Assignment for 10/21 - Hemingway

“Hills Like White Elephants” is both enigmatic and extremely easy to understand, once the imagery of the story is unlocked, and once it is unequivocally decided that the young couple are discussing a probable abortion. Rounded hills call to mind a pregnant belly, the elephants are those in the room with them with the not directly discussed nearly-child, and a “white elephant” is a rummage sale where you get rid of things that you don’t want any longer. Though this term is anachronistic in our time, it was used frequently in the early half of the last century. It was a garage sale before most people had garages. It also carried the connotation that there were valuable items among the junk, but no one had bothered to separate them beforehand.

Hemingway’s writing is like a house waiting for the new owners to arrive and move in. Without the furniture of emotional context, backstory, or detailed description, the narration is an empty, echoing room. The narration does not comment on the imagery used in the story, it just stands back and lets the characters draw metaphors. This is a method of characterization that in some ways depends on the narration to be neutral, which often leads to a sense that the narration is harsh. A lack is discerned as coldness. This is something that Hemingway relies upon to carry the emphasis in his writing.

When the girl says, “‘It tastes like liquorice,’” and then puts the glass down, note that licorice has been used as an abortifacient since ancient times.

Assignment for 10/19

Christopher Durang is insane. Have you ever read his DMV sketch? Yeah. Crazy man. It doesn’t stop him from being funny and disturbing at the same time. In fact, his being nuts is probably what allows him to do it so well. “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You” is actually one of his more lucid plays.

The play is essentially a send-up of strict Catholicism. Durang has Sister Mary explain most of its core beliefs, focusing especially on ones that don’t make much sense, like changes to canonical belief that are not retroactive. There are a lot of important questions that Sister Mary does not answer. She just rolls right over them, only to have those same questions brought up by the former students who come to visit her. Diane and Gary’s deaths may be symbolic of all the Catholics who become “dead” to their families when certain things -- abortion, being gay, not quite believing -- are known.

Her behavior is a strange mix of maternal and childlike at the same time. Her affection for Thomas is almost maternal, but the way she acts towards her old students is petty and histronic. It calls her sanity into question, where before she was just eccentric. In many ways her old students have become older than she is. Their life experiences have taken them beyond the dogma that she taught them. She is reactionary, then, and mean, because she cannot accept anything that does not conform to her heavily circumscribed view of life.

There are so many things Sister Mary Ignatius can’t explain for us, and those are the things that organized deistic religion doesn’t do such a good job with, either.

Durang’s writing would probably be classed as “low,” in Lanham’s scheme. The play is supposed to be both a easy-to-understand presentation, so it makes sense that Sister Mary would be speaking in simple language. What has always bothered me about the “high/middle/low” spectrum is that, like so many other categorization schema, it is used to denote the quality of the work, rather than the quality of the prose. However, this is not what Lanham does, and I am very pleased with that. The quality of the prose overall does reflect on the rest of the piece, (meaning, success, etc.) but an author can employ many different styles in the same piece. In fiction, when functioning as narrator, describer of scenes and characters, mood-setter, and dialogue writer. In non-fiction, depending on the audience, the desired effect, whether it is meant to be read aloud or to oneself, the possibilities are endless. Good stylists often move between styles to achieve their desired outcomes, no matter what they are writing.

I would class Clinton’s speech as an example of this. He uses complex phrasing with more simplistic language to reach a large audience that he must draw to him. Orwell uses a uniformly high style in “Politics and the English Language.” His diction is varied, his phrasing carries the weight of his words effortlessly, and he works references, his own extremely pointed view, and close readings into the whole.

Assignment for 10/14 - Faulkner

“Dry September” for a title already sets the story on edge. Something is going to be wrong there. The weather is held complicit in the action. “Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass---the rumor, the story, whatever it was.” Maybe if there had been a little rain, this construction suggests, everyone might have been a little more circumspect about the whole thing. The “bloody September twilight” is the “aftermath of sixty-two rainless days.” Not the aftermath of an action, however slight or misunderstood, but the aftermath of two months of hot, dry weather.

Miss Minnie Cooper is the character the story hangs on. Whatever she said about Will Mayes, no matter how innocuous it was, started the trouble. She is not desirable to the men in her town, and hasn’t been for years. “...the sitting and lounging men did not even follow her with their eyes any more.” This is also not the first time she said something about unwanted attention from a man. “‘Did it really happen’ a third said. ‘This ain’t the first man scare she ever had, like Hawkshaw says. Wasn’t there something about a man on the kitchen roof, watching her undress, about a year ago?’” She is not considered reliable by the men in town, but when her accusation is against a black man, they can’t help but believe her. If they didn’t, they would have to take Will Mayes’ word against hers. The women do not consider her that reliable, either. “Then to one another: ‘Do you suppose anything really happened?’ their eyes darkly aglitter, secret and passionate. ‘Shhhhhhhhhh! Poor girl! Poor Minnie!’” They are pitying her not only for what might have happened, (and probably didn’t) but also for the lengths she went to.

So, Minnie desperately wants attention. To get it, she says/does/alludes to something Will Mayes said/did/alluded to, and gets him, if not killed, than very thoroughly incapacitated. This the sickening effect of actually getting her sexual attention from the men in her community. “Then the drug store, where even the young men lounging in the door-way tipped their hats and followed with their eyes the motion of her hips and legs when she passed.” She has set herself up as a desired woman by the most forbidden of people, and the one who will be least likely believed when he says that nothing happened at all. She is the one with the power when she lassos Will Mayes into her desperate bid for attention. This may be the only interaction with a man where she has had the power in her entire life. Minnie is left screaming to herself, as the other women comfort her even while they check her hair for signs of age.

At the end of the story, no one is left thinking they did the right thing. There is no redemption, and there will be none. Faulkner sees to that in the final sentences, when he describes John McLendon at night, after he has returned home. “At last he found it and wiped his body again, and, with his body pressed against the dusty screen, he stood panting. There was no movement, no sound, not even an insect. The dark world seemed to like stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars.” In the silence, McLendon’s panting makes him the animal, trapped inside his house and inside the actions he took. The world is “stricken,” as if unable to believe or bear what has happened. The stars have no lids. They are open, though it seems they should be shut. Nothing is right.

Assignment for 10/12 - Baldwin

The frame of “Stranger in the Village” allows James Baldwin to write about dangerous subjects in relative safety. He is thinking about America having left it, in this essay. Geographically in Switzerland, Baldwin is in a country famed for remaining neutral during wars. He is reporting on a war in this essay, one fought within America for control of history, perception, and power. He has taken on the role of observer while still claiming his place in the trenches. He moves from warrior to war correspondent without tripping.

Switzerland is not an entirely safe place for Baldwin, but it is unsafe in an almost quaint fashion. He is the first black man the people in this town have ever seen. The baggage they carry about having a black man in their presence is primarily religious. “...other children, having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish as I approach.” (163) Their fear rises from a metaphor rather than from deep-rooted psychological uneasiness, and while their reactions anger him, he can come to terms with certain parts of his treatment in town because he can attribute it to a single source.

Baldwin is a stranger to this small town in more ways than one. He has left his country. He is a different color. The language he thinks in is foreign. One of the main attracting features of the town is the hot springs, and “cripples” often come. He is not physically a cripple, but the way he writes about being a black man in America is clearly meant to draw the parallel. He is in a place for restoration, and it seems that he does find some there. He writes about the way children respond to him in the first part of the essay, using the theme of childhood innocence and in fact, the innocence of an entire community of people, to set off what he has to say about America. “There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children who shouted Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger! yesterday--the abyss is experience, the American experience. The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America...” (164)

He uses complex hypotactic sentences, stacking one after another. They link. They flow. They are arranged to make his point, and the point is not a pleasant one, so it has to be written as unassailable. The sentences also periodic. They have been planned. He is not talking. He is writing.

Assignment for 10/7 - Didion

When Joan Didion says, on the 6th page of the essay “Goodbye to All That,” that she and her husband moved away from New York three years before she wrote the essay, I was surprised. The distance of three years did not seem to be nearly enough for the way she was writing. There was a clarity about the experience of living in New York that felt as though it could only be seen from a greater distance. But there was also a lack of affection for her younger self, a bitterness, that came through. “That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable, and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it.” (4) She never comes right out and says that she wasted eight years of her life, but there is a great deal of anger in those words.

There are occasional touches of humor, as on the parenthetical aside on the sixth page where she talks about why it was such a problem that she “could not bear Upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings,” but mostly the story is sad. She keeps referring to all the things she did not know. (The curtains on page 4, how much to tip on page 1, that there would eventually be a cost for all of this, throughout.) She uses the word “should” a lot, as if she wants to go back and shake her former self.

“That is what it was all about about, wasn’t it? Promises?” (4) Who is she talking to? The reader? The city? Herself, of several years ago? It could be one of them, or all of them. “Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited.” (4) Her sentences are generally long, rushing out over themselves so that it feels as though she is trying to get all of thise out of her, where it can trouble her no longer.

Even the things that she liked about the city are dulled, cast in an unflattering light. “Some years passed, I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.” (5) That is a common feeling, but in the context of the rest of the piece it feels as though she is scoffing at herself for being selfish. New York, it seemed, made her selfish. It made her unaware. But now that she has become aware, the process of looking back is made bleak.

Assignment for 10/5 - Plath

Reading depression is always uncomfortable, especially when it’s done well. Sylvia Plath does it well. The zombie voice that makes decisions the person behind it never makes, the way there is nothing to do but endure, waiting for the next thing to go wrong, feeling the weight of everything that remains unknown as a personal failure, all of that is made inevitably believable. Given Plath’s history, it is no surprise that she can write about depression so accurately.

The writing in this excerpt is uncomfortable. It begins with the italicised statemend, “The face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian.” (112) This is not a useful comparison, because a “sick Indian” is not an image that readily forms in the mind. A “sick person” would, but a “sick Indian” is off, slightly racist, playing on assumptions that no one has. As well, having a face stand in for an entire human figure is wrong. The mass is wrong, the scale is off. From the first line, the world is already not behaving the way it is supposed to.

The narrator, unnamed until the seventh page of the chapter, is alone while travelling, a common occurance in literature. Trains, planes, long car trips, these are all good places to insert some exposition, or a character study, or some action that will give the reader more information. When the narrator, “dropped the compact into my pocketbook,” it shows a certain carelessness for things. (12) The scenery is not seen as a whole. It is a, “colossal junkyard, the swamps and back lots of Connecticut flashed past, one broken-down fragment bearing no relation to another.” (12) This could so easily have gone the other way. All the things in a junkyard are connected by their presence in the junkyard. There are connections to make, but the narrator is not making them, and claiming that they do not exist at all.

First-person narration creates automatic subjectivity, since having only one point of view means that you are relying on one character for all your information. The narrator is the character, and the implied author sneaks in there, too. In this piece, it highlights Esther’s loneliness. Since Esther-as-author is choosing this form of narration, the loneliness is to a certain extent self-imposed.

Reading The Bell Jar is complicated by the knowledge that this novel was intended to be autobiographical, and that Plath killed herself. It is as if the novel has an end beyond the last page, and that end is the more final one. The author has merged with the writing. So to say, as I did in the last paragraph, that Esther is the author of her own story, and has chosen the first-person point of view, and that she could have chosen something else, is to say that if it had been in third-person, Esther would still have been the author. Even in limited third-person, there is no question that the narrator is the one telling the story, with the implied author and author making up that particular holy trinity. Esther would no longer be the author. But I made the assumption that the possibility existed, because I know that Esther is, to a greater extent than usual, Sylvia. That she was meant by Sylvia to be a mirroring of Sylvia. Perhaps Esther is Sylvia’s face reflected in the train window. A ghost. Because of Sylvia’s death, Esther remains as her ghost-in-print, immortal in some limited first-person way.