fantastical
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Short Stories—A Neurological Approach,’’ in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Vol. 14, No. 100, 2005, pp. 100–15.
Richard Fusco In the follow excerpt, Fusco describes the structure and methods of Maupassant’s writing technique. THE LINEAR SHORT STORY
Quite naturally, Maupassant gravitated to the simpler literary forms in his early writing. The simplest of these was the linear short story, a text almost free from an omniscient narrator’s intrusions and a plot unadorned by authorial manipulation. Most often, the story is presented in its proper chronological sequence, stripped of all irrelevant happenings in the lives of the characters so that the reader sees the story in terms of a causal chain in which no one cause or effect dominates the text. Such a choice in form suggests the writer’s implicit belief that the story possesses in itself sufficient qualities to impress his reader. Early in his career, a naive and, perhaps, egotistical Maupassant, believing in his ability to ferret out those incidents of human reality that most entertained men, trusted that linear presentations would suffice. ‘‘Le Donneur d’eau be´nite’’ (1877, The bestower of holy water), for example, presents a parent’s horror: a child that vanishes mysteriously. Rather than employ literary devices, Maupassant relies upon a reader’s sympathy with the plight of the protagonists, a wheelwright and his wife. In theory, if such stories reached primal emotional levels, a reader could even project himself into the parents’ situation. Each succeeding plot element competes for the reader’s attention with the result that neither the loss of the child Jean, the parent’s patient remorse, nor their joy in rediscovering the adult Jean dominates the story. Calculated to arouse one’s awe of the curious whims of providence. ‘‘Le Donneur’’ has the underlying assumption that both misery and happiness are products of chance. With the aid of religious faith, symbolized by the old and destitute wheelwright’s position as ‘‘le donneur d’eau be´nite,’’ chance led ultimately to happiness, an ending very uncharacteristic of Maupassant’s later stories. Perhaps the outcome of ‘‘Le Donneur’’ suggests why linear patterns seldom dominate his later work: left to chance, situations could resolve themselves happily, a consequence that an increasingly pessimistic Maupassant recoiled from accepting. . . .
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These situations often had undertones of irony, but one dilemma of linearly plotted stories is that this undertone may remain an undertone in interpretation. Irony was perhaps the strongest of Maupassant’s impulses in his fiction, but simply constructed stories, for example, of local color or the Franco-Prussian War or human duplicity, often failed to elicit insights of such subtlety in readers. One could easily miss the symbolic paradox of a lone civilian successfully defending patriotic honor in the aftermath of a French military defeat in ‘‘Un duel’’ (1883, ‘‘A duel’’). In ‘‘La Dot’’ (1884, ‘‘The dowry’’) Maupassant hints that a young woman finds a better prospect in love through the perfidy of her bridegroom, who absconds with her dowry; but the very construct of the story, which follows a simple episodic chronology, unintentionally downplays the irony. We have reasons for such speculations, but the clues Maupassant provides are among his most tenuous. Therefore, since irony became his most potent literary weapon—it conflated his pessimism with his humor—Maupassant had to incorporate linear progressions in more complex forms in order to portray life more as he saw it. The absence of literary devices that stressed irony made his stories more difficult to interpret properly. Thus, economy paradoxically demanded complication. THE IRONIC CODA
The simplest development of the linear story employed by Maupassant was to add a brief coda. Most often these codas take place after the time frame of the primary story, long enough so that characters can view a significant event more reflectively than emotionally. These codas do not force the reader to reinterpret the story; rather, they serve to highlight some irony. If anything, their existence suggests the possibility that the author is somehow dissatisfied with the primary body of the story. Believing that a linear plot cannot stand alone, he risks disunity by breaking the chronological flow of the text in order to buttress its ironic thrust. Whether it exists as a tagged section, paragraph, or even a sentence or two, however, the ironic coda often seems no more than an afterthought: thus it is perhaps the weakest of Maupassant’s organizing devices, tenuously integrating text and interpretation. Although ironic codas do appear fairly early in the Maupassant canon, they were not sequentially the next step in his experiment with form. Instead, he alternated among several schemes as
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he explored the nuances of the genre. Ultimately, as he matured as a writer, ironic codas appended to linear plots appeared less frequently. When he chose to direct the reader’s attention toward the ending of a text in his later work, he usually opted for stronger plot devices. . . . Rather than using extended and elaborate episodes, Maupassant more often reduced codas to a terse sentence or two, constituting a last paragraph. He found this form and style particularly suitable for his war stories. He primarily intended to render faithful impressions of the events of 1870, and so linear exposition, which usually conveys to the reader a sense of immediate presence, created the illusion of validity in each account. Yet he had a secondary, almost extemporaneous, purpose. Writing a dozen years after the French defeat, Maupassant saw French society reshaping history to fit its ego. Individuals elevated their common duties in war to acts of extraordinary patriotism and heroism. After the main text dispassionately dissects the events and motivations in a war incident, the coda briefly and ironically exposes how French society of the 1880s has twisted its memory of the past. In a sense, Maupassant shows his offhanded preparedness to laugh at and to dismiss any personal yarn of patriotism. Overall, the war fiction promotes a notion that (rare) true patriotism produces silence either because an authentic hero tries to forget or because he is dead. . . . Source: Richard Fusco, ‘‘Maupassant and the Simpler Structure of the Short Story,’’ in Maupassant and the American Short Story, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, pp. 11–20.
Rachel Killick In the following excerpt, Killick illustrates Maupassant’s reccurring theme of the wartime hero. Discussion of authorial and narratorial perspective in Maupassant’s tales, first explored by J. P. Sartre in Qu’est-ce que la litte´rature? (1948), has recently acquired new impetus with the appearance of a number of articles dealing with Maupassant’s manipulation of narrative stance and frame narration. Some of these, seeing in the subject-matter merely a metaphor for narrative process, endeavour, somewhat unconvincingly, to transform Maupassant into a crypto-structuralist. Others, accepting the intrinsic interest of the author’s chosen material, point helpfully to the often considerable narrational ambiguities of the superficially innocent Maupassant text and the tensions of attitude and philosophy
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which are thereby revealed. Where the FrancoPrussian War is concerned, it seems clear that Maupassant is treating a subject important to him on its own merits and that any interpretation failing to take this into account could be only a perverse one. However, it is also true that his handling of the theme shows an acute awareness of the different impact of various narrative strategies and that these are skilfully exploited to allow both for the prejudices of a varied public and for his own ambiguities of attitude. A particularly clear demonstration of the use of a range of different narrational possibilities is given by the three successive versions of his tale Le Mariage du lieutenant Lare´ (1878), reworked in Souvenir (1882) and in Les Ide´es du Colonel (1884). ` J. Thoraval, in L’Art de Maupassant d’apres ses variantes (Paris, 1950), extensively considered the first and last of these versions as one of the main illustrations of his general thesis of a move in Maupassant’s technique towards greater realism and greater coherence and precision. However, his comparison of Le Mariage du lieutenant Lare´ and Les Ide´es du Colonel is carried out piecemeal over a number of chapters dealing separately with plot, characterization, description, and so on, and there is no unified discussion of the two versions as individual units, each with its own narrational technique and shape. Furthermore, he appears unaware of the second version of the story, Souvenir, which forms an important intermediate stage in the evolution of the text. In contrast, this article proposes an examination of all three versions, considering each in its entirety in order to show how changes in narrative stance and frame technique modify the reader’s perception of the text and make increasingly evident the ambiguous attitude of the author towards those displays of daring, valour, chivalry, and national feeling which combine to form a stereotype of heroic behaviour. . . . Maupassant’s reutilization of his fictional and journalistic material is sometimes adduced in support of a view that sees him as nothing more than a literary capitalist, interested only in securing the largest possible financial returns from his writing. However, as Thoraval points out, in the fiction at least, reutilization does not imply artistic laziness or dishonesty, since invariably significant rethinking and reworking of the text is involved. In the story considered here, the reworkings demonstrate clearly the increasing effort and skill of Maupassant as a narrative strategist, able to appeal to a wide
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range of audience opinion and simultaneously able to preserve the integrity of his evolving personal vision. In line with remarks in his various contemporary ‘chroniques’, he moves towards an increasingly pointed criticism of the heroic mythology of war, using the permutations of a first-person narrator and of frame technique to query, first discreetly (Souvenir) then more radically (Les Ide´es du colonel), the assumptions taken as read by the third-person narration of Le Mariage du lieutenant Lare´. Yet, at the same time, the credibility of the heroic ethos is not entirely between the positive qualities of physical endurance and human compassion displayed by the protagonists and the cliche´d rhetoric that exploits such qualities to promote and glorify the brutality of war. Reworking has thus produced two texts whose narrational subtleties, allowing a variety of interpretations and emphases, reveal Maupassant’s growing maturity and skill as a writer and the use of that skill to propose and invite an essentially critical but nevertheless nuanced approach towards the stereotype of the traditional military hero. Source: Rachel Killick, ‘‘Mock Heroics? Narrative Strategy in a Maupassant War Story,’’ in Modern Language Review, Vol. 82, No. 2, April 1987, p. 14.
Quarterly Review In the following review, a century-old critique of Maupassant’s works is presented. All that is revolting in [Zola’s ‘physiological school’]—its suffocating atmosphere and cold analysis,—might be illustrated from ‘Boule de Suif.’ But there was something more in it than Zolaesque brutality, or the tedious yet impressive collocation of details with which Flaubert’s name is inseparably associated. There was humour, pathos, strong character-drawing, and the most deceptive air, not merely of Realism but of real life. . . . ‘Boule de Suif,’ who gives her name, or rather her nickname, to the story,—how can we praise her sufficiently? Describe her, indeed, we cannot, except by a circumlocution, yet in her degraded but still womanly nature, the oddest notions lurk of the base and the honourable, making her,—poor bedraggled creature,—a sort of heroine, in the ‘General Overturn.’ It is the absurdest, yet most touching situation. And it is in the spirit of Flaubert. If there is in it a throbbing vein of compassion, there is also unconquerable cynicism. . . . Never, from the day he began to write until the pen dropped from his convulsed fingers, did Maupassant grow weary of
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WHEN MAUPASSANT TELLS A STORY LIKE THIS, WHICH GOES TO THE HEART, WE BEAR WITH HIS COARSENESS, MUCH AS IT OFFENDS A HEALTHY NOSTRIL; WE ARE ALMOST WILLING TO FORGIVE AND TO LIKE THE MAN.’’
enlarging on ‘the infamy of the human heart.’ With the insolent gaiety of youth he paints it in the faces, actions, gestures, . . . of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen. . . . This we may call satire, if we will, but it has risen to a great height, and is in a key untouched, we are sure, by Juvenal. But the root of bitterness remains. Our feeling, as we read the last words of ‘Boule de Suif,’ is not so much pity for the victim, as a loathing like that which overcame Gulliver on returning from his last voyage, and falling in with the Yahoos who were his own kith and kin. It provokes an indictment of human nature. That anarchic moral returns in Maupassant’s stories like a refrain. The disgust of his own species never quits him. For dogs and horses he can feel; nor is he without a thrill of compassion when he comes across suffering or tormented children. He pities the miserable, too; outcasts, vagabonds, cripples, of whom he knows many sad and melting stories, appeal, not, he would say, to his humanity (for the human is vile and selfish), but to that quality of tenderness in the modern, highly civilized man, which is artificial, and not in any sense due to nature. He is eloquent on the struggle maintained by choice spirits against the something that made the world, and made it so brutal and ugly. That Promethean strain, so marked in a stage of Goethe’s life and poetry, which Shelley also has harped upon in exquisite golden verse, inflicts on us a sense of surprise, when we hear it in Maupassant. But the antique symbol of a rebellious, suffering spirit which defies the god of nature, whether he is to be styled Zeus or Satan, has never perhaps died out of men’s minds; and in ‘L’Inutile Beaute´’ it finds vehement expression, though in language too gross and violent to be quoted. (pp. 483–84) [Maupassant felt,] in his own language, ‘a violent passion’ for the sea and the river. In all his books the clear and astonishingly precise
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description of the quick changing forms, and dancing or slumbering beauty of the waters, would satisfy at once a scientific observer like Mr. Tyndall, and a dreamy artist like Turner in his best period. The resources of French prose since Victor Hugo have been strikingly enlarged; and a new and refined colour-sense betokens its presence by the added suppleness, the continual gleaming of words which fill the eye with a vision as distinct as a photograph, while adding to it the tints of the landscape. With Maupassant there is no affectation of artistic phrase. He writes a limpid French, bright and unembarrassed wherever it has no reminiscence of Flaubert, as in most of his later stories. In the conversations which he so admirably fits to the personages brought on his mimic stage, there is no sign of mannerism. They are quite unaffected and true to nature. . . . By and by, Maupassant, when his mental tone was enfeebled, did lapse occasionally into the morbid style of the symbolists. At no time, however, was it truly his own. The rude Norman vigour, the good sense, not quite unencumbered with a certain—shall we say stupidity?—which he inherited from his forefathers, and which ought to have kept him sound and healthy, would have sent him away laughing from lackadaisical poetasters, in whom there is no genius, but only a serious cultivation of aesthetic follies. He had no wish to be a prose Verlaine.
cornfields and vineyards. Everywhere we are sensible of a fixed and ingrained hardness which strikes home like a breeze from an iceberg, deadly cold and pitiless. . . . [We] may compare ‘L’Histoire d’une Fille de Ferme’ with ‘Adam Bede,’ or ‘Le ` Amable’ with ‘Silas Marner.’ Upon the EngPere lish stories, for all their tragic burden, a mild radiance seems to be shed; the great sky, with its stars and sunsets, hangs above us while we move among these men and women, whose thoughts are not invariably bent earthwards, nor their spirit become a tired and fretful beast, dragging the plough with unwilling muscles. There is sunshine on the land, which yet we know is not simply a painted operatic scene, but, in some measure at all events, taken from life. And, from life, too, Maupassant draws, but in what ashen colours! . . . The painting is always,—we fear, because the facts warrant it,—a depressing ‘grey in grey;’ true doubtless, but spectral as the mists in Ossian, with ghosts murmuring hollow on the wind, and unspeakably desolate.
From nature he had received the endowment somewhat rare, among Parisian novelists, of hearty laughter. As a born Frenchman we might expect him to be witty and amusing; but humour we should not have looked for. . . . Maupassant, however, was not a scented popinjay, like those to whom Paris means all the world they have travelled in, or those others who have come up from the provinces young, and are glad to forget the miseries of their peasant childhood. In his acquaintance with fields and hedgerows, with the life of the farm, with its sounds at morning and eventide, with wild birds and wild flowers, he resembles George Sand, though he lacks her untiring good-nature, and is not in the least a Utopian or a Socialist. Suggestive, indeed, as well as saddening, is the descent from lightsome and touching romance, in ‘La Petite Fadette’ and ‘Les Maitres Sonneurs,’ to the naked reality, though we grant its flashes of the ludicrous, which fills Maupassant’s country scenes. They leave a feeling on the mind not unlike a medieval Dance of Death, painted among
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And still, bursts of laughter are not wanting; genuine, unforced hilarity, to which the dialect adds a keen flavour, as in ‘Une Vente,’ and ‘Tribunaux Rustiques.’ There is even at times (would it came oftener!) a vivid touch of the old world, something quaint, and lovable, or perhaps affecting: witness ‘La Ficelle,’ with its Teniers-like drawing of market-day in Goderville; or the exceedingly piteous tale of ‘Le Gueux,’ the starved cripple, in whose hunger none will believe until he dies of it. . . . Like these are the most taking of the country stories, which almost persuade us to unsay the charge we have brought against their author, of hatred of the human race. That he loves a joke is much in his favour; and we allow that his laugh has an infectious ring about it which ought to scatter some of our dislike for the self-conscious misanthrope. Moments there are when we acknowledge that Maupassant, like all who have mixed with high and low sympathetically, can be genial and even kind-hearted. When he talks his native patois, with its delightful yet unconscious touches of the comic, its rude repartee, quaint farce, and explosive jollity, one cannot help laughing all down the page, and the air clears in a surprising manner. . . . When Maupassant’s peasantry laugh their best, they seem to stand back from their grim and sordid existence, like men looking at a picture; and the strings of their heart, nay, of their purse, are loosened. The fine Celtic gaiety, of which traces yet live in these stories, though less frequent as we move on with them, may love pleasure and excitement; but it is
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too eager, too delicate, to dwell, in the icy mood of the Epicurean, upon its own sensations. It is warm and tender, somewhat given to change perhaps, but as unlike as possible to the nature of the voluptuary, whose fancy swings to and fro between Tiberius and the neo-pagans, and whose weary dreams Maupassant chose to delineate with ever-growing earnestness during his brief career. (pp. 485–88) [Bel-Ami] is an edifying romance, not marred, be sure of it, in the telling. The style is crisp, high-strung, and exceedingly photographic,—the perfection of that which impressionists aim at but seldom achieve. From its descriptions, an archaeologist of the twenty-first century might reproduce, with most admired exactness, the form and habit of Parisian life as it goes on in the many-storied houses and outside them. We are here shown, with singular clearness, the Paris of [Daudet’s] ‘Les Rois en Exil.’ . . . Yet in the multitude of human beings we distinguish an amazingly small variety of types. Huge Paris, with its two million mortals living inside the barriers, seems no larger, no more opulent in character and circumstance, than one of Terence’s comedies. The scene has grown to vast proportions; it is an immense spectacle; but the players, and even the masks they wear, disappoint us with their eternal monotony. (p. 492) [‘Notre Coeur’ has] its brilliant pages; but in subtlety of colour and high-wrought passion it will not compare for an instant with George Sand’s ‘Elle et Lui,’ to say nothing of ‘Le´lia’ or ‘Indiana.’ Neither is the self-conscious, half-poetic mood which Bourget is fond of dissecting and of adorning with his passionate melancholy, quite in the vein of our sturdy Norman. Where sentiment is concerned, Maupassant does little more than make believe. He prefers a drinking scene, in which his comrades laugh over barrack-room stories, and make the glasses on the table ring again. . . .
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but the bourgeois intent on enjoyment, the academician, the artist, the deputy, the senator. Note, of course, the exaggeration; but mark also how much truth lurks in the gibe. . . . Our guide to these heartrending sights is only too competent. He paints and he speaks, not as a religious man,— he is no Fra` Angelico,—but calmly, like a citizen of the world. Yet his voice trembles a little; and, in the midst of his shameful narrative there will break out, as it were, a sob from the depths of his heart,—as in the piteous story of ‘L’Armoire.’ The tale itself is slight, is nothing. But the picture of the child, turned out of its poor little bed and sent to sleep all night as well as it can, on a chair in the cupboard,—and the child of such a mother, engaged in such a trade,—who can express the things of which it is an evidence? They are as touching as they are horrible. (pp. 496–97) When Maupassant tells a story like this, which goes to the heart, we bear with his coarseness, much as it offends a healthy nostril; we are almost willing to forgive and to like the man. But he is a creature of instinct; the pity which fills his eyes one moment is forgotten the next. He cares only for excitement, nor does he reck of what species, tender, morose, or even cruel. Not that he gloats over cruelty as done by himself; but he has a mania for studying its phases. The world of detestable, though still human vice, seems to undergo a transformation as we pass with him along his dark galleries. Our step falters where he gains assurance. Why explore these Bedlams, whether of life or literature? ‘Why?’ he replies, ‘because they are the truth, the only solid ground beneath the world’s illusion.’ Thus he indulges, in a mood of mocking complicity, all the bizarre fancies which haunt the last agonies of reason. (p. 497)
[In] the painfully vivid sketch called ‘Un Fils,’ the fathers of all the criminal vagrants, of the diseased, forsaken, and dangerous members of society, are neither the poor nor the hardworking,
[In the supernatural sketches of Maupassant] there comes the delineation of maniacal fury, bent on gratifying its cravings in a series of heightened atrocities. The coarse and illbred humour which disfigured Maupassant’s Norman tales was harmless in comparison. It could only disgust. But the miasma of insanity exhaling from narratives such as ‘Un Fou,’ ‘Moiron,’ ‘Chevelure,’ and ‘Le Horla’ betokens, if we may venture on the expression, a decaying brain. We turn with unconquerable dread from the like phenomena in those highcoloured and plague-stricken artists Edgar Poe, Baudelaire, and William Blake. In this weird region of nightmare and hallucination nature seems dead. (p. 499)
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In ‘Notre Coeur’ there is a sort of murderous enchantment, which takes prisoner soul and sense, though certainly not those of an Englishman, who despises what to his Gallic neighbour might seem to be luxuries of feeling. It is a dream, hanging clear above our heads—detached from duties and moralities—where instinct may do as it will and no fault found. (p. 494)
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Source: ‘‘The French Decadence,’’ in Quarterly Review, Vol. 174, No. 348, April 1892, pp. 479–504.
Tolstoy, Leo, ‘‘The Works of Guy de Maupassant,’’ in Complete Works, Vol. 10, translated by Leo Wiener, Colonial, 1905, pp. 509–34, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/ 30057436&referer=brief_results (accessed September 9, 2009).
SOURCES Baldick, Robert, The Siege of Paris, B. T. Batsford, 1964. Gregorio, Laurence A., ‘‘Maupassant’s Fiction and the Darwinian View of Life,’’ in Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, No.143, Peter Lang, 2005, pp. 92–93. Greimas, Algirdas Julien, Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises, translated by Paul Perron, J. Benjamin, 1988. Horne, Alistair, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, 1870–71, Penguin Books, 1981. Ignotus, Paul, The Paradox of Maupassant, Funk & Wagnall’s, 1966. Lerner, Michael G., Maupassant, G. Braziller, 1975. Maupassant, Guy de, ‘‘Madame Husson’s May King,’’ in Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories, translated by David Coward, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 167–184. ———, ‘‘Two Friends,’’ in Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories, translated by David Coward, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 27–33. Messinger, Gary S., British Propaganda and the State in the First World War, Manchester University Press, 1992, pp. 18–19. Ponsonby, Arthur, Falsehood in War-Time: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated throughout the Nations during the Great War, George Allen and Unwin, 1928. Stivale, Charles J., The Art of Rupture: Narrative and Duplicity in the Tales of Guy de Maupassant, University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 98–105.
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FURTHER READING Fisher, John, Airlift 1870: The Balloon and Pigeon Post in the Siege of Paris, Max Parrish, 1965. This study concentrates on one of the most fascinating aspects of the Siege of Paris, the efforts to maintain communications between the city and Metropolitan France through hot air balloons and pigeons, as well as the German response with the first pieces of anti-aircraft artillery and the application of the aristocratic Prussian officers’ hobby of hawking against the carrier pigeons. James, Henry, Partial Portraits, Kessinger Publishing, 2007. This collection of essays on contemporary authors includes James’s treatment of Maupassant. Shann, Stephen, and Louis Delperier, French Army, 1870–71: Franco Prussian War, 2 vols., Osprey, 1991. Shann and Delperier examine the tactics, strategies, uniforms, and history of the French army in the Franco-Prussian War. Solka, Michael, German Armies, 1870–71, 2 vols., Osprey, 2004–05. Solka explores the full details of the tactics, strategy, doctrine, and uniforms of the Prussian and allied German armies during the Franco-Prussian War.
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Glossary A Aestheticism: A literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement believed that art should not be mixed with social, political, or moral teaching. The statement ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ is a good summary of aestheticism. The movement had its roots in France, but it gained widespread importance in England in the last half of the nineteenth century, where it helped change the Victorian practice of including moral lessons in literature. Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe are two of the best-known ‘‘aesthetes’’ of the late nineteenth century. Allegory: A narrative technique in which characters representing things or abstract ideas are used to convey a message or teach a lesson. Allegory is typically used to teach moral, ethical, or religious lessons but is sometimes used for satiric or political purposes. Many fairy tales are allegories. Allusion: A reference to a familiar literary or historical person or event, used to make an idea more easily understood. Joyce Carol Oates’s story ‘‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’’ exhibits several allusions to popular music. Analogy: A comparison of two things made to explain something unfamiliar through its similarities to something familiar, or to prove one point based on the acceptance
of another. Similes and metaphors are types of analogies. Antagonist: The major character in a narrative or drama who works against the hero or protagonist. The Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s story ‘‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’’ serves as the antagonist for the Grandmother. Anthology: A collection of similar works of literature, art, or music. Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘‘The Eatonville Anthology’’ is a collection of stories that take place in the same town. Anthropomorphism: The presentation of animals or objects in human shape or with human characteristics. The term is derived from the Greek word for ‘‘human form.’’ The fur necklet in Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘‘Miss Brill’’ has anthropomorphic characteristics. Anti-hero: A central character in a work of literature who lacks traditional heroic qualities such as courage, physical prowess, and fortitude. Anti-heroes typically distrust conventional values and are unable to commit themselves to any ideals. They generally feel helpless in a world over which they have no control. Anti-heroes usually accept, and often celebrate, their positions as social outcasts. A well-known anti-hero is Walter Mitty in James Thurber’s story ‘‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.’’ Archetype: The word archetype is commonly used to describe an original pattern or model from
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which all other things of the same kind are made. Archetypes are the literary images that grow out of the ‘‘collective unconscious,’’ a theory proposed by psychologist Carl Jung. They appear in literature as incidents and plots that repeat basic patterns of life. They may also appear as stereotyped characters. The ‘‘schlemiel’’ of Yiddish literature is an archetype. Autobiography: A narrative in which an individual tells his or her life story. Examples include Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Amy Hempel’s story ‘‘In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,’’ which has autobiographical characteristics even though it is a work of fiction. Avant-garde: A literary term that describes new writing that rejects traditional approaches to literature in favor of innovations in style or content. Twentieth-century examples of the literary avant-garde include the modernists and the minimalists.
B Belles-lettres: A French term meaning ‘‘fine letters’’ or ‘‘beautiful writing.’’ It is often used as a synonym for literature, typically referring to imaginative and artistic rather than scientific or expository writing. Current usage sometimes restricts the meaning to light or humorous writing and appreciative essays about literature. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland epitomizes the realm of belles-lettres. Bildungsroman: A German word meaning ‘‘novel of development.’’ The bildungsroman is a study of the maturation of a youthful character, typically brought about through a series of social or sexual encounters that lead to selfawareness. J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman, and Doris Lessing’s story ‘‘Through the Tunnel’’ exhibits characteristics of a bildungsroman as well. Black Aesthetic Movement: A period of artistic and literary development among African Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s. This was the first major African-American artistic movement since the Harlem Renaissance and was closely paralleled by the civil rights and black power movements. The black aesthetic writers attempted to produce works of art that would be meaningful to the black masses. Key figures in black aesthetics included one of its founders, poet and playwright Amiri
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Baraka, formerly known as Le Roi Jones; poet and essayist Haki R. Madhubuti, formerly Don L. Lee; poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez; and dramatist Ed Bullins. Works representative of the Black Aesthetic Movement include Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman, a 1964 Obie award-winner. Black Humor: Writing that places grotesque elements side by side with humorous ones in an attempt to shock the reader, forcing him or her to laugh at the horrifying reality of a disordered world. ‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter,’’ by Roald Dahl, in which a placid housewife murders her husband and serves the murder weapon to the investigating policemen, is an example of black humor.
C Catharsis: The release or purging of unwanted emotions—specifically fear and pity— brought about by exposure to art. The term was first used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics to refer to the desired effect of tragedy on spectators. Character: Broadly speaking, a person in a literary work. The actions of characters are what constitute the plot of a story, novel, or poem. There are numerous types of characters, ranging from simple, stereotypical figures to intricate, multifaceted ones. ‘‘Characterization’’ is the process by which an author creates vivid, believable characters in a work of art. This may be done in a variety of ways, including (1) direct description of the character by the narrator; (2) the direct presentation of the speech, thoughts, or actions of the character; and (3) the responses of other characters to the character. The term ‘‘character’’ also refers to a form originated by the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus that later became popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is a short essay or sketch of a person who prominently displays a specific attribute or quality, such as miserliness or ambition. ‘‘Miss Brill,’’ a story by Katherine Mansfield, is an example of a character sketch. Classical: In its strictest definition in literary criticism, classicism refers to works of ancient Greek or Roman literature. The term may also be used to describe a literary work of recognized importance (a ‘‘classic’’) from any time period or literature that exhibits the traits of classicism. Examples of later works
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and authors now described as classical include French literature of the seventeenth century, Western novels of the nineteenth century, and American fiction of the midnineteenth century such as that written by James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain.
Dramatic Poesie. Contemporary schools of criticism include deconstruction, feminist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, new historicist, postcolonialist, and reader-response.
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Climax: The turning point in a narrative, the moment when the conflict is at its most intense. Typically, the structure of stories, novels, and plays is one of rising action, in which tension builds to the climax, followed by falling action, in which tension lessens as the story moves to its conclusion.
Deconstruction: A method of literary criticism characterized by multiple conflicting interpretations of a given work. Deconstructionists consider the impact of the language of a work and suggest that the true meaning of the work is not necessarily the meaning that the author intended.
Comedy: One of two major types of drama, the other being tragedy. Its aim is to amuse, and it typically ends happily. Comedy assumes many forms, such as farce and burlesque, and uses a variety of techniques, from parody to satire. In a restricted sense the term comedy refers only to dramatic presentations, but in general usage it is commonly applied to nondramatic works as well.
Deduction: The process of reaching a conclusion through reasoning from general premises to a specific premise. Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes often used deductive reasoning to solve mysteries.
Comic Relief: The use of humor to lighten the mood of a serious or tragic story, especially in plays. The technique is very common in Elizabethan works, and can be an integral part of the plot or simply a brief event designed to break the tension of the scene. Conflict: The conflict in a work of fiction is the issue to be resolved in the story. It usually occurs between two characters, the protagonist and the antagonist, or between the protagonist and society or the protagonist and himself or herself. The conflict in Washington Irving’s story ‘‘The Devil and Tom Walker’’ is that the Devil wants Tom Walker’s soul but Tom does not want to go to hell.
Denotation: The definition of a word, apart from the impressions or feelings it creates in the reader. The word ‘‘apartheid’’ denotes a political and economic policy of segregation by race, but its connotations—oppression, slavery, inequality—are numerous. Denouement: A French word meaning ‘‘the unknotting.’’ In literature, it denotes the resolution of conflict in fiction or drama. The denouement follows the climax and provides an outcome to the primary plot situation as well as an explanation of secondary plot complications. A well-known example of denouement is the last scene of the play As You Like It by William Shakespeare, in which couples are married, an evildoer repents, the identities of two disguised characters are revealed, and a ruler is restored to power. Also known as ‘‘falling action.’’
Criticism: The systematic study and evaluation of literary works, usually based on a specific method or set of principles. An important part of literary studies since ancient times, the practice of criticism has given rise to numerous theories, methods, and ‘‘schools,’’ sometimes producing conflicting, even contradictory, interpretations of literature in general as well as of individual works. Even such basic issues as what constitutes a poem or a novel have been the subject of much criticism over the centuries. Seminal texts of literary criticism include Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Poetics, Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie, and John Dryden’s Of
Detective Story: A narrative about the solution of a mystery or the identification of a criminal. The conventions of the detective story include the detective’s scrupulous use of logic in solving the mystery; incompetent or ineffectual police; a suspect who appears guilty at first but is later proved innocent; and the detective’s friend or confidant— often the narrator—whose slowness in interpreting clues emphasizes by contrast the detective’s brilliance. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ is commonly regarded as the earliest example of this type of story. Other practitioners are Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie.
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Dialogue: Dialogue is conversation between people in a literary work. In its most restricted sense, it refers specifically to the speech of characters in a drama. As a specific literary genre, a ‘‘dialogue’’ is a composition in which characters debate an issue or idea. Didactic: A term used to describe works of literature that aim to teach a moral, religious, political, or practical lesson. Although didactic elements are often found inartistically pleasing works, the term ‘‘didactic’’ usually refers to literature in which the message is more important than the form. The term may also be used to criticize a work that the critic finds ‘‘overly didactic,’’ that is, heavy-handed in its delivery of a lesson. An example of didactic literature is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Dramatic Irony: Occurs when the reader of a work of literature knows something that a character in the work itself does not know. The irony is in the contrast between the intended meaning of the statements or actions of a character and the additional information understood by the audience. Dystopia: An imaginary place in a work of fiction where the characters lead dehumanized, fearful lives. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eightyfour, and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale portray versions of dystopia.
E Edwardian: Describes cultural conventions identified with the period of the reign of Edward VII of England (1901–1910). Writers of the Edwardian Age typically displayed a strong reaction against the propriety and conservatism of the Victorian Age. Their work often exhibits distrust of authority in religion, politics, and art and expresses strong doubts about the soundness of conventional values. Writers of this era include E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. Empathy: A sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself. Empathy is often used to describe the response of a reader to a literary character. Epilogue: A concluding statement or section of a literary work. In dramas, particularly those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the epilogue is a closing speech, often in verse, delivered by an actor at the end of a play and spoken directly to the audience.
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Epiphany: A sudden revelation of truth inspired by a seemingly trivial incident. The term was widely used by James Joyce in his critical writings, and the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners are commonly called ‘‘epiphanies.’’ Epistolary Novel: A novel in the form of letters. The form was particularly popular in the eighteenth century. The form can also be applied to short stories, as in Edwidge Danticat’s ‘‘Children of the Sea.’’ Epithet: A word or phrase, often disparaging or abusive, that expresses a character trait of someone or something. ‘‘The Napoleon of crime’’ is an epithet applied to Professor Moriarty, arch-rival of Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s series of detective stories. Existentialism: A predominantly twentiethcentury philosophy concerned with the nature and perception of human existence. There are two major strains of existentialist thought: atheistic and Christian. Followers of atheistic existentialism believe that the individual is alone in a godless universe and that the basic human condition is one of suffering and loneliness. Nevertheless, because there are no fixed values, individuals can create their own characters—indeed, they can shape themselves—through the exercise of free will. The atheistic strain culminates in and is popularly associated with the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Christian existentialists, on the other hand, believe that only in God may people find freedom from life’s anguish. The two strains hold certain beliefs in common: that existence cannot be fully understood or described through empirical effort; that anguish is a universal element of life; that individuals must bear responsibility for their actions; and that there is no common standard of behavior or perception for religious and ethical matters. Existentialist thought figures prominently in the works of such authors as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Albert Camus. Expatriatism: The practice of leaving one’s country to live for an extended period in another country. Literary expatriates include Irish author James Joyce who moved to Italy and France, American writers James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald who lived and wrote in
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Paris, and Polish novelist Joseph Conrad in England. Exposition: Writing intended to explain the nature of an idea, thing, or theme. Expository writing is often combined with description, narration, or argument. Expressionism: An indistinct literary term, originally used to describe an early twentiethcentury school of German painting. The term applies to almost any mode of unconventional, highly subjective writing that distorts reality in some way. Advocates of Expressionism include Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugene O’Neill, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce.
F Fable: A prose or verse narrative intended to convey amoral. Animals or inanimate objects with human characteristics often serve as characters in fables. A famous fable is Aesop’s ‘‘The Tortoise and the Hare.’’ Fantasy: A literary form related to mythology and folklore. Fantasy literature is typically set in non-existent realms and features supernatural beings. Notable examples of literature with elements of fantasy are Gabriel Ga´rcia Ma´rquez’s story ‘‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’’ and Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’’ Farce: A type of comedy characterized by broad humor, outlandish incidents, and often vulgar subject matter. Much of the comedy in film and television could more accurately be described as farce. Fiction: Any story that is the product of imagination rather than a documentation of fact. Characters and events in such narratives may be based in real life but their ultimate form and configuration is a creation of the author. Figurative Language: A technique in which an author uses figures of speech such as hyperbole, irony, metaphor, or simile for a particular effect. Figurative language is the opposite of literal language, in which every word is truthful, accurate, and free of exaggeration or embellishment.
Foil: A character in a work of literature whose physical or psychological qualities contrast strongly with, and therefore highlight, the corresponding qualities of another character. In his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle portrayed Dr. Watson as a man of normal habits and intelligence, making him a foil for the eccentric and unusually perceptive Sherlock Holmes. Folklore: Traditions and myths preserved in a culture or group of people. Typically, these are passed on by word of mouth in various forms—such as legends, songs, and proverbs—or preserved in customs and ceremonies. Washington Irving, in ‘‘The Devil and Tom Walker’’ and many of his other stories, incorporates many elements of the folklore of New England and Germany. Folktale: A story originating in oral tradition. Folk tales fall into a variety of categories, including legends, ghost stories, fairy tales, fables, and anecdotes based on historical figures and events. Foreshadowing: A device used in literature to create expectation or to set up an explanation of later developments. Edgar Allan Poe uses foreshadowing to create suspense in ‘‘The Fall of the House of Usher’’ when the narrator comments on the crumbling state of disrepair in which he finds the house.
G Genre: A category of literary work. Genre may refer to both the content of a given work— tragedy, comedy, horror, science fiction— and to its form, such as poetry, novel, or drama. Gilded Age: A period in American history during the 1870s and after characterized by political corruption and materialism. A number of important novels of social and political criticism were written during this time. Henry James and Kate Chopin are two writers who were prominent during the Gilded Age.
Flashback: A device used in literature to present action that occurred before the beginning of the story. Flashbacks are often introduced as the dreams or recollections of one or more characters.
Gothicism: In literature, works characterized by a taste for medieval or morbid characters and situations. A gothic novel prominently features elements of horror, the supernatural, gloom, and violence: clanking chains, terror, ghosts, medieval castles, and unexplained phenomena. The term ‘‘gothic novel’’ is also applied to novels that lack elements of the traditional Gothic setting
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but that create a similar atmosphere of terror or dread. The term can also be applied to stories, plays, and poems. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur are both gothic novels.
images do not follow the literal meaning of the words exactly. Images in literature are usually visual, but the term ‘‘image’’ can also refer to the representation of any sensory experience.
Grotesque: In literature, a work that is characterized by exaggeration, deformity, freakishness, and disorder. The grotesque often includes an element of comic absurdity. Examples of the grotesque can be found in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Heller, and Shirley Jackson.
Imagery: The array of images in a literary work. Also used to convey the author’s overall use of figurative language in a work.
H Harlem Renaissance: The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s is generally considered the first significant movement of black writers and artists in the United States. During this period, new and established black writers, many of whom lived in the region of New York City known as Harlem, published more fiction and poetry than ever before, the first influential black literary journals were established, and black authors and artists received their first widespread recognition and serious critical appraisal. Among the major writers associated with this period are Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Zora Neale Hurston. Hero/Heroine: The principal sympathetic character in a literary work. Heroes and heroines typically exhibit admirable traits: idealism, courage, and integrity, for example. Famous heroes and heroines of literature include Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara, and the anonymous narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
In medias res: A Latin term meaning ‘‘in the middle of things.’’ It refers to the technique of beginning a story at its midpoint and then using various flashback devices to reveal previous action. This technique originated in such epics as Virgil’s Aeneid. Interior Monologue: A narrative technique in which characters’ thoughts are revealed in a way that appears to be uncontrolled by the author. The interior monologue typically aims to reveal the inner self of a character. It portrays emotional experiences as they occur at both a conscious and unconscious level. One of the best-known interior monologues in English is the Molly Bloom section at the close of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘‘The Jilting of Granny Weatherall’’ is also told in the form of an interior monologue. Irony: In literary criticism, the effect of language in which the intended meaning is the opposite of what is stated. The title of Jonathan Swift’s ‘‘A Modest Proposal’’ is ironic because what Swift proposes in this essay is cannibalism—hardly ‘‘modest.’’
Hyperbole: Deliberate exaggeration used to achieve an effect. In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth hyperbolizes when she says, ‘‘All the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten this little hand.’’
J Jargon: Language that is used or understood only by a select group of people. Jargon may refer to terminology used in a certain profession, such as computer jargon, or it may refer to any nonsensical language that is not understood by most people. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and James Thurber’s ‘‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’’ both use jargon.
I Image: A concrete representation of an object or sensory experience. Typically, such a representation helps evoke the feelings associated with the object or experience itself. Images are either ‘‘literal’’ or ‘‘figurative.’’ Literal images are especially concrete and involve little or no extension of the obvious meaning of the words used to express them. Figurative
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K Knickerbocker Group: An indistinct group of New York writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Members of the group were linked only by location and a common theme: New York life. Two famous members of the Knickerbocker Group were Washington Irving and William Cullen
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Bryant. The group’s name derives from Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York.
L Literal Language: An author uses literal language when he or she writes without exaggerating or embellishing the subject matter and without any tools of figurative language. To say ‘‘He ran very quickly down the street’’ is to use literal language, whereas to say ‘‘He ran like a hare down the street’’ would be using figurative language. Literature: Literature is broadly defined as any written or spoken material, but the term most often refers to creative works. Literature includes poetry, drama, fiction, and many kinds of nonfiction writing, as well as oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions not necessarily preserved in a written format, such as films and television programs. Lost Generation: A term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. The term is commonly applied to Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.
M Magic Realism: A form of literature that incorporates fantasy elements or supernatural occurrences into the narrative and accepts them as truth. Gabriel Ga´rcia Ma´rquez and Laura Esquivel are two writers known for their works of magic realism. Metaphor: A figure of speech that expresses an idea through the image of another object. Metaphors suggest the essence of the first object by identifying it with certain qualities of the second object. An example is ‘‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun’’ in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Here, Juliet, the first object, is identified with qualities of the second object, the sun.
Modernism: Modern literary practices. Also, the principles of a literary school that lasted from roughly the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of World War II. Modernism is defined by its rejection of the literary conventions of the nineteenth century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste, traditions, and economic values. Many writers are associated with the concepts of modernism, including Albert Camus, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, and James Joyce. Monologue: A composition, written or oral, by a single individual. More specifically, a speech given by a single individual in a drama or other public entertainment. It has no set length, although it is usually several or more lines long. ‘‘I Stand Here Ironing’’ by Tillie Olsen is an example of a story written in the form of a monologue. Mood: The prevailing emotions of a work or of the author in his or her creation of the work. The mood of a work is not always what might be expected based on its subject matter. Motif: A theme, character type, image, metaphor, or other verbal element that recurs throughout a single work of literature or occurs in a number of different works over a period of time. For example, the color white in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is a ‘‘specific’’ motif, while the trials of starcrossed lovers is a ‘‘conventional’’ motif from the literature of all periods.
N Narration: The telling of a series of events, real or invented. A narration may be either a simple narrative, in which the events are recounted chronologically, or a narrative with a plot, in which the account is given in a style reflecting the author’s artistic concept of the story. Narration is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘‘storyline.’’
Minimalism: A literary style characterized by spare, simple prose with few elaborations. In minimalism, the main theme of the work is often never discussed directly. Amy Hempel and Ernest Hemingway are two writers known for their works of minimalism.
Narrative: A verse or prose accounting of an event or sequence of events, real or invented. The term is also used as an adjective in the sense ‘‘method of narration.’’ For example, in literary criticism, the expression ‘‘narrative technique’’ usually refers to the way the author structures and presents his or her story. Different narrative forms include
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diaries, travelogues, novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other fictional forms. Narrator: The teller of a story. The narrator may be the author or a character in the story through whom the author speaks. Huckleberry Finn is the narrator of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Novella: An Italian term meaning ‘‘story.’’ This term has been especially used to describe fourteenth-century Italian tales, but it also refers to modern short novels. Modern novellas include Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilich, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
in the New Testament, notably ‘‘The Prodigal Son,’’ but parables also are used in Sufism, rabbinic literature, Hasidism, and Zen Buddhism. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story ‘‘Gimpel the Fool’’ exhibits characteristics of a parable. Paradox: A statement that appears illogical or contradictory at first, but may actually point to an underlying truth. A literary example of a paradox is George Orwell’s statement ‘‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’’ in Animal Farm.
O Oedipus Complex: A son’s romantic obsession with his mother. The phrase is derived from the story of the ancient Theban hero Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, and was popularized by Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. Literary occurrences of the Oedipus complex include Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and D. H. Lawrence’s ‘‘The Rocking-Horse Winner.’’ Onomatopoeia: The use of words whose sounds express or suggest their meaning. In its simplest sense, onomatopoeia may be represented by words that mimic the sounds they denote such as ‘‘hiss’’ or ‘‘meow.’’ At a more subtle level, the pattern and rhythm of sounds and rhymes of a line or poem may be onomatopoeic. Oral Tradition: A process by which songs, ballads, folklore, and other material are transmitted by word of mouth. The tradition of oral transmission predates the written record systems of literate society. Oral transmission preserves material sometimes over generations, although often with variations. Memory plays a large part in the recitation and preservation of orally transmitted material. Native American myths and legends, and African folktales told by plantation slaves are examples of orally transmitted literature.
P Parable: A story intended to teach a moral lesson or answer an ethical question. Examples of parables are the stories told by Jesus Christ
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Parody: In literature, this term refers to an imitation of a serious literary work or the signature style of a particular author in a ridiculous manner. Atypical parody adopts the style of the original and applies it to an inappropriate subject for humorous effect. Parody is a form of satire and could be considered the literary equivalent of a caricature or cartoon. Henry Fielding’s Shamela is a parody of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Persona: A Latin term meaning ‘‘mask.’’ Personae are the characters in a fictional work of literature. The persona generally functions as a mask through which the author tells a story in a voice other than his or her own. A persona is usually either a character in a story who acts as a narrator or an ‘‘implied author,’’ a voice created by the author to act as the narrator for himself or herself. The persona in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’ is the unnamed young mother experiencing a mental breakdown. Personification: A figure of speech that gives human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, and inanimate objects. To say that ‘‘the sun is smiling’’ is to personify the sun. Plot: The pattern of events in a narrative or drama. In its simplest sense, the plot guides the author in composing the work and helps the reader follow the work. Typically, plots exhibit causality and unity and have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes, however, a plot may consist of a series of disconnected events, in which case it is known as an ‘‘episodic plot.’’ Poetic Justice: An outcome in a literary work, not necessarily a poem, in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished, especially in ways that particularly fit their virtues or crimes. For example, a murderer may
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himself be murdered, or a thief will find himself penniless. Poetic License: Distortions of fact and literary convention made by a writer—not always a poet—for the sake of the effect gained. Poetic license is closely related to the concept of ‘‘artistic freedom.’’ An author exercises poetic license by saying that a pile of money ‘‘reaches as high as a mountain’’ when the pile is actually only a foot or two high. Point of View: The narrative perspective from which a literary work is presented to the reader. There are four traditional points of view. The ‘‘third person omniscient’’ gives the reader a ‘‘godlike’’ perspective, unrestricted by time or place, from which to see actions and look into the minds of characters. This allows the author to comment openly on characters and events in the work. The ‘‘third person’’ point of view presents the events of the story from outside of any single character’s perception, much like the omniscient point of view, but the reader must understand the action as it takes place and without any special insight into characters’ minds or motivations. The ‘‘first person’’ or ‘‘personal’’ point of view relates events as they are perceived by a single character. The main character ‘‘tells’’ the story and may offer opinions about the action and characters which differ from those of the author. Much less common than omniscient, third person, and first person is the ‘‘second person’’ point of view, wherein the author tells the story as if it is happening to the reader. James Thurber employs the omniscient point of view in his short story ‘‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.’’ Ernest Hemingway’s ‘‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’’ is a short story told from the third person point of view. Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn is presented from the first person viewpoint. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City is an example of a novel which uses the second person point of view.
Post-Aesthetic Movement: An artistic response made by African Americans to the black aesthetic movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Writers since that time have adopted a somewhat different tone in their work, with less emphasis placed on the disparity between black and white in the United States. In the words of post-aesthetic authors such as Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Kristin Hunter, African Americans are portrayed as looking inward for answers to their own questions, rather than always looking to the outside world. Two well-known examples of works produced as part of the post-aesthetic movement are the Pulitzer Prize–winning novels The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Beloved by Toni Morrison. Postmodernism: Writing from the 1960s forward characterized by experimentation and application of modernist elements, which include existentialism and alienation. Postmodernists have gone a step further in the rejection of tradition begun with the modernists by also rejecting traditional forms, preferring the anti-novel over the novel and the antihero over the hero. Postmodern writers include Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Drabble, and Gabriel Ga´rcia Ma´rquez. Prologue: An introductory section of a literary work. It often contains information establishing the situation of the characters or presents information about the setting, time period, or action. In drama, the prologue is spoken by a chorus or by one of the principal characters. Prose: A literary medium that attempts to mirror the language of everyday speech. It is distinguished from poetry by its use of unmetered, unrhymed language consisting of logically related sentences. Prose is usually grouped into paragraphs that form a cohesive whole such as an essay or a novel. The term is sometimes used to mean an author’s general writing.
Pornography: Writing intended to provoke feelings of lust in the reader. Such works are often condemned by critics and teachers, but those which can be shown to have literary value are viewed less harshly. Literary works that have been described as pornographic include D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Protagonist: The central character of a story who serves as a focus for its themes and incidents and as the principal rationale for its development. The protagonist is sometimes referred to in discussions of modern literature as the hero or anti-hero. Well-known protagonists are Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
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R Realism: A nineteenth-century European literary movement that sought to portray familiar characters, situations, and settings in a realistic manner. This was done primarily by using an objective narrative point of view and through the buildup of accurate detail. The standard for success of any realistic work depends on how faithfully it transfers common experience into fictional forms. The realistic method may be altered or extended, as in stream of consciousness writing, to record highly subjective experience. Contemporary authors who often write in a realistic way include Nadine Gordimer and Grace Paley. Resolution: The portion of a story following the climax, in which the conflict is resolved. The resolution of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is neatly summed up in the following sentence: ‘‘Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang and every body smiled.’’ Rising Action: The part of a drama where the plot becomes increasingly complicated. Rising action leads up to the climax, or turning point, of a drama. The final ‘‘chase scene’’ of an action film is generally the rising action which culminates in the film’s climax. Roman a clef: A French phrase meaning ‘‘novel with a key.’’ It refers to a narrative in which real persons are portrayed under fictitious names. Jack Kerouac, for example, portrayed various friends under fictitious names in the novel On the Road. D. H. Lawrence based ‘‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’’ on a family he knew. Romanticism: This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it refers to a European intellectual and artistic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that sought greater freedom of personal expression than that allowed by the strict rules of literary form and logic of the eighteenth-century neoclassicists. The Romantics preferred emotional and imaginative expression to rational analysis. They considered the individual to be at the center of all experience and so placed him or her at the center of their art. The Romantics believed that the creative imagination reveals nobler truths—unique feelings and attitudes—than those that could be discovered by logic or by scientific examination. ‘‘Romanticism’’ is also used as a
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general term to refer to a type of sensibility found in all periods of literary history and usually considered to be in opposition to the principles of classicism. In this sense, Romanticism signifies any work or philosophy in which the exotic or dreamlike figure strongly, or that is devoted to individualistic expression, self-analysis, or a pursuit of a higher realm of knowledge than can be discovered by human reason. Prominent Romantics include JeanJacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
S Satire: A work that uses ridicule, humor, and wit to criticize and provoke change in human nature and institutions. Voltaire’s novella Candide and Jonathan Swift’s essay ‘‘A Modest Proposal’’ are both satires. Flannery O’Connor’s portrayal of the family in ‘‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’’ is a satire of a modern, Southern, American family. Science Fiction: A type of narrative based upon real or imagined scientific theories and technology. Science fiction is often peopled with alien creatures and set on other planets or in different dimensions. Popular writers of science fiction are Isaac Asimov, Karel Capek, Ray Bradbury, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Setting: The time, place, and culture in which the action of a narrative takes place. The elements of setting may include geographic location, characters’s physical and mental environments, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the historical time in which the action takes place. Short Story: A fictional prose narrative shorter and more focused than a novella. The short story usually deals with a single episode and often a single character. The ‘‘tone,’’ the author’s attitude toward his or her subject and audience, is uniform throughout. The short story frequently also lacks denouement, ending instead at its climax. Signifying Monkey: A popular trickster figure in black folklore, with hundreds of tales about this character documented since the 19th century. Henry Louis Gates Jr. examines the history of the signifying monkey in The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, published in 1988.
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Simile: A comparison, usually using ‘‘like’’ or ‘‘as,’’ of two essentially dissimilar things, as in ‘‘coffee as cold as ice’’ or ‘‘He sounded like a broken record.’’ The title of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants’’ contains a simile.
will soon be revealed. Suspense in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is sustained throughout by the question of whether or not the Prince will achieve what he has been instructed to do and of what he intends to do.
Socialist Realism: The Socialist Realism school of literary theory was proposed by Maxim Gorky and established as a dogma by the first Soviet Congress of Writers. It demanded adherence to a communist worldview in works of literature. Its doctrines required an objective viewpoint comprehensible to the working classes and themes of social struggle featuring strong proletarian heroes. Gabriel Ga´rcia Ma´rquez’s stories exhibit some characteristics of Socialist Realism.
Symbol: Something that suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. Literary symbols are of two types: those that carry complex associations of meaning no matter what their contexts, and those that derive their suggestive meaning from their functions in specific literary works. Examples of symbols are sunshine suggesting happiness, rain suggesting sorrow, and storm clouds suggesting despair.
Stereotype: A stereotype was originally the name for a duplication made during the printing process; this led to its modern definition as a person or thing that is (or is assumed to be) the same as all others of its type. Common stereotypical characters include the absentminded professor, the nagging wife, the troublemaking teenager, and the kindhearted grandmother. Stream of Consciousness: A narrative technique for rendering the inward experience of a character. This technique is designed to give the impression of an ever-changing series of thoughts, emotions, images, and memories in the spontaneous and seemingly illogical order that they occur in life. The textbook example of stream of consciousness is the last section of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Structure: The form taken by a piece of literature. The structure may be made obvious for ease of understanding, as in nonfiction works, or may obscured for artistic purposes, as in some poetry or seemingly ‘‘unstructured’’ prose. Style: A writer’s distinctive manner of arranging words to suit his or her ideas and purpose in writing. The unique imprint of the author’s personality upon his or her writing, style is the product of an author’s way of arranging ideas and his or her use of diction, different sentence structures, rhythm, figures of speech, rhetorical principles, and other elements of composition.
T Tale: A story told by a narrator with a simple plot and little character development. Tales are usually relatively short and often carry a simple message. Examples of tales can be found in the works of Saki, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, and O. Henry. Tall Tale: A humorous tale told in a straightforward, credible tone but relating absolutely impossible events or feats of the characters. Such tales were commonly told of frontier adventures during the settlement of the west in the United States. Literary use of tall tales can be found in Washington Irving’s History of New York, Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, and in the German R. F. Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narratives of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. Theme: The main point of a work of literature. The term is used interchangeably with thesis. Many works have multiple themes. One of the themes of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘‘Young Goodman Brown’’ is loss of faith.
Suspense: A literary device in which the author maintains the audience’s attention through the buildup of events, the outcome of which
Tone: The author’s attitude toward his or her audience maybe deduced from the tone of the work. A formal tone may create distance or convey politeness, while an informal tone may encourage a friendly, intimate, or intrusive feeling in the reader. The author’s attitude toward his or her subject matter may also be deduced from the tone of the words he or she uses in discussing it. The tone of John F. Kennedy’s speech which included
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the appeal to ‘‘ask not what your country can do for you’’ was intended to instill feelings of camaraderie and national pride in listeners. Tragedy: A drama in prose or poetry about a noble, courageous hero of excellent character who, because of some tragic character flaw, brings ruin upon him- or herself. Tragedy treats its subjects in a dignified and serious manner, using poetic language to help evoke pity and fear and bring about catharsis, a purging of these emotions. The tragic form was practiced extensively by the ancient Greeks. The classical form of tragedy was revived in the sixteenth century; it flourished especially on the Elizabethan stage. In modern times, dramatists have attempted to adapt the form to the needs of modern society by drawing their heroes from the ranks of ordinary men and women and defining the nobility of these heroes in terms of spirit rather than exalted social standing. Some contemporary works that are thought of as tragedies include The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.
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Tragic Flaw: In a tragedy, the quality within the hero or heroine which leads to his or her downfall. Examples of the tragic flaw include Othello’s jealousy and Hamlet’s indecisiveness, although most great tragedies defy such simple interpretation.
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U Utopia: A fictional perfect place, such as ‘‘paradise’’ or ‘‘heaven.’’ An early literary utopia was described in Plato’s Republic, and in modern literature, Ursula K. Le Guin depicts a utopia in ‘‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’’
V Victorian: Refers broadly to the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837-1901) and to anything with qualities typical of that era. For example, the qualities of smug narrowmindedness, bourgeois materialism, faith in social progress, and priggish morality are often considered Victorian. In literature, the Victorian Period was the great age of the English novel, and the latter part of the era saw the rise of movements such as decadence and symbolism.
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Cumulative Author/Title Index A A & P (Updike): V3 Achebe, Chinua Civil Peace: V13 Vengeful Creditor: V3 Adams, Alice Greyhound People: V21 The Last Lovely City: V14 African Passions (Rivera): V15 Africans (Kohler): V18 Aftermath (Waters): V22 After Twenty Years (Henry): V27 Agu¨eros, Jack Dominoes: V13 Aiken, Conrad Silent Snow, Secret Snow: V8 The Aleph (Borges): V17 Alexie, Sherman Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner’’ at Woodstock: V18 All the Years of Her Life (Callaghan): V19 Allen, Woody The Kugelmass Episode: V21 Allende, Isabel And of Clay Are We Created: V11 The Gold of Toma´s Vargas: V16 Alvarez, Julia Liberty: V27 America and I (Yezierska): V15 American History (Cofer): V27 Amigo Brothers (Thomas): V28 And of Clay Are We Created (Allende): V11
Anderson, Sherwood Death in the Woods: V10 Hands: V11 Sophistication: V4 Animal Stories (Brown): V14 Anxiety (Paley): V27 The Arabian Nights (Burton): V21 Araby (Joyce): V1 Art Work (Byatt): V26 Asimov, Isaac Nightfall: V17 Astronomer’s Wife (Boyle): V13 Atwood, Margaret Happy Endings: V13 Rape Fantasies: V3 Average Waves in Unprotected Waters (Tyler): V17 Axolotl (Corta´zar): V3
B Babel, Isaac My First Goose: V10 Babette’s Feast (Dinesen): V20 Babylon Revisited (Fitzgerald): V4 Baida, Peter A Nurse’s Story: V25 Baldwin, James The Rockpile: V18 Sonny’s Blues: V2 Balzac, Honore de La Grande Brete`che: V10 Bambara, Toni Cade Blues Ain’t No Mockin Bird: V4 Gorilla, My Love: V21 The Lesson: V12 Raymond’s Run: V7
Barn Burning (Faulkner): V5 Barnes, Julian Melon: V24 Barrett, Andrea The English Pupil: V24 Barth, John Lost in the Funhouse: V6 Barthelme, Donald The Indian Uprising: V17 Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning: V3 Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street (Melville): V3 The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant (Wetherell): V28 Bates, H. E. The Daffodil Sky: V7 The Bear (Faulkner): V2 The Beast in the Jungle (James): V6 Beattie, Ann Imagined Scenes: V20 Janus: V9 Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner’’ at Woodstock (Alexie): V18 Beckett, Samuel Dante and the Lobster: V15 The Beginning of Homewood (Wideman): V12 Bellow, Saul Leaving the Yellow House: V12 A Silver Dish: V22 Bender, Aimee The Rememberer: V25
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Benet, Stephen Vincent An End to Dreams: V22 Berriault, Gina The Stone Boy: V7 Women in Their Beds: V11 The Best Girlfriend You Never Had (Houston): V17 Bierce, Ambrose The Boarded Window: V9 A Horseman in the Sky: V27 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: V2 Big Black Good Man (Wright): V20 Big Blonde (Parker): V5 The Birds (du Maurier): V16 Bisson, Terry The Toxic Donut: V18 Black Boy (Boyle): V14 The Black Cat (Poe): V26 Black Is My Favorite Color (Malamud): V16 Blackberry Winter (Warren): V8 Bliss (Mansfield): V10 Blood-Burning Moon (Toomer): V5 Bloodchild (Butler): V6 The Bloody Chamber (Carter): V4 Bloom, Amy Silver Water: V11 Blues Ain’t No Mockin Bird (Bambara): V4 The Blues I’m Playing (Hughes): V7 The Boarded Window (Bierce): V9 Boccaccio, Giovanni Federigo’s Falcon: V28 Boll, Heinrich Christmas Not Just Once a Year: V20 Borges, Jorge Luis The Aleph: V17 The Circular Ruins: V26 The Garden of Forking Paths: V9 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote: V4 Borowski, Tadeusz This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen: V13 Boule de Suif (Maupassant): V21 Bowen, Elizabeth A Day in the Dark: V22 The Demon Lover: V5 Bowles, Paul The Eye: V17 A Boy and His Dog (Ellison): V14 Boyle, Kay Astronomer’s Wife: V13 Black Boy: V14 The White Horses of Vienna: V10 Boyle, T. Coraghessan Stones in My Passway, Hellhound on My Trail: V13 The Underground Gardens: V19 Boys and Girls (Munro): V5
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Bradbury, Ray The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: V28 There Will Come Soft Rains: V1 The Veldt: V20 Brazzaville Teen-ager (Friedman): V18 Bright and Morning Star (Wright): V15 Brokeback Mountain (Proulx): V23 Brown, Jason Animal Stories: V14 Brownies (Packer): V25 Burton, Richard The Arabian Nights: V21 Butler, Octavia Bloodchild: V6 Butler, Robert Olen A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: V11 Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle: V22 Byatt, A. S. Art Work: V26
C Callaghan, Morley All the Years of Her Life: V19 Calvino, Italo The Feathered Ogre: V12 Camus, Albert The Guest: V4 The Canal (Yates): V24 The Canterville Ghost (Wilde): V7 Capote, Truman A Christmas Memory: V2 Caroline’s Wedding (Danticat): V25 Carter, Angela The Bloody Chamber: V4 The Erlking: V12 Carver, Raymond Cathedral: V6 Errand: V13 A Small, Good Thing: V23 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: V12 Where I’m Calling From: V3 The Cask of Amontillado (Poe): V7 The Catbird Seat (Thurber): V10 Cathedral (Carver): V6 Cather, Willa The Diamond Mine: V16 Neighbour Rosicky: V7 Paul’s Case: V2 A Wagner Matinee: V27 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (Twain): V1 The Centaur (Saramago): V23 The Challenge (Vargas Llosa): V14 Chandra, Vikram Dharma: V16
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Charles (Jackson): V27 Cheever, John The Country Husband: V14 The Swimmer: V2 Chekhov, Anton The Darling: V13 Gooseberries: V14 Gusev: V26 The Lady with the Pet Dog: V5 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell The Goophered Grapevine: V26 The Sheriff’s Children: V11 Children of the Sea (Danticat): V1 Chopin, Kate De´sire´e’s Baby: V13 A Point at Issue!: V17 The Storm: V26 The Story of an Hour: V2 A Christmas Memory (Capote): V2 Christmas Not Just Once a Year (Bo¨ll): V20 The Chrysanthemums (Steinbeck): V6 A Circle in the Fire (O’Connor): V19 The Circular Ruins (Borges): V26 Cisneros, Sandra Eleven: V27 Little Miracles, Kept Promises: V13 Woman Hollering Creek: V3 Civil Peace (Achebe): V13 Clarke, Arthur C. ‘‘If I Forget Thee, O Earth. . .’’: V18 The Star: V4 A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (Hemingway): V9 Cofer, Judith Ortiz American History: V27 Collier, Eugenia W. Marigolds: V28 Connell, Richard The Most Dangerous Game: V1 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness: V12 The Secret Sharer: V1 Conscience of the Court (Hurston): V21 A Conversation from the Third Floor (El-Bisatie): V17 A Conversation with My Father (Paley): V3 The Conversion of the Jews (Roth): V18 Corta´zar, Julio Axolotl: V3 House Taken Over: V28 The Pursuer: V20 The Country Husband (Cheever): V14 Crane, Stephen A Mystery of Heroism: V28 The Open Boat: V4
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Crazy Sunday (Fitzgerald): V21 The Curing Woman (Morales): V19
The Daffodil Sky (Bates): V7 Dahl, Roald Lamb to the Slaughter: V4 Dante and the Lobster (Beckett): V15 Danticat, Edwidge Caroline’s Wedding: V25 Children of the Sea: V1 The Darling (Chekhov): V13 Davies, Peter Ho Think of England: V21 Davis, Rebecca Harding Life in the Iron Mills: V26 A Day in the Dark (Bowen): V22 Day of the Butterfly (Munro): V28 de Balzac, Honore La Grande Brete`che: V10 de Maupassant, Guy Boule de Suif: V21 The Necklace: V4 Two Friends: V28 de Unamuno, Miguel Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr: V20 The Dead (Joyce): V6 Death in the Woods (Anderson): V10 Death in Venice (Mann): V9 The Death of Ivan Ilych (Tolstoy): V5 Debbie and Julie (Lessing): V12 The Deep (Swan): V23 The Demon Lover (Bowen): V5 Desai, Anita Games at Twilight: V28 Desiree’s Baby (Chopin): V13 The Destructors (Greene): V14 The Devil and Tom Walker (Irving): V1 Devlin, Anne Naming the Names: V17 Dharma (Chandra): V16 The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (Fitzgerald): V25 The Diamond Mine (Cather): V16 Diaz, Junot The Sun, the Moon, the Stars: V20 The Difference (Glasgow): V9 Dinesen, Isak Babette’s Feast: V20 The Ring: V6 The Sailor-Boy’s Tale: V13 Sorrow-Acre: V3 Disorder and Early Sorrow (Mann): V4 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee Meeting Mrinal: V24 Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter: V18 Doctorow, E. L. The Writer in the Family: V27
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E The Eatonville Anthology (Hurston): V1 Edwards, Kim The Way It Felt to Be Falling: V18 Eisenberg, Deborah Someone to Talk To: V24 El-Bisatie, Mohamed A Conversation from the Third Floor: V17 Elbow Room (McPherson): V23 The Elephant Vanishes (Murakami): V23 Eleven (Cisneros): V27 Eliot, George The Lifted Veil: V8 Ellison, Harlan A Boy and His Dog: V14 I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: V15 Jeffty Is Five: V13 ‘‘Repent, Harlequin!’’ Said the Ticktockman: V21 Ellison, Ralph The Invisible Man, or Battle Royal: V11 King of the Bingo Game: V1 The End of Old Horse (Ortiz): V22 An End to Dreams (Bene´t): V22 The English Pupil (Barrett): V24 Erdrich, Louise Fleur: V22 The Red Convertible: V14 The Erlking (Carter): V12 Errand (Carver): V13 The Eskimo Connection (Yamamoto): V14 Eveline (Joyce): V19 Everyday Use (Walker): V2 Everything That Rises Must Converge (O’Connor): V10 Exchanging Glances (Wolf): V14 The Eye (Bowles): V17
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Eyes of a Blue Dog (Garcı´ a Ma´rquez): V21
F The Fall of Edward Barnard (Maugham): V17 The Fall of the House of Usher (Poe): V2 The Far and the Near (Wolfe): V18 Far, Sui Sin Mrs. Spring Fragrance: V4 The Fat Girl (Dubus): V10 Faulkner, William Barn Burning: V5 The Bear: V2 Race at Morning: V27 A Rose for Emily: V6 That Evening Sun: V12 The Feathered Ogre (Calvino): V12 Federigo’s Falcon (Boccaccio) V28 Ferrell, Carolyn Proper Library: V23 Fever (Wideman): V6 The First Seven Years (Malamud): V13 The First Year of My Life (Spark): V28 Fish (McCorkle): V24 Fitzgerald, F. Scott Babylon Revisited: V4 Crazy Sunday: V21 The Diamond as Big as the Ritz: V25 Winter Dreams: V15 Flaubert, Gustave A Simple Heart: V6 Fleur (Erdrich): V22 Flight (Steinbeck): V3 Flowering Judas (Porter): V8 Fountains in the Rain (Mishima): V12 Four Summers (Oates): V17 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins A New England Nun: V8 Old Woman Magoun: V26 The Revolt of ‘Mother’: V4 Friedman, Bruce Jay Brazzaville Teen-ager: V18
G Gaines, Ernest The Sky is Gray: V5 Galsworthy, John The Japanese Quince: V3 Games at Twilight (Desai): V28 Garcı´ a Ma´rquez, Gabriel Eyes of a Blue Dog: V21 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: V1 A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: V6 The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock: V16
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Doerr, Anthony The Shell Collector: V25 The Dog of Tithwal (Manto): V15 Dominoes (Agu¨eros): V13 Don’t Look Now (du Maurier): V14 The Door in the Wall (Wells): V3 Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Grand Inquisitor: V8 Doyle, Arthur Conan The Red-Headed League: V2 du Maurier, Daphne The Birds: V16 Don’t Look Now: V14 Dubus, Andre The Fat Girl: V10 Dybek, Stuart Hot Ice: V23
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The Garden of Forking Paths (Borges): V9 The Garden Party (Mansfield): V8 Gardner, John Redemption: V8 Gibson, William Johnny Mnemonic: V26 The Gift of the Magi (Henry): V2 Gilchrist, Ellen Victory Over Japan: V9 The Gilded Six-Bits (Hurston): V11 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Three Thanksgivings: V18 The Yellow Wallpaper: V1 Gimpel the Fool (Singer): V2 Girl (Kincaid): V7 A Girl like Phyl (Highsmith): V25 The Girls (Williams): V25 Glasgow, Ellen The Difference: V9 Glaspell, Susan A Jury of Her Peers: V3 Gogol, Nikolai The Overcoat: V7 The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind (Bradbury): V28 The Gold of Toma´s Vargas (Allende): V16 The Good Doctor (Haslett): V24 A Good Man Is Hard to Find (O’Connor): V2 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Butler): V11 The Good Shopkeeper (Upadhyay): V22 Goodbye, Columbus (Roth): V12 The Goophered Grapevine (Chesnutt): V26 Gooseberries (Chekhov): V14 Gordimer, Nadine Once Upon a Time: V28 Town and Country Lovers: V14 The Train from Rhodesia: V2 The Ultimate Safari: V19 Gorilla, My Love (Bambara): V21 The Grand Inquisitor (Dostoevsky): V8 The Grave (Porter): V11 A Great Day (Sargeson): V20 Great Day (Malouf): V24 Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases (Gustafsson): V22 The Green Leaves (Ogot): V15 Greene, Graham The Destructors: V14 Greyhound People (Adams): V21 The Guest (Camus): V4 Guests of the Nation (O’Connor): V5 A Guide to Berlin (Nabokov): V6 Gusev (Chekhov): V26 Gustafsson, Lars Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases: V22
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H Half a Day (Mahfouz): V9 The Half-Skinned Steer (Proulx): V18 Han’s Crime (Naoya): V5 Hands (Anderson): V11 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World (Garcı´ a Ma´rquez): V1 Happy Endings (Atwood): V13 Harrison Bergeron (Vonnegut): V5 Harte, Bret The Outcasts of Poker Flat: V3 The Harvest (Rivera): V15 Haslett, Adam The Good Doctor: V24 Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable: V7 My Kinsman, Major Molineux: V11 The Wives of the Dead: V15 Young Goodman Brown: V1 He (Porter): V16 Head, Bessie Life: V13 Snapshots of a Wedding: V5 Heart of Darkness (Conrad): V12 Heinlein, Robert A. Waldo: V7 Helprin, Mark Perfection: V25 Hemingway, Ernest A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: V9 Hills Like White Elephants: V6 In Another Country: V8 The Killers: V17 The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: V1 The Snows of Kilimanjaro: V11 Soldier’s Home: V26 Hemon, Aleksandar Islands: V22 Hempel, Amy In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried: V2 Hendel, Yehudit Small Change: V14 Henne Fire (Singer): V16 Henry, O. After Twenty Years: V27 The Gift of the Magi: V2 Mammon and the Archer: V18 Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (McCracken): V25 Highsmith, Patricia A Girl like Phyl: V25 Hills Like White Elephants (Hemingway): V6 The Hitchhiking Game (Kundera): V10 Hoeg, Peter Journey into a Dark Heart: V18
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Holiday (Porter): V23 A Horse and Two Goats (Narayan): V5 A Horseman in the Sky (Bierce): V27 Hot Ice (Dybek): V23 House Taken Over (Corta´zar): V28 Houston, Pam The Best Girlfriend You Never Had: V17 How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again (Oates): V8 How Much Land Does a Man Need? (Tolstoy): V28 How to Tell a True War Story (O’Brien): V15 Hughes, Langston The Blues I’m Playing: V7 Slave on the Block: V4 A Hunger Artist (Kafka): V7 Hurst, James The Scarlet Ibis: V23 Hurston, Zora Neale Conscience of the Court: V21 The Eatonville Anthology: V1 The Gilded Six-Bits: V11 Spunk: V6 Sweat: V19
I I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (Ellison): V15 I Stand Here Ironing (Olsen): V1 If I Forget Thee, O Earth. . .’’ (Clarke): V18 If You Sing like That for Me (Sharma): V21 Imagined Scenes (Beattie): V20 Immigration Blues (Santos): V19 Immortality (Yiyun Li): V24 In Another Country (Hemingway): V8 In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried (Hempel): V2 In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (Wolff): V4 In the Kindergarten (Jin): V17 In the Middle of the Fields (Lavin): V23 In the Penal Colony (Kafka): V3 In the Shadow of War (Okri): V20 In the Zoo (Stafford): V21 The Indian Uprising (Barthelme): V17 The Interlopers (Saki): V15 The Invalid’s Story (Twain): V16 The Invisible Man, or Battle Royal (Ellison): V11 Irving, Washington The Devil and Tom Walker: V1 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: V8 Rip Van Winkle: V16 Islands (Hemon): V22
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K Kafka, Franz A Hunger Artist: V7 In the Penal Colony: V3 The Metamorphosis: V12 Kew Gardens (Woolf): V12 The Killers (Hemingway): V17 Kincaid, Jamaica Girl: V7 What I Have Been Doing Lately: V5 King of the Bingo Game (Ellison): V1 Kingston, Maxine Hong On Discovery: V3 Kipling, Rudyard Mowgli’s Brothers: V22 Mrs. Bathurst: V8 Rikki-Tikki-Tavi: V21 Kitchen (Yoshimoto): V16 Kohler, Sheila Africans: V18
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The Lottery (Jackson): V1 Lullaby (Silko): V10
M
L La Grande Brete`che (Balzac/de Balzac): V10 The Lady with the Pet Dog (Chekhov): V5 The Lady, or the Tiger? (Stockton): V3 Lagerlo¨f, Selma The Legend of the Christmas Rose: V18 Lahiri, Jhumpa A Temporary Matter: V19 This Blessed House: V27 Lamb to the Slaughter (Dahl): V4 Last Courtesies (Leffland): V24 The Last Lovely City (Adams): V14 Last Night (Salter): V25 Lavin, Mary In the Middle of the Fields: V23 Lawrence, D. H. Odour of Chrysanthemums: V6 The Rocking-Horse Winner: V2 Le Guin, Ursula K. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: V2 Leaving the Yellow House (Bellow): V12 Lee, Don The Price of Eggs in China: V25 Leffland, Ella Last Courtesies: V24 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Irving): V8 The Legend of the Christmas Rose (Lagerlo¨f): V18 Lessing, Doris Debbie and Julie: V12 A Mild Attack of Locusts: V26 Through the Tunnel: V1 To Room Nineteen: V20 The Lesson (Bambara): V12 Li, Yiyun Immortality: V24 Liberty (Alvarez): V27 Life (Head): V13 Life in the Iron Mills (Davis): V26 The Life You Save May Be Your Own (O’Connor): V7 The Lifted Veil (Eliot): V8 Little Miracles, Kept Promises (Cisneros): V13 London, Jack To Build a Fire: V7 Long Distance (Smiley): V19 The Long-Distance Runner (Paley): V20 Lost in the Funhouse (Barth): V6
S t u d e n t s ,
I n d e x
V o l u m e
2 8
The Magic Barrel (Malamud): V8 Mahfouz, Naguib Half a Day: V9 Malamud, Bernard Black Is My Favorite Color: V16 The First Seven Years: V13 The Magic Barrel: V8 Malouf, David Great Day: V24 Mammon and the Archer (Henry): V18 The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (Twain): V7 The Man to Send Rain Clouds (Silko): V8 The Man Who Lived Underground (Wright): V3 The Man Who Was Almost a Man (Wright): V9 The Management of Grief (Mukherjee): V7 Mann, Thomas Death in Venice: V9 Disorder and Early Sorrow: V4 Mansfield, Katherine Bliss: V10 The Garden Party: V8 Marriage a` la Mode: V11 Miss Brill: V2 Manto, Saadat Hasan The Dog of Tithwal: V15 A Map of Tripoli, 1967 (Wetzel): V17 Marigolds (Collier): V28 Marriage a` la Mode (Mansfield): V11 Marry the One Who Gets There First (Julavits): V23 Marshall, Paule To Da-duh, in Memoriam: V15 Mason, Bobbie Ann Private Lies: V20 Residents and Transients: V8 Shiloh: V3 The Masque of the Red Death (Poe): V8 Mateo Falcone (Merimee): V8 Maugham, W. Somerset The Fall of Edward Barnard: V17 McCorkle, Jill Fish: V24 McCracken, Elizabeth Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry: V25 McCullers, Carson Wunderkind: V5 McPherson, James Alan Elbow Room: V23
3 2 7
Cumulative Author/Title Index
Jackson, Shirley Charles: V27 The Lottery: V1 Jacobs, W. W. The Monkey’s Paw: V2 James, Henry The Beast in the Jungle: V6 The Jolly Corner: V9 Janus (Beattie): V9 The Japanese Quince (Galsworthy): V3 Jeeves Takes Charge (Wodehouse): V10 Jeffty Is Five (Ellison): V13 Jewett, Sarah Orne A White Heron: V4 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall (Porter): V1 Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn (Twain): V27 Jin, Ha In the Kindergarten: V17 Johnny Mnemonic (Gibson): V26 Johnson, Charles Menagerie, a Child’s Fable: V16 The Jolly Corner (James): V9 Jones, Thom The Pugilist at Rest: V23 Journey into a Dark Heart (Høeg): V18 Joyce, James Araby: V1 The Dead: V6 Eveline: V19 Julavits, Heidi Marry the One Who Gets There First: V23 A Jury of Her Peers (Glaspell): V3
A u t h o r / T i t l e
C u m u l a t i v e
A u t h o r / T i t l e
The Medicine Bag (Sneve): V28 Meeting Mrinal (Divakaruni): V24 Melanctha (Stein): V5 Melon (Barnes): V24 Melville, Herman Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street: V3 Menagerie, a Child’s Fable (Johnson): V16 Meneseteung (Munro): V19 Merimee, Prosper Mateo Falcone: V8 The Metamorphosis (Kafka): V12 The Middleman (Mukherjee): V24 A Mild Attack of Locusts (Lessing): V26 The Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable (Hawthorne): V7 Mishima, Yukio Fountains in the Rain: V12 Swaddling Clothes: V5 Miss Brill (Mansfield): V2 Mistry, Rohinton Swimming Lessons: V6 The Monkey’s Paw (Jacobs): V2 Moon Lake (Welty): V26 Moore, Lorrie You’re Ugly, Too: V19 Morales, Alejandro The Curing Woman: V19 Morrison, Toni Recitatif: V5 The Most Dangerous Game (Connell): V1 Mowgli’s Brothers (Kipling): V22 Mphahlele, Es’kia (Ezekiel) Mrs. Plum: V11 Mrs. Bathurst (Kipling): V8 Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter (Divakaruni): V18 Mrs. Plum (Mphahlele): V11 Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Far): V4 Mukherjee, Bharati The Management of Grief: V7 The Middleman: V24 Munro, Alice Boys and Girls: V5 Day of the Butterfly: V28 Meneseteung: V19 Walker Brothers Cowboy: V13 Murakami, Haruki The Elephant Vanishes: V23 My First Goose (Babel): V10 My Kinsman, Major Molineux (Hawthorne): V11 My Life with the Wave (Paz): V13 A Mystery of Heroism (Crane): V28
N Nabokov, Vladimir A Guide to Berlin: V6 That in Aleppo Once. . .: V15
3 2 8
I n d e x
Naming the Names (Devlin): V17 Naoya, Shiga Han’s Crime: V5 Narayan, R. K. A Horse and Two Goats: V5 The Necessary Grace to Fall (Ochsner): V24 The Necklace (Maupassant): V4 Neighbour Rosicky (Cather): V7 The New Dress (Woolf): V4 A New England Nun (Freeman): V8 The News from Ireland (Trevor): V10 The Night the Ghost Got In (Thurber): V19 Night (Tolstaya): V14 Nightfall (Asimov): V17 No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (Twain): V21 A Nurse’s Story (Baida): V25
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Le Guin): V2 The Open Boat (Crane): V4 The Open Window (Saki): V1 Orringer, Julie The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones: V23 Ortiz, Simon J. The End of Old Horse: V22 Orwell, George Shooting an Elephant: V4 The Outcasts of Poker Flat (Harte): V3 The Overcoat (Gogol): V7 Ozick, Cynthia The Pagan Rabbi: V12 Rosa: V22 The Shawl: V3
P
O O’Brien, Tim How to Tell a True War Story: V15 The Things They Carried: V5 O’Connor, Flannery A Circle in the Fire: V19 Everything That Rises Must Converge: V10 A Good Man Is Hard to Find: V2 The Life You Save May Be Your Own: V7 O’Connor, Frank Guests of the Nation: V5 O’Flaherty, Liam The Sniper: V20 The Wave: V5 Oates, Joyce Carol Four Summers: V17 How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again: V8 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: V1 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Bierce): V2 Ochsner, Gina The Necessary Grace to Fall: V24 Odour of Chrysanthemums (Lawrence): V6 Ogot, Grace The Green Leaves: V15 Okri, Ben In the Shadow of War: V20 Old Woman Magoun (Freeman): V26 Olsen, Tillie I Stand Here Ironing: V1 Once Upon a Time (Gordimer): V28 On Discovery (Kingston): V3 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn): V9
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
Packer, ZZ Brownies: V25 The Pagan Rabbi (Ozick): V12 Paley, Grace Anxiety: V27 A Conversation with My Father: V3 The Long-Distance Runner: V20 Paris 1991 (Walbert): V24 Parker, Dortothy Big Blonde: V5 Paul’s Case (Cather): V2 Paz, Octavio My Life with the Wave: V13 The Pearl (Steinbeck): V22 A Perfect Day for Bananafish (Salinger): V17 Perfection (Helprin): V25 Phillips, Jayne Anne Souvenir: V4 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (Borges): V4 Poe, Edgar Allan The Black Cat: V26 The Cask of Amontillado: V7 The Fall of the House of Usher: V2 The Masque of the Red Death: V8 The Purloined Letter: V16 The Tell-Tale Heart: V4 A Point at Issue! (Chopin): V17 Pomegranate Seed (Wharton): V6 Porter, Katherine Anne Flowering Judas: V8 The Grave: V11 He: V16 Holiday: V23 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: V1 Powell, Padgett Trick or Treat: V25 The Price of Eggs in China (Lee): V25
f o r
S t u d e n t s ,
V o l u m e
2 8
C u m u l a t i v e
R Race at Morning (Faulkner): V27 Rape Fantasies (Atwood): V3 Raymond’s Run (Bambara): V7 Recitatif (Morrison): V5 The Red Convertible (Erdrich): V14 The Red-Headed League (Doyle): V2 Redemption (Gardner): V8 The Rememberer (Bender): V25 Repent, Harlequin!’’ Said the Ticktockman (Ellison): V21 The Replacement (Robbe-Grillet): V15 Residents and Transients (Mason): V8 Resurrection of a Life (Saroyan): V14 The Revolt of ‘Mother’ (Freeman): V4 Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (Kipling): V21 The Ring (Dinesen): V6 Rip Van Winkle (Irving): V16 Rivera, Beatriz African Passions: V15 Rivera, Toma´s The Harvest: V15 Robbe-Grillet, Alain The Replacement: V15 Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning (Barthelme): V3 The Rocking-Horse Winner (Lawrence): V2 The Rockpile (Baldwin): V18 Roman Fever (Wharton): V7 Rosa (Ozick): V22 A Rose for Emily (Faulkner): V6 Roselily (Walker): V11 Roth, Philip The Conversion of the Jews: V18 Goodbye, Columbus: V12 Rules of the Game (Tan): V16
S The Sailor-Boy’s Tale (Dinesen): V13 Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr (Unamuno/de Unamuno): V20 Saki The Interlopers: V15 The Open Window: V1 Salinger, J. D. A Perfect Day for Bananafish: V17
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
f o r
Salter, James Last Night: V25 Santos, Bienvenido Immigration Blues: V19 Saramago, Jose´ The Centaur: V23 Sargeson, Frank A Great Day: V20 Saroyan, William Resurrection of a Life: V14 Sartre, Jean-Paul The Wall: V9 Say Yes (Wolff): V11 Sayers, Dorothy L. Suspicion: V12 The Scarlet Ibis (Hurst): V23 Scott, Sir Walter Wandering Willie’s Tale: V10 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Thurber): V1 The Secret Sharer (Conrad): V1 Sharma, Akhil If You Sing like That for Me: V21 The Shawl (Ozick): V3 The Shell Collector (Doerr): V25 The Sheriff’s Children (Chesnutt): V11 Shiloh (Mason): V3 Shooting an Elephant (Orwell): V4 The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (Hemingway): V1 Silent Snow, Secret Snow (Aiken): V8 Silko, Leslie Marmon Lullaby: V10 The Man to Send Rain Clouds: V8 Storyteller: V11 Yellow Woman: V4 Silver, Marisa What I Saw from Where I Stood: V25 A Silver Dish (Bellow): V22 Silver Water (Bloom): V11 A Simple Heart (Flaubert): V6 Singer, Isaac Bashevis Gimpel the Fool: V2 Henne Fire: V16 The Spinoza of Market Street: V12 Zlateh the Goat: V27 The Sky is Gray (Gaines): V5 Slave on the Block (Hughes): V4 The Slump (Updike): V19 Small Change (Hendel): V14 A Small, Good Thing (Carver): V23 Smiley, Jane Long Distance: V19 The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones (Orringer): V23 Snapshots of a Wedding (Head): V5 Sneve, Virginia Driving Hawk The Medicine Bag: V28 The Sniper (O’Flaherty): V20 The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Hemingway): V11
S t u d e n t s ,
V o l u m e
2 8
I n d e x
Soldier’s Home (Hemingway): V26 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: V9 Someone to Talk To (Eisenberg): V24 Sonny’s Blues (Baldwin): V2 Sontag, Susan The Way We Live Now: V10 Sophistication (Anderson): V4 Sorrow-Acre (Dinesen): V3 Souvenir (Phillips): V4 Sparks, Muriel The First Year of My Life: V28 The Spinoza of Market Street (Singer): V12 A Spinster’s Tale (Taylor): V9 Spunk (Hurston): V6 Stafford, Jean In the Zoo: V21 The Star (Clarke): V4 The Stationmaster (Pushkin): V9 Stein, Gertrude Melanctha: V5 Steinbeck, John The Chrysanthemums: V6 Flight: V3 The Pearl: V22 Stockton, Frank R. The Lady, or the Tiger?: V3 The Stone Boy (Berriault): V7 Stones in My Passway, Hellhound on My Trail (Boyle): V13 The Storm (Chopin): V26 The Story of an Hour (Chopin): V2 Storyteller (Silko): V11 The Sun, the Moon, the Stars (Dı´ az): V20 Suspicion (Sayers): V12 Swaddling Clothes (Mishima): V5 Swan, Mary The Deep: V23 Sweat (Hurston): V19 The Swimmer (Cheever): V2 Swimming Lessons (Mistry): V6
T Tan, Amy Rules of the Game: V16 Two Kinds: V9 Taylor, Peter A Spinster’s Tale: V9 The Tell-Tale Heart (Poe): V4 A Temporary Matter (Lahiri): V19 That Evening Sun (Faulkner): V12 That in Aleppo Once. . . (Nabokov): V15 There Will Come Soft Rains (Bradbury): V1 The Things They Carried (O’Brien): V5 Think of England (Davies): V21
3 2 9
Cumulative Author/Title Index
Private Lies (Mason): V20 Proper Library (Ferrell): V23 Proulx, E. Annie Brokeback Mountain: V23 The Half-Skinned Steer: V18 The Pugilist at Rest (Jones): V23 The Purloined Letter (Poe): V16 The Pursuer (Corta´zar): V20 Pushkin, Alexander The Stationmaster: V9
A u t h o r / T i t l e
C u m u l a t i v e
A u t h o r / T i t l e
This Blessed House (Lahiri): V27 This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Borowski): V13 Thomas, Piri Amigo Brothers: V28 Three Thanksgivings (Gilman): V18 Through the Tunnel (Lessing): V1 Thurber, James The Catbird Seat: V10 The Night the Ghost Got In: V19 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: V1 Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle (Butler): V22 To Build a Fire (London): V7 To Da-duh, in Memoriam (Marshall): V15 To Room Nineteen (Lessing): V20 Tolstaya, Tatyana Night: V14 Tolstoy, Leo The Death of Ivan Ilych: V5 How Much Land Does a Man Need: V28 Toomer, Jean Blood-Burning Moon: V5 Town and Country Lovers (Gordimer): V14 The Toxic Donut (Bisson): V18 The Train from Rhodesia (Gordimer): V2 Trevor, William The News from Ireland: V10 Trick or Treat (Powell): V25 Twain, Mark The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: V1 The Invalid’s Story: V16 Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn: V27 The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg: V7 No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger: V21 Two Friends (de Maupassant): V28 Two Kinds (Tan): V9 Tyler, Anne Average Waves in Unprotected Waters: V17
U The Ultimate Safari (Gordimer): V19 Unamuno, Miguel de Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr: V20 The Underground Gardens (Boyle): V19 Upadhyay, Samrat The Good Shopkeeper: V22 Updike, John A & P: V3 The Slump: V19 The Use of Force (Williams): V27
3 3 0
I n d e x
V Vargas Llosa, Mario The Challenge: V14 The Veldt (Bradbury): V20 Vengeful Creditor (Achebe): V3 A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (Garcı´ a Ma´rquez): V6 Victory Over Japan (Gilchrist): V9 Vonnegut, Kurt Harrison Bergeron: V5
W A Wagner Matinee (Cather): V27 Walbert, Kate Paris 1991: V24 Waldo (Heinlein): V7 Walker Brothers Cowboy (Munro): V13 Walker, Alice Everyday Use: V2 Roselily: V11 The Wall (Sartre): V9 Wandering Willie’s Tale (Scott): V10 Warren, Robert Penn Blackberry Winter: V8 Waters, Mary Yukari Aftermath: V22 The Wave (O’Flaherty): V5 The Way It Felt to Be Falling (Edwards): V18 The Way We Live Now (Sontag): V10 Wells, H. G. The Door in the Wall: V3 Welty, Eudora Moon Lake: V26 Why I Live at the P.O.: V10 A Worn Path: V2 Wetherell, W. D. The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: V28 Wetzel, Marlene Reed A Map of Tripoli, 1967: V17 Wharton, Edith Pomegranate Seed: V6 Roman Fever: V7 What I Have Been Doing Lately (Kincaid): V5 What I Saw from Where I Stood (Silver): V25 What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence (Wideman): V24 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Carver): V12 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (Oates): V1 Where I’m Calling From (Carver): V3 A White Heron (Jewett): V4 The White Horses of Vienna (Boyle): V10 Why I Live at the P.O. (Welty): V10 Wideman, John Edgar The Beginning of Homewood: V12
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
Fever: V6 What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence: V24 Wilde, Oscar The Canterville Ghost: V7 Williams, Joy The Girls: V25 Williams, William Carlos The Use of Force: V27 Winter Dreams (Fitzgerald): V15 The Wives of the Dead (Hawthorne): V15 Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville Jeeves Takes Charge: V10 Wolf, Christa Exchanging Glances: V14 Wolfe, Thomas The Far and the Near: V18 Wolff, Tobias In the Garden of the North American Martyrs: V4 Say Yes: V11 Woman Hollering Creek (Cisneros): V3 The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock (Garcı´ a Ma´rquez): V16 Women in Their Beds (Berriault): V11 Woolf, Virginia Kew Gardens: V12 The New Dress: V4 A Worn Path (Welty): V2 Wright, Richard Big Black Good Man: V20 Bright and Morning Star: V15 The Man Who Lived Underground: V3 The Man Who Was Almost a Man: V9 The Writer in the Family (Doctorow): V27 Wunderkind (McCullers): V5
Y Yamamoto, Hisaye The Eskimo Connection: V14 Yates, Richard The Canal: V24 The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman): V1 Yellow Woman (Silko): V4 Yezierska, Anzia America and I: V15 Yiyun Li Immortality: V24 Yoshimoto, Banana Kitchen: V16 You’re Ugly, Too (Moore): V19 Young Goodman Brown (Hawthorne): V1
Z Zlateh the Goat (Singer): V27
f o r
S t u d e n t s ,
V o l u m e
2 8
Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index African American Baldwin, James The Rockpile: V18 Sonny’s Blues: V2 Bambara, Toni Cade Blues Ain’t No Mockin Bird: V4 Gorilla, My Love: V21 The Lesson: V12 Raymond’s Run: V7 Butler, Octavia Bloodchild: V6 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell The Goophered Grapevine: V26 The Sheriff’s Children: V11 Collier, Eugenia W. Marigolds: V28 Ellison, Ralph King of the Bingo Game: V1 Hughes, Langston The Blues I’m Playing: V7 Slave on the Block: V4 Hurston, Zora Neale Conscience of the Court: V21 The Eatonville Anthology: V1 The Gilded Six-Bits: V11 Spunk: V6 Sweat: V19 Marshall, Paule To Da-duh, in Memoriam: V15 McPherson, James Alan Elbow Room: V23 Toomer, Jean Blood-Burning Moon: V5 Walker, Alice Everyday Use: V2 Roselily: V11
Wideman, John Edgar The Beginning of Homewood: V12 Fever: V6 What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence: V24 Wright, Richard Big Black Good Man: V20 Bright and Morning Star: V15 The Man Who Lived Underground: V3 The Man Who Was Almost a Man: V9
American Adams, Alice Greyhound People: V21 The Last Lovely City: V14 Agu¨eros, Jack Dominoes: V13 Aiken, Conrad Silent Snow, Secret Snow: V8 Alexie, Sherman Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner’’ at Woodstock: V18 Allen, Woody The Kugelmass Episode: V21 Alvarez, Julia Liberty: V27 Anderson, Sherwood Death in the Woods: V10 Hands: V11 Sophistication: V4 Asimov, Isaac Nightfall: V17
Baida, Peter A Nurse’s Story: V25 Baldwin, James The Rockpile: V18 Sonny’s Blues: V2 Bambara, Toni Cade Blues Ain’t No Mockin Bird: V4 Gorilla, My Love: V21 The Lesson: V12 Raymond’s Run: V7 Barrett, Andrea The English Pupil: V24 Barth, John Lost in the Funhouse: V6 Barthelme, Donald The Indian Uprising: V17 Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning: V3 Beattie, Ann Imagined Scenes: V20 Janus: V9 Bellow, Saul Leaving the Yellow House: V12 A Silver Dish: V22 Bender, Aimee The Rememberer: V25 Benet, Stephen Vincent An End to Dreams: V22 Berriault, Gina The Stone Boy: V7 Women in Their Beds: V11 Bierce, Ambrose The Boarded Window: V9 A Horseman in the Sky: V27 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: V2
3 3 1
C u m u l a t i v e
N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y
Bisson, Terry The Toxic Donut: V18 Bloom, Amy Silver Water: V11 Bowles, Paul The Eye: V17 Boyle, Kay Astronomer’s Wife: V13 Black Boy: V14 The White Horses of Vienna: V10 Boyle, T. Coraghessan Stones in My Passway, Hellhound on My Trail: V13 The Underground Gardens: V19 Bradbury, Ray The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: V28 There Will Come Soft Rains: V1 The Veldt: V20 Brown, Jason Animal Stories: V14 Butler, Octavia Bloodchild: V6 Butler, Robert Olen A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: V11 Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle: V22 Capote, Truman A Christmas Memory: V2 Carver, Raymond Cathedral: V6 Errand: V13 A Small, Good Thing: V23 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: V12 Where I’m Calling From: V3 Cather, Willa The Diamond Mine: V16 Neighbour Rosicky: V7 Paul’s Case: V2 A Wagner Matinee: V27 Cheever, John The Country Husband: V14 The Swimmer: V2 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell The Goophered Grapevine: V26 The Sheriff’s Children: V11 Chopin, Kate De´sire´e’s Baby: V13 A Point at Issue!: V17 The Storm: V26 The Story of an Hour: V2 Cisneros, Sandra Eleven: V27 Little Miracles, Kept Promises: V13 Woman Hollering Creek: V3 Cofer, Judith Ortiz American History: V27 Collier, Eugenia W. Marigolds: V28
3 3 2
I n d e x
Connell, Richard The Most Dangerous Game: V1 Crane, Stephen A Mystery of Heroism: V28 The Open Boat: V4 Davies, Peter Ho Think of England: V21 Davis, Rebecca Harding Life in the Iron Mills: V26 Diaz, Junot The Sun, the Moon, the Stars: V20 Doctorow, E. L. The Writer in the Family: V27 Doerr, Anthony The Shell Collector: V25 Dubus, Andre The Fat Girl: V10 Dybek, Stuart Hot Ice: V23 Edwards, Kim The Way It Felt to Be Falling: V18 Eisenberg, Deborah Someone to Talk To: V24 Ellison, Harlan A Boy and His Dog: V14 I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: V15 Jeffty Is Five: V13 ‘‘Repent, Harlequin!’’ Said the Ticktockman: V21 Ellison, Ralph The Invisible Man, or Battle Royal: V11 King of the Bingo Game: V1 Erdrich, Louise Fleur: V22 The Red Convertible: V14 Faulkner, William Barn Burning: V5 The Bear: V2 Race at Morning: V27 A Rose for Emily: V6 That Evening Sun: V12 Ferrell, Carolyn Proper Library: V23 Fitzgerald, F. Scott Babylon Revisited: V4 Crazy Sunday: V21 The Diamond as Big as the Ritz: V25 Winter Dreams: V15 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins A New England Nun: V8 Old Woman Magoun: V26 The Revolt of ‘Mother’: V4 Friedman, Bruce Jay Brazzaville Teen-ager: V18 Gaines, Ernest The Sky is Gray: V5 Gardner, John Redemption: V8 Gibson, William Johnny Mnemonic: V26
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
Gilchrist, Ellen Victory Over Japan: V9 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Three Thanksgivings: V18 The Yellow Wallpaper: V1 Glasgow, Ellen The Difference: V9 Glaspell, Susan A Jury of Her Peers: V3 Harte, Bret The Outcasts of Poker Flat: V3 Haslett, Adam The Good Doctor: V24 Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable: V7 My Kinsman, Major Molineux: V11 The Wives of the Dead: V15 Young Goodman Brown: V1 Heinlein, Robert A. Waldo: V7 Helprin, Mark Perfection: V25 Hemingway, Ernest A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: V9 Hills Like White Elephants: V6 In Another Country: V8 The Killers: V17 The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: V1 The Snows of Kilimanjaro: V11 Soldier’s Home: V26 Hempel, Amy In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried: V2 Henry, O. After Twenty Years: V27 The Gift of the Magi: V2 Mammon and the Archer: V18 Highsmith, Patricia A Girl like Phyl: V25 Houston, Pam The Best Girlfriend You Never Had: V17 Hughes, Langston The Blues I’m Playing: V7 Slave on the Block: V4 Hurst, James The Scarlet Ibis: V23 Hurston, Zora Neale Conscience of the Court: V21 The Eatonville Anthology: V1 The Gilded Six-Bits: V11 Spunk: V6 Sweat: V19 Irving, Washington The Devil and Tom Walker: V1 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: V8 Rip Van Winkle: V16
f o r
S t u d e n t s ,
V o l u m e
2 8
C u m u l a t i v e
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
f o r
Mukherjee, Bharati The Management of Grief: V7 The Middleman: V24 Nabokov, Vladimir A Guide to Berlin: V6 That in Aleppo Once. . .: V15 O’Brien, Tim How to Tell a True War Story: V15 The Things They Carried: V5 O’Connor, Flannery A Circle in the Fire: V19 Everything That Rises Must Converge: V10 A Good Man Is Hard to Find: V2 The Life You Save May Be Your Own: V7 Oates, Joyce Carol Four Summers: V17 How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again: V8 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: V1 Ochsner, Gina The Necessary Grace to Fall: V24 Olsen, Tillie I Stand Here Ironing: V1 Orringer, Julie The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones: V23 Ortiz, Simon J. The End of Old Horse: V22 Ozick, Cynthia The Pagan Rabbi: V12 Rosa: V22 The Shawl: V3 Packer, ZZ Brownies: V25 Paley, Grace Anxiety: V27 A Conversation with My Father: V3 The Long-Distance Runner: V20 Parker, Dortothy Big Blonde: V5 Phillips, Jayne Anne Souvenir: V4 Poe, Edgar Allan The Black Cat: V26 The Cask of Amontillado: V7 The Fall of the House of Usher: V2 The Masque of the Red Death: V8 The Purloined Letter: V16 The Tell-Tale Heart: V4 Porter, Katherine Anne Flowering Judas: V8 The Grave: V11 He: V16 Holiday: V23 The Jilting of Granny Weatherall: V1
S t u d e n t s ,
V o l u m e
2 8
I n d e x
Powell, Padgett Trick or Treat: V25 Proulx, E. Annie Brokeback Mountain: V23 The Half-Skinned Steer: V18 Rivera, Beatriz African Passions: V15 Rivera, Toma´s The Harvest: V15 Roth, Philip The Conversion of the Jews: V18 Goodbye, Columbus: V12 Salinger, J. D. A Perfect Day for Bananafish: V17 Salter, James Last Night: V25 Santos, Bienvenido Immigration Blues: V19 Saroyan, William Resurrection of a Life: V14 Sharma, Akhil If You Sing like That for Me: V21 Silko, Leslie Marmon Lullaby: V10 The Man to Send Rain Clouds: V8 Storyteller: V11 Yellow Woman: V4 Silver, Marisa What I Saw from Where I Stood: V25 Singer, Isaac Bashevis Gimpel the Fool: V2 Henne Fire: V16 The Spinoza of Market Street: V12 Zlateh the Goat: V27 Smiley, Jane Long Distance: V19 Sneve, Virginia Driving Hawk The Medicine Bag: V28 Sontag, Susan The Way We Live Now: V10 Stafford, Jean In the Zoo: V21 Stein, Gertrude Melanctha: V5 Steinbeck, John The Chrysanthemums: V6 Flight: V3 The Pearl: V22 Stockton, Frank R. The Lady, or the Tiger?: V3 Tan, Amy Rules of the Game: V16 Two Kinds: V9 Taylor, Peter A Spinster’s Tale: V9 Thomas, Piri Amigo Brothers: V28 Thurber, James The Catbird Seat: V10 The Night the Ghost Got In: V19 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: V1
3 3 3
Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index
Jackson, Shirley Charles: V27 The Lottery: V1 James, Henry The Beast in the Jungle: V6 The Jolly Corner: V9 Jewett, Sarah Orne A White Heron: V4 Johnson, Charles Menagerie, a Child’s Fable: V16 Jones, Thom The Pugilist at Rest: V23 Julavits, Heidi Marry the One Who Gets There First: V23 Kincaid, Jamaica Girl: V7 What I Have Been Doing Lately: V5 Kingston, Maxine Hong On Discovery: V3 Lahiri, Jhumpa A Temporary Matter: V19 This Blessed House: V27 Lavin, Mary In the Middle of the Fields: V23 Le Guin, Ursula K. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: V2 Lee, Don The Price of Eggs in China: V25 Leffland, Ella Last Courtesies: V24 London, Jack To Build a Fire: V7 Malamud, Bernard Black Is My Favorite Color: V16 The First Seven Years: V13 The Magic Barrel: V8 Marshall, Paule To Da-duh, in Memoriam: V15 Mason, Bobbie Ann Private Lies: V20 Residents and Transients: V8 Shiloh: V3 McCorkle, Jill Fish: V24 McCracken, Elizabeth Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry: V25 McCullers, Carson Wunderkind: V5 McPherson, James Alan Elbow Room: V23 Melville, Herman Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street: V3 Moore, Lorrie You’re Ugly, Too: V19 Morales, Alejandro The Curing Woman: V19 Morrison, Toni Recitatif: V5
N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y
C u m u l a t i v e
N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y
Toomer, Jean Blood-Burning Moon: V5 Twain, Mark The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: V1 The Invalid’s Story: V16 Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn: V27 The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg: V7 No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger: V21 Tyler, Anne Average Waves in Unprotected Waters: V17 Updike, John A & P: V3 The Slump: V19 Vonnegut, Kurt Harrison Bergeron: V5 Walbert, Kate Paris 1991: V24 Walker, Alice Everyday Use: V2 Roselily: V11 Warren, Robert Penn Blackberry Winter: V8 Waters, Mary Yukari Aftermath: V22 Welty, Eudora Moon Lake: V26 Why I Live at the P.O.: V10 A Worn Path: V2 Wetherell, W. D. The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: V28 Wetzel, Marlene Reed A Map of Tripoli, 1967: V17 Wharton, Edith Pomegranate Seed: V6 Roman Fever: V7 Wideman, John Edgar The Beginning of Homewood: V12 Fever: V6 What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence: V24 Williams, Joy The Girls: V25 Williams, William Carlos The Use of Force: V27 Wolfe, Thomas The Far and the Near: V18 Wolff, Tobias In the Garden of the North American Martyrs: V4 Say Yes: V11 Wright, Richard Big Black Good Man: V20 Bright and Morning Star: V15 The Man Who Lived Underground: V3 The Man Who Was Almost a Man: V9
3 3 4
I n d e x
Yamamoto, Hisaye The Eskimo Connection: V14 Yates, Richard The Canal: V24 Yezierska, Anzia America and I: V15
Antiguan Kincaid, Jamaica Girl: V7 What I Have Been Doing Lately: V5
Argentinian Borges, Jorge Luis The Aleph: V17 The Circular Ruins: V26 The Garden of Forking Paths: V9 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote: V4 Corta´zar, Julio Axolotl: V3 House Taken Over: V28 The Pursuer: V20
Mukherjee, Bharati The Management of Grief: V7 The Middleman: V24 Munro, Alice Boys and Girls: V5 Day of the Butterfly: V28 Meneseteung: V19 Walker Brothers Cowboy: V13 Swan, Mary The Deep: V23
Chilean Allende, Isabel And of Clay Are We Created: V11 The Gold of Toma´s Vargas: V16
Chinese Jin, Ha In the Kindergarten: V17 Yiyun Li Immortality: V24
Colombian
Asian American Kingston, Maxine Hong On Discovery: V3 Lee, Don The Price of Eggs in China: V25 Tan, Amy Rules of the Game: V16 Two Kinds: V9 Yamamoto, Hisaye The Eskimo Connection: V14
Garcı´ a Ma´rquez, Gabriel Eyes of a Blue Dog: V21 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: V1 A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: V6 The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock: V16
Cuban
Malouf, David Great Day: V24
Calvino, Italo The Feathered Ogre: V12 Rivera, Beatriz African Passions: V15
Austrian
Czech
Kafka, Franz A Hunger Artist: V7 In the Penal Colony: V3 The Metamorphosis: V12
Bosnian
Kafka, Franz A Hunger Artist: V7 In the Penal Colony: V3 The Metamorphosis: V12 Kundera, Milan The Hitchhiking Game: V10
Hemon, Aleksandar Islands: V22
Danish
Australian
Canadian Atwood, Margaret Happy Endings: V13 Rape Fantasies: V3 Bellow, Saul A Silver Dish: V22 Callaghan, Morley All the Years of Her Life: V19 Mistry, Rohinton Swimming Lessons: V6
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
Dinesen, Isak Babette’s Feast: V20 The Ring: V6 The Sailor-Boy’s Tale: V13 Sorrow-Acre: V3 Høeg, Peter Journey into a Dark Heart: V18
Dominican Alvarez, Julia Liberty: V27
f o r
S t u d e n t s ,
V o l u m e
2 8
C u m u l a t i v e
Dı´ az, Junot The Sun, the Moon, the Stars: V20
Egyptian
English Barnes, Julian Melon: V24 Bates, H. E. The Daffodil Sky: V7 Bowen, Elizabeth The Demon Lover: V5 Burton, Richard The Arabian Nights: V21 Byatt, A. S. Art Work: V26 Carter, Angela The Bloody Chamber: V4 The Erlking: V12 Clarke, Arthur C. ‘‘If I Forget Thee, O Earth. . .’’: V18 The Star: V4 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness: V12 The Secret Sharer: V1 Davies, Peter Ho Think of England: V21 du Maurier, Daphne The Birds: V16 Don’t Look Now: V14 Eliot, George The Lifted Veil: V8 Far, Sui Sin Mrs. Spring Fragrance: V4 Galsworthy, John The Japanese Quince: V3 Greene, Graham The Destructors: V14 Jacobs, W. W. The Monkey’s Paw: V2 Kipling, Rudyard Mowgli’s Brothers: V22 Mrs. Bathurst: V8 Rikki-Tikki-Tavi: V21 Lahiri, Jhumpa A Temporary Matter: V19 This Blessed House: V27 Lawrence, D. H. Odour of Chrysanthemums: V6 The Rocking-Horse Winner: V2 Lessing, Doris Debbie and Julie: V12 A Mild Attack of Locusts: V26 Through the Tunnel: V1 To Room Nineteen: V20
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
f o r
Maugham, W. Somerset The Fall of Edward Barnard: V17 Okri, Ben In the Shadow of War: V20 Orwell, George Shooting an Elephant: V4 Saki The Interlopers: V15 The Open Window: V1 Sayers, Dorothy L. Suspicion: V12 Wells, H. G. The Door in the Wall: V3 Williams, William Carlos The Use of Force: V27 Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville Jeeves Takes Charge: V10 Woolf, Virginia Kew Gardens: V12 The New Dress: V4
Eurasian Far, Sui Sin Mrs. Spring Fragrance: V4
French Balzac, Honore de La Grande Brete`che: V10 Beckett, Samuel Dante and the Lobster: V15 Camus, Albert The Guest: V4 Corta´zar, Julio Axolotl: V3 The Pursuer: V20 de Maupassant, Guy Boule de Suif: V21 The Necklace: V4 Two Friends: V28 Flaubert, Gustave A Simple Heart: V6 Merimee, Prosper Mateo Falcone: V8 Robbe-Grillet, Alain The Replacement: V15 Sartre, Jean-Paul The Wall: V9
German Bo¨ll, Heinrich Christmas Not Just Once a Year: V20 Mann, Thomas Death in Venice: V9 Disorder and Early Sorrow: V4 Wolf, Christa Exchanging Glances: V14
Hispanic American Allende, Isabel And of Clay Are We Created: V11 The Gold of Toma´s Vargas: V16 Alvarez, Julia Liberty: V27 Cisneros, Sandra Eleven: V27 Little Miracles, Kept Promises: V13 Woman Hollering Creek: V3 Cofer, Judith Ortiz American History: V27 Garcı´ a Ma´rquez, Gabriel Eyes of a Blue Dog: V21 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: V1 A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: V6 The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock: V16 Morales, Alejandro The Curing Woman: V19 Rivera, Beatriz African Passions: V15 Rivera, Toma´s The Harvest: V15 Thomas, Piri Amigo Brothers: V28
Indian Chandra, Vikram Dharma: V16 Desai, Anita Games at Twilight: V28 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee Meeting Mrinal: V24 Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter: V18 Lahiri, Jhumpa A Temporary Matter: V19 This Blessed House: V27 Manto, Saadat Hasan The Dog of Tithwal: V15 Mistry, Rohinton Swimming Lessons: V6 Mukherjee, Bharati The Management of Grief: V7 The Middleman: V24 Narayan, R. K. A Horse and Two Goats: V5 Sharma, Akhil If You Sing like That for Me: V21
Beckett, Samuel Dante and the Lobster: V15
Danticat, Edwidge
V o l u m e
Caroline’s Wedding: V25 Children of the Sea: V1
Irish
Haitian
S t u d e n t s ,
I n d e x
Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index
El-Bisatie, Mohamed A Conversation from the Third Floor: V17 Mahfouz, Naguib Half a Day: V9
N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y
2 8
3 3 5
C u m u l a t i v e
N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y
Bowen, Elizabeth A Day in the Dark: V22 The Demon Lover: V5 Devlin, Anne Naming the Names: V17 Joyce, James Araby: V1 The Dead: V6 Eveline: V19 Lavin, Mary In the Middle of the Fields: V23 O’Connor, Frank Guests of the Nation: V5 O’Flaherty, Liam The Sniper: V20 The Wave: V5 Trevor, William The News from Ireland: V10 Wilde, Oscar The Canterville Ghost: V7
Israeli Hendel, Yehudit Small Change: V14
Italian Boccaccio, Giovanni Federigo’s Falcon: V28 Calvino, Italo The Feathered Ogre: V12
Japanese Mishima, Yukio Fountains in the Rain: V12 Swaddling Clothes: V5 Murakami, Haruki The Elephant Vanishes: V23 Naoya, Shiga Han’s Crime: V5 Waters, Mary Yukari Aftermath: V22 Yoshimoto, Banana Kitchen: V16
I n d e x
Helprin, Mark Perfection: V25 Kafka, Franz A Hunger Artist: V7 In the Penal Colony: V3 The Metamorphosis: V12 Malamud, Bernard Black Is My Favorite Color: V16 The First Seven Years: V13 The Magic Barrel: V8 Orringer, Julie The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones: V23 Ozick, Cynthia The Pagan Rabbi: V12 Rosa: V22 The Shawl: V3 Paley, Grace Anxiety: V27 A Conversation with My Father: V3 The Long-Distance Runner: V20 Roth, Philip The Conversion of the Jews: V18 Goodbye, Columbus: V12 Salinger, J. D. A Perfect Day for Bananafish: V17 Singer, Isaac Bashevis Gimpel the Fool: V2 Henne Fire: V16 The Spinoza of Market Street: V12 Zlateh the Goat: V27 Stein, Gertrude Melanctha: V5
Kenyan Ogot, Grace The Green Leaves: V15
Mexican Paz, Octavio My Life with the Wave: V13
Jewish
Native American
Asimov, Isaac Nightfall: V17 Babel, Isaac My First Goose: V10 Bellow, Saul Leaving the Yellow House: V12 A Silver Dish: V22 Berriault, Gina The Stone Boy: V7 Women in Their Beds: V11 Doctorow, E. L. The Writer in the Family: V27 Eisenberg, Deborah Someone to Talk To: V24 Friedman, Bruce Jay Brazzaville Teen-ager: V18
Alexie, Sherman Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner’’ at Woodstock: V18 Erdrich, Louise Fleur: V22 The Red Convertible: V14 Ortiz, Simon J. The End of Old Horse: V22 Silko, Leslie Marmon Lullaby: V10 The Man to Send Rain Clouds: V8 Storyteller: V11 Yellow Woman: V4
3 3 6
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
Sneve, Virginia Driving Hawk The Medicine Bag: V28
Nepalese Upadhyay, Samrat The Good Shopkeeper: V22
New Zealander Mansfield, Katherine Bliss: V10 The Garden Party: V8 Marriage a` la Mode: V11 Miss Brill: V2 Sargeson, Frank A Great Day: V20
Nigerian Achebe, Chinua Civil Peace: V13 Vengeful Creditor: V3 Okri, Ben In the Shadow of War: V20
Peruvian Vargas Llosa, Mario The Challenge: V14
Philippine Santos, Bienvenido Immigration Blues: V19
Polish Borowski, Tadeusz This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen: V13 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness: V12 The Secret Sharer: V1 Singer, Isaac Bashevis Gimpel the Fool: V2 Henne Fire: V16 The Spinoza of Market Street: V12 Zlateh the Goat: V27
Portuguese Saramago, Jose´ The Centaur: V23
Puerto Rican Cofer, Judith Ortiz American History: V27 Williams, William Carlos The Use of Force: V27
Russian Asimov, Isaac Nightfall: V17
f o r
S t u d e n t s ,
V o l u m e
2 8
C u m u l a t i v e
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
f o r
Yezierska, Anzia America and I: V15
Scottish Doyle, Arthur Conan The Red-Headed League: V2 Scott, Sir Walter Wandering Willie’s Tale: V10 Spark, Muriel The First Year of My Life: V28
South African Gordimer, Nadine Once Upon a Time: V28 Town and Country Lovers: V14 The Train from Rhodesia: V2 The Ultimate Safari: V19 Head, Bessie Life: V13 Snapshots of a Wedding: V5 Kohler, Sheila Africans: V18 Mphahlele, Es’kia (Ezekiel) Mrs. Plum: V11
S t u d e n t s ,
V o l u m e
2 8
I n d e x
Spanish Unamuno, Miguel de Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr: V20 Vargas Llosa, Mario The Challenge: V14
Swedish Gustafsson, Lars Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases: V22 Lagerlo¨f, Selma The Legend of the Christmas Rose: V18
Welsh Dahl, Roald Lamb to the Slaughter: V4
West Indian Kincaid, Jamaica Girl: V7 What I Have Been Doing Lately: V5
3 3 7
Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index
Babel, Isaac My First Goose: V10 Chekhov, Anton The Darling: V13 Gooseberries: V14 Gusev: V26 The Lady with the Pet Dog: V5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Grand Inquisitor: V8 Gogol, Nikolai The Overcoat: V7 Nabokov, Vladimir A Guide to Berlin: V6 That in Aleppo Once. . .: V15 Pushkin, Alexander The Stationmaster: V9 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: V9 Tolstaya, Tatyana Night: V14 Tolstoy, Leo The Death of Ivan Ilych: V5 How Much Land Does a Man Need: V28
N a t i o n a l i t y / E t h n i c i t y
Subject/Theme Index Numerical 1950s (Decade) The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 149 1960s (Decade) Marigolds: 221–222 1970s (Decade) Amigo Brothers: 8
A Absurdity The First Year of My Life: 97, 101, 103 A Mystery of Heroism: 265 Acceptance How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 197, 200 The Medicine Bag: 234 Activism Amigo Brothers: 17–18 Adolescence Day of the Butterfly: 54–55 Marigolds: 226 Aesthetic values How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 198 African American history Marigolds: 219–222 African Americans Marigolds: 212, 215 Aggression (Psychology) Two Friends: 301 Alienation Day of the Butterfly: 56–57 Games at Twilight: 115, 120, 126
Allegories The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 138, 143–144 House Taken Over: 170 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 196 Allusions The First Year of My Life: 92, 98 Ambiguity Games at Twilight: 129 House Taken Over: 170 A Mystery of Heroism: 267 Ambition Amigo Brothers: 11 Anger Marigolds: 212, 213, 215, 217, 224, 230 Anguish. See Grief Animals Federigo’s Falcon: 85–86 Anxiety How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 192 Apartheid Once Upon a Time: 269, 273, 276–278, 279, 281, 282 Aristocracy Federigo’s Falcon: 76, 85 Arrogance Federigo’s Falcon: 70, 72 Art The First Year of My Life: 96, 98, 100, 101 House Taken Over: 176–178 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 198 Assimilation The Medicine Bag: 239–240
Atonement Day of the Butterfly: 51, 58, 59 Authority The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 143
B Beauty The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 26 Marigolds: 219, 222, 226 Betrayal The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 36 Day of the Butterfly: 54 Bildungsroman The Medicine Bag: 241–243 Bravery. See Courage Brutality Two Friends: 301 Bullying. See Cruelty
C Canadian history Day of the Butterfly: 48–49 Chance Federigo’s Falcon: 89 Characterization Federigo’s Falcon: 82–83 The First Year of My Life: 111 Games at Twilight: 132 Marigolds: 224 The Medicine Bag: 237–238 Childhood Games at Twilight: 123 Chivalry Federigo’s Falcon: 81, 82, 88, 89
3 3 9
S u b j e c t / T h e m e
I n d e x
Choice (Psychology) Amigo Brothers: 11, 13 The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 23 Federigo’s Falcon: 89 Christianity How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 193, 197–198, 206, 207–209 A Mystery of Heroism: 263–264 Civil war A Mystery of Heroism: 247, 249–250, 253–254, 260–261 Cold War The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 138, 143–144, 144–146, 147–151 Colonialism House Taken Over: 172 Comfort Marigolds: 217, 218 Coming of age The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 23, 30 Marigolds: 215, 217, 219, 222, 230 The Medicine Bag: 241–243 Common man A Mystery of Heroism: 253 Compassion Marigolds: 213, 215, 224 A Mystery of Heroism: 250 Two Friends: 307 Confinement How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 205 Conflict The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 26, 30 Federigo’s Falcon: 87, 88 Games at Twilight: 118, 129 The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 138, 141–142, 147–151 Marigolds: 211, 217 Confusion Marigolds: 215, 217, 219 Connectedness Once Upon a Time: 279, 280, 281–282 Consciousness Games at Twilight: 129 Once Upon a Time: 285–286 Contentment House Taken Over: 170 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 191 Contradiction Federigo’s Falcon: 88 Control (Psychology) Day of the Butterfly: 63 Federigo’s Falcon: 77 Cooperation The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 140, 142–143, 148–149, 150–151
3 4 0
Corruption Once Upon a Time: 281 Courage Amigo Brothers: 20 Federigo’s Falcon: 89 Games at Twilight: 126 Marigolds: 224 A Mystery of Heroism: 256, 265, 267, 268 Courtly love Federigo’s Falcon: 70–72, 75, 81, 87, 89 Creativity The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 140 Cruelty Day of the Butterfly: 44, 45, 58, 59 Marigolds: 213, 214, 230 Two Friends: 293, 301 Cultural identity The Medicine Bag: 237, 238, 241, 243, 244 Cynicism Two Friends: 307
D Damnation How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 199 Danger Day of the Butterfly: 43, 48, 52 Once Upon a Time: 286–287 Two Friends: 294 Death Day of the Butterfly: 48 Federigo’s Falcon: 89 The First Year of My Life: 98, 103, 104 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 205, 206 The Medicine Bag: 234 A Mystery of Heroism: 251, 265, 267 Decay Marigolds: 214 Deception The Bass, the River, and Sheila Manta: 28–30, 35 Two Friends: 293, 302 Denial House Taken Over: 166, 171 Description (Literature) House Taken Over: 167 Despair Games at Twilight: 126 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 196, 206 Marigolds: 213, 215, 226, 230 Destruction Marigolds: 214, 219, 226 Detachment A Mystery of Heroism: 266 Two Friends: 293, 302
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
Determination Amigo Brothers: 11, 13 Devastation Games at Twilight: 117, 118 Devil How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 189, 190, 191, 194, 199, 203, 205 Devotion Federigo’s Falcon: 72, 84 Dignity Amigo Brothers: 20 Federigo’s Falcon: 76 The Medicine Bag: 234 Diligence Amigo Brothers: 13 Disillusionment Games at Twilight: 120 Distance A Mystery of Heroism: 266 Divine providence How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 204 Dreams How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 207 The Medicine Bag: 238 Duty The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 149 Two Friends: 294, 306
E Economics Federigo’s Falcon: 83–84 Embarrassment The Medicine Bag: 231, 233, 235, 236, 237, 242 Emotions Federigo’s Falcon: 82 The First Year of My Life: 113 The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 143 Marigolds: 226 A Mystery of Heroism: 267 Once Upon a Time: 279 Encouragement Amigo Brothers: 1, 3, 11, 13 Entitlement. See Arrogance Envy How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 191–192, 193 Epiphanies Games at Twilight: 128–131 Marigolds: 219 Escape Marigolds: 213 Ethnic identity Amigo Brothers: 14 Ethnicity Day of the Butterfly: 58
f o r
S t u d e n t s ,
V o l u m e
2 8
S u b j e c t / T h e m e
F Fairy tales Once Upon a Time: 269, 271, 281, 284–285, 286–287 Faith How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 197, 206–207, 208–209 Familial love The Medicine Bag: 236–237 Family Games at Twilight: 119 Family life Games at Twilight: 122–123 Family relationships The Medicine Bag: 235–237 Fantasy fiction The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 138, 155–159 House Taken Over: 180 Fate Federigo’s Falcon: 89 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 207 Fatherhood Marigolds: 213, 214 Fear Games at Twilight: 118, 126 The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 141 Marigolds: 213, 214, 215 The Medicine Bag: 242 A Mystery of Heroism: 249–250, 266, 267 Once Upon a Time: 269, 271, 272, 273–275, 279–282 Fear of death How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 199, 205 Female-male relations The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 27 Federigo’s Falcon: 76–79, 80–84 Femininity Federigo’s Falcon: 80–81 Feminism Games at Twilight: 132 Once Upon a Time: 286–287
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
f o r
Folk culture How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 187, 193–194, 198 Once Upon a Time: 276 Foreshadowing Day of the Butterfly: 46–47 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 194 A Mystery of Heroism: 266 Freedom Marigolds: 219, 223–224 A Mystery of Heroism: 253 Two Friends: 292 French history Two Friends: 296–299 Friendship Amigo Brothers: 1, 3, 4, 5–6, 11, 12 Day of the Butterfly: 43, 44, 48, 54 Two Friends: 291, 294–295 Frustration Marigolds: 214, 217 Futility The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 141–142, 149, 150 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 205
Generosity Federigo’s Falcon: 81 God How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 204 Good and evil Federigo’s Falcon: 85 Goodness Federigo’s Falcon: 75 Great Depression Marigolds: 212, 215, 217, 219–221 Greed How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 187, 191–192, 193, 196, 199, 200, 203, 204 Grief Federigo’s Falcon: 66, 72, 86, 87, 88, 89 Marigolds: 213, 215, 217, 219 The Medicine Bag: 237 Guilt (Psychology) Day of the Butterfly: 44 Marigolds: 214 The Medicine Bag: 233
Hatred Two Friends: 302 Hell How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 199 Heritage The Medicine Bag: 231, 234, 237, 238, 241, 242 Heroes A Mystery of Heroism: 252 Two Friends: 299, 306–307 Heroism A Mystery of Heroism: 247, 249, 250–251, 253, 256–258, 265, 266, 267 Two Friends: 306 Hispanic American culture Amigo Brothers: 1, 21 Hispanic Americans Amigo Brothers: 16–20, 21 Honor Amigo Brothers: 6 Federigo’s Falcon: 72 Two Friends: 293 Hope Games at Twilight: 126 Marigolds: 212, 214, 219, 222 Hopelessness How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 205, 206 Marigolds: 213, 214, 219 Hostility Two Friends: 301, 302 Human condition Games at Twilight: 120, 127 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 204–206 A Mystery of Heroism: 261–262 Once Upon a Time: 285 Human nature Federigo’s Falcon: 85 The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 152–153 Two Friends: 307–309 Humanity Federigo’s Falcon: 75, 76 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 209 Humiliation Games at Twilight: 120 Marigolds: 214, 217 Humor Two Friends: 308–309
H
I
Happiness Federigo’s Falcon: 69, 72, 84, 90 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 191, 196 Two Friends: 291, 292 Harlem Renaissance Marigolds: 227–229
Identity Amigo Brothers: 13, 20 Games at Twilight: 115, 118–119, 124 Marigolds: 211 Illumination. See Insight Imagery (Literature) Federigo’s Falcon: 85
G
S t u d e n t s ,
V o l u m e
2 8
Subject/Theme Index
European history The First Year of My Life: 99–100 Two Friends: 301–302 Evil How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 205 Two Friends: 301 Exaggeration How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 199 Exclusion. See Outsiders Existentialism Games at Twilight: 120, 126–127 Exploitation Two Friends: 293
I n d e x
3 4 1
S u b j e c t / T h e m e
I n d e x
Imagination Once Upon a Time: 275, 283 Immigrant life Amigo Brothers: 8–10 Day of the Butterfly: 45, 48–49 Immorality The First Year of My Life: 98 Indecision Federigo’s Falcon: 88 Indian culture Games at Twilight: 124, 125, 133–134 Indian history Games at Twilight: 121–123 Individualism Games at Twilight: 119, 124, 125, 135 Innocence The First Year of My Life: 103 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 191 Marigolds: 211, 213–214, 215, 217, 224, 230 Insight Games at Twilight: 128–129 Once Upon a Time: 285–286 Insignificance Games at Twilight: 117, 118, 120, 126 Integrity Amigo Brothers: 6–7, 11–12 Intelligence Federigo’s Falcon: 82 Irony Federigo’s Falcon: 87, 88, 89–90 The First Year of My Life: 92, 104 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 194, 199 A Mystery of Heroism: 250, 252, 265, 267 Once Upon a Time: 286 Two Friends: 293, 305–306 Isolation Day of the Butterfly: 45–46, 59 Games at Twilight: 120 House Taken Over: 165–166, 170 Marigolds: 212, 213 Once Upon a Time: 279 Italian culture Federigo’s Falcon: 80 Italian history Federigo’s Falcon: 73–75, 90
J Joy Federigo’s Falcon: 69 Marigolds: 214, 219 Justice Federigo’s Falcon: 90 Justification Day of the Butterfly: 52, 53
3 4 2
K Kindness A Mystery of Heroism: 267 Knowledge The First Year of My Life: 103 Marigolds: 224
L Language and languages Amigo Brothers: 8, 13 Federigo’s Falcon: 72–73 The First Year of My Life: 108–109 Games at Twilight: 121, 132–134 A Mystery of Heroism: 253 Latin American history House Taken Over: 168–169 Leadership Day of the Butterfly: 44 Life and death The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 144 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 205 Loneliness Day of the Butterfly: 42 Marigolds: 215 Longing The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 25, 34–36 Federigo’s Falcon: 87 Loss (Psychology) Federigo’s Falcon: 88 Marigolds: 227 Love Federigo’s Falcon: 66, 68–69, 70, 86 The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 159 Once Upon a Time: 279 Loyalty Federigo’s Falcon: 84 Two Friends: 292–293, 294
M Magical realism House Taken Over: 161, 169, 172 Malaise House Taken Over: 170 Marginalization Federigo’s Falcon: 83 Marriage Federigo’s Falcon: 69, 84 Masculinity Federigo’s Falcon: 81 Meaning of life How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 208–209 Memory Day of the Butterfly: 51–54 Games at Twilight: 119, 126 Marigolds: 211, 212, 218, 219, 226
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
Metamorphosis (Literature) How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 199 Metaphors Amigo Brothers: 11 Day of the Butterfly: 63 The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 147, 148 House Taken Over: 175–176 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 196, 199 Marigolds: 211, 218–219, 222 A Mystery of Heroism: 251, 266 Metaphysics House Taken Over: 179 Middle ages Federigo’s Falcon: 74–75, 82 Middle class Games at Twilight: 123, 124 Miracles How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 206–207 Misfortunes Federigo’s Falcon: 89 Misunderstanding The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 27 Modernization Games at Twilight: 115 Morality Day of the Butterfly: 59 Federigo’s Falcon: 78, 85, 86 The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 159 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 187, 198, 200–203, 206 Mother-child relationships Federigo’s Falcon: 78 Games at Twilight: 118 Motion House Taken Over: 170 Motivation Federigo’s Falcon: 81 A Mystery of Heroism: 247, 257 Multiculturalism Day of the Butterfly: 49 Murder Once Upon a Time: 281 Mystery House Taken Over: 161
N Narrators Day of the Butterfly: 41, 47, 51–54, 61 The First Year of My Life: 92, 96, 100, 101 House Taken Over: 166–167 Native American culture The Medicine Bag: 231, 233–234, 236, 237, 239–240, 241, 242, 243, 244–245
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S u b j e c t / T h e m e
O Obsession The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 26, 27, 28, 35–36 Omniscience The First Year of My Life: 94, 95, 100, 101, 102, 103 Oppression (Politics) Once Upon a Time: 273 Optimism The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 152–153 Otherness Marigolds: 224 Outsiders Day of the Butterfly: 43, 44, 45–46, 52, 56–58 Games at Twilight: 135 Marigolds: 213
Marigolds: 217 Once Upon a Time: 285 Two Friends: 305 Rebellion Games at Twilight: 126 Reflection Games at Twilight: 129 Religion How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 207–209 A Mystery of Heroism: 263–264 Religious beliefs How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 197–198, 207–209 Remorse Marigolds: 217 Respect The Medicine Bag: 233, 234, 235–236, 238, 241 Two Friends: 291 Responsibility Marigolds: 215 Restlessness Marigolds: 215 Rituals Day of the Butterfly: 58, 59 The Medicine Bag: 238 A Mystery of Heroism: 266 Rivalry The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 138, 141–142, 147–151 Rural life Marigolds: 212 Russian culture How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 194–195, 199, 207
S
P Pain Games at Twilight: 117 Paradoxes Federigo’s Falcon: 88 Parody Once Upon a Time: 269, 281 Passion The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 27 Federigo’s Falcon: 84, 86 Past House Taken Over: 164 Patience The Medicine Bag: 234 Patriarchy Federigo’s Falcon: 80–84 The Medicine Bag: 234 Patriotism Two Friends: 306 Peace The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 149 Two Friends: 292, 293
S h o r t
Peasant culture How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 189, 195, 197 Philosophy A Mystery of Heroism: 261–262 Point of view (Literature) Day of the Butterfly: 51–54 Games at Twilight: 124–125 Politics The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 143–144, 144–146, 147–151 Two Friends: 291, 292, 294 Postcolonialism Games at Twilight: 121, 122–123, 124 House Taken Over: 172 Postmodernism Day of the Butterfly: 61–63 Poverty Day of the Butterfly: 60 Federigo’s Falcon: 69, 76, 81, 84, 86, 88 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 197 Marigolds: 212, 213, 214, 215, 217, 219, 224, 230 Power (Philosophy) Amigo Brothers: 11 Day of the Butterfly: 63 Federigo’s Falcon: 76 Pragmatism House Taken Over: 165 Pretension A Mystery of Heroism: 266 Pride Federigo’s Falcon: 72 A Mystery of Heroism: 251–252
Subject/Theme Index
Native American history The Medicine Bag: 238–240, 244–245 Naturalism (Literature) Two Friends: 296 Nature The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 27, 31–32, 36, 37–38 Nobility Federigo’s Falcon: 69, 72, 78, 81, 85 Normalcy The First Year of My Life: 98, 101, 102 Northeastern United States Amigo Brothers: 1, 7, 8–10
I n d e x
S t o r i e s
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Q Questing Two Friends: 295
R Race relations Once Upon a Time: 269, 273, 279–282, 287 Racism Amigo Brothers: 14, 15, 19, 21 Marigolds: 215, 219–221, 229 See also Apartheid Realism (Cultural movement) A Mystery of Heroism: 253, 260–261, 268 Two Friends: 303, 306, 307 Reality Amigo Brothers: 8 Day of the Butterfly: 50 Games at Twilight: 126 House Taken Over: 179–180 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 207
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Sacrifice The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 28 Federigo’s Falcon: 69, 72, 78, 84, 86, 87, 88 Sadism Two Friends: 293, 301, 302 Satire Once Upon a Time: 284 Two Friends: 307 Self identity The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 23, 28, 30 Marigolds: 213, 217 Self knowledge The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 36 Day of the Butterfly: 60 A Mystery of Heroism: 258 Self realization Games at Twilight: 115, 124–127, 126 Self worth Marigolds: 213
3 4 3
S u b j e c t / T h e m e
I n d e x
Selfishness The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 27 Sensitivity Federigo’s Falcon: 76 Games at Twilight: 118–119, 120, 125 Sentimentality Federigo’s Falcon: 82 Setting (Literature) Amigo Brothers: 7–8, 13 The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 144 House Taken Over: 170 Sex roles Federigo’s Falcon: 87 Games at Twilight: 123, 124 Marigolds: 217, 218, 224 Shame Games at Twilight: 117 Marigolds: 213, 217 Sibling relations House Taken Over: 174 Marigolds: 215 Sin How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 193 Slavery Marigolds: 224–227 Social class Day of the Butterfly: 58 House Taken Over: 165, 172 A Mystery of Heroism: 253 Two Friends: 300 Social identity Games at Twilight: 125 Marigolds: 217 Sorrow Marigolds: 213 South African culture Once Upon a Time: 269, 276–278 Spirituality Games at Twilight: 130 A Mystery of Heroism: 267 Stereotypes (Psychology) Two Friends: 292, 301 Stoicism House Taken Over: 165 Storytelling Once Upon a Time: 284–285 Strength Federigo’s Falcon: 82, 89 Marigolds: 215, 218, 226 The Medicine Bag: 238 Struggle The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 30 Games at Twilight: 115 Suburban life Games at Twilight: 123
3 4 4
Once Upon a Time: 271, 272, 273, 279 Success The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 140 Suffering How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 199–200 Supernatural House Taken Over: 161, 170, 172, 180–181 Surrealism The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 39 Suspense The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 30 House Taken Over: 161 Symbolism Day of the Butterfly: 48 Federigo’s Falcon: 85–86 Games at Twilight: 126 The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 144 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 205 Marigolds: 211, 212, 214, 215, 219, 222–224 The Medicine Bag: 238 A Mystery of Heroism: 251 Two Friends: 296, 301 Sympathy Federigo’s Falcon: 78 Two Friends: 293
T Teacher-student relationships Day of the Butterfly: 44 Temptation How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 192–193, 194 Tension The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant: 26 Federigo’s Falcon: 82 The First Year of My Life: 102 How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 205 A Mystery of Heroism: 266 Tradition The Medicine Bag: 234, 235, 236, 237, 243 Transformation Marigolds: 215 Triumph Amigo Brothers: 4 Truth Day of the Butterfly: 61 Federigo’s Falcon: 88 The First Year of My Life: 101, 111–112, 113
S h o r t
S t o r i e s
U Uncertainty Federigo’s Falcon: 88 Understanding Marigolds: 224 Two Friends: 291 Unity Games at Twilight: 126–127 Universality Once Upon a Time: 285 Urban life Amigo Brothers: 1, 8–9 Games at Twilight: 115, 125 House Taken Over: 172 Utopianism The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 149
V Vanity A Mystery of Heroism: 247 Victimization Day of the Butterfly: 60 Once Upon a Time: 272 Violence Amigo Brothers: 8–10 The First Year of My Life: 110 Marigolds: 214 Virtue Federigo’s Falcon: 76, 84
W Wars The First Year of My Life: 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103 A Mystery of Heroism: 247, 249–250, 251, 253–254, 258–261, 265, 266, 267 Two Friends: 289–290, 290–292, 295–296, 296–299, 299–302, 306–307 Weakness Amigo Brothers: 12 Marigolds: 218 Wealth Federigo’s Falcon: 69, 76, 82, 83, 88, 90 Western culture Games at Twilight: 123, 124 Wisdom The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind: 140–141, 143 Marigolds: 224 World War I, 1914-1918 The First Year of My Life: 94, 96–97, 99–100
Y Yearning. See Longing
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