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Story-a-Day - 2 What exactly IS "Story-a-Day"? Well, Story-a-Day (also known as "Story-A-Day") is my goal to read one story every day from Ann Charters' collection "The Story and Its Writer" (5th Ed.) which is quite an amazing collection of short stories from around the world. So here is a list (alphabetical, for that's how they appear in the book) of the stories I've read beginning June 5, 2004. I'll include an excerpt before any comments.
New! Click on the names (on this side of the
dashed line) to find more info on the writer! Day 26: Raymond Carver - "Errand" - 1987 "Anton Pavlovich lay on his back," Maria wrote in her Memoirs. "He was not allowed to speak. After greeting him, I went over to the table to hide my emotions." There, among bottles of champagne, jars of caviar, bouquets of flowers from well-wishers, she saw something that terrified her: a freehand drawing, obviously done by a specialist in these matters, of Chekhov's lungs.
Carver's
magic lies not in his ability to write a powerful, moving piece of
historical fiction, nor his careful mimic of Chekhov's story-writing;
neither does it sit with his knowledge of Russian literature (the story
begins in a restaurant reminiscent of a scene in Demons or The
Possessed—depending on your translation) nor his unique maintenance and
destruction of Aristotle's unities... wait. Maybe I'm wrong.
"Errand" shows an entirely different side of Carver, and his strength in any
voice he chooses. The narrator in "Cathedral" and the author of
"Errand" are two different people. I promise. Carver
seems to be one of Ann Charters' favorites for there are three of his
stories in her collection, and a lengthy discussion of his work in the
second "section" on the art of writing. It's causing me to wonder just
who this Charters person is; her name has previously come to me via
Kerouac's work: I rather think she is following me like that car ahead of
you who makes all the turns toward your house. You know the one. Day 27: Raymond Carver - "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" - 1981 "But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did. So I suppose I am like Terri in that regard. Terry and Ed." He thought about it and then he went on. "There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me. Then there's Ed. Okay, we're back to Ed. He loves Terri so much he tries to kill her and he winds up killing himself." Mel stopped talking and swallowed from his glass. A quote from "Errand" by Raymond Carver: (Tolstoy comes to visit Chekhov who's ill) "Despite his low opinion of Chekhov's abilities as a playwright (Tolstoy felt the plays were static and lacking any moral vision. 'Where do your characters take you?' he once demanded of Chekhov. 'From the sofa to the junk room and back'), Tolstoy liked Chekhov's short stories." Carver is perhaps more comfortable with his "lack of moral vision" than Chekhov ever was, and it shows in this story. Two drunk couples talk about love. Spiritual or carnal, they argue. Can masochism be entwined with love? These are all questions; it's Carver listing questions through his narrator Nick. Nick and Laura are in the honeymoon stage of things. They're just getting started at 18 months, but both have been married before. Everyone at the table is a seasoned veteran at marriage, at relationships. Mel is a cardiologist and witnesses death in the ER. There is death and love and relationships and alcohol, but where is the moral vision? Carver, you damn nihilist. But even Carver, though dead now, would appreciate the humor in calling him a nihilist (for it was a joke—by me at least; others are more serious), since the word (as a theory, not as the German word for nothing) came into use after Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons, in which the term means not the discarding of a moral system in favor of chaos, but the rejection of traditional values in favor of...what? It's not an author's job to suggest what will be in favor, but merely to point out epochs in which it occurs. Carver's lack of moral direction in a story like this one doesn't point to his own reflection, but his own astute observation. Carver's stories deal with youth and age (blind man in "Cathedral," the dying Chekhov in "Errand," the old couple in the car accident in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"), and focus on that unstable continuum of morality. This makes many people uncomfortable. It makes me glad to be alive. Day 28: Willa Cather - "Paul's Case" - 1905 Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odors of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly-clad men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple orchards that bloomed perennially under the lime-light.
Death
seems to be a prevalent theme among the stories thus far. Two of them
even had the word "death" in the title. The three stories on this page
(and thirteen on the previous) have a death occur in them—even more use the
theme. Paul is a suicide case; so far there have been relatively few
suicides. Atwood offered the hint of one in "Death by Landscape,"
Allison mentions a few in passing in "River of Names." Paul's is the
first story of a suicide coming. He doesn't fit anywhere, not in his
father's realm of the Pittsburgh steel industry nor the niceties of New York
at the Astoria. It's almost Holden Caulfield's story written from his
formally literate aunt's perspective...but in 1905! Cather was paying
attention. But this isn't Paul's story, it's his case. Day 29: John Cheever - "The Swimmer" - 1964 His life was not confining and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape. He seemed to see, with a cartographer's eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.
My father
read Cheever's story "The Swimmer" late last Friday. I told him it
would be neat if we swapped ideas on it since I knew I'd be reading it...oh,
about now. I'd read it before, back in 1998, too. Day 30: Anton Chekhov - "The Darling" - 1899 And what was worst of all, she had no opinions of any sort. She saw the objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any opinion about them, and did not know what to talk about. And how awful it is not to have any opinions! One sees a bottle, for instance, or the rain, or the peasant, and what is the meaning of it, one can't say, and could not even for a thousand rubles.
Chekhov
wrote more than 800 short stories a play or two you may have read or seen.
I'm not too crazy about the translation, but otherwise this story is
captivating. Highly allegorical it focuses on a woman who forms
opinions only through a series of men: husband, husband, husband, adopted
child. We all may know someone like this, and it's a curious artifact
which those people carry from relationship to relationship. One
wonders who precisely is to blame for such occurrences, akin to the
chickeny-egg debate of who is to blame for prostitution: the buyers or the
sellers. Chekhov, in this story anyway, gives blame to those who lack
judgment rather than those who strip it away. At the heart of the
story, though, is not a societal debate about opinions, but a poke at people
who have ceased thinking for their selves. At last count, there were
at least one or two of these people still around; Chekhov may have been on
to something... Chekhov is widely considered a master of the short
story (and a master playwright, too), and this story and the next are two
good examples why. When you write 800 stories, you become effective at
writing stories. You learn where the story is, and how to tell it
without a lot of extraneous garbage clogging the veins of your idea or
theme. Day 31: Anton Chekhov - "The Lady with the Pet Dog" - 1899 Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, Gurov, soothed and spellbound by these magical surroundings—the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky—thought how everything is really beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget the higher aims of life and our own human dignity.
The book
is used; the book I'm reading these stories from is used. There's a
yellow sticker on the back that says in capital, bold letters: U-S-E-D.
Because of this I sometimes find faint lead squiggles bracketing passages
that someone else found intriguing, moving or stupid. "The Lady with
the Pet Dog" is full of these little marginal quips. I assume that
"amaz" stands for "amazing" and that "wow" signifies a particularly close
connection the previous reader had with the text in that section.
Sometimes there's an underline, as in this: "...that civilized man is so
nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected." I
wonder where this person is now, if they're young or old (relative to me, of
course), and whether or not they still think of this happenstance love
story. Maybe the person who wrote in my book will search for this
story and find my rambling: we'll make contact and talk about our favorite
passages. Day 32: Charles Chesnutt - "The Sheriff's Children" - 1899 In the silent watches of the night, when he was alone with God, there came into his mind a flood of unaccustomed thoughts. An hour or two before standing face to face with death, he had experienced a sensation similar to that which drowning men are said to feel—a kind of clarifying of the moral faculty, in which the veil of the flesh, with its obscuring passions and prejudices, is pushed aside for a moment, and all the acts of one's life stand out, in the clear light of truth, in their correct proportions and relations,—a state of mind in which one sees himself as God may be supposed to see him.
Set 10
years after the conclusion of the Civil War, Chesnutt's story focuses on a
small town sheriff's obligation to his post and his filial obligation to his
abandoned child. When a lynch mob comes for a mulatto accused of
murder, the sheriff steps in to protect the prisoner. But soon the
tables are turned when their roles are reversed after the captor acquires
the pistol. The mob driven away, the prisoner reveals that he is the
sheriff's son with one of his slaves in the pre-war days. Day 33: Kate Chopin - "Désirée's Baby" - 1892 Désirée had not changed the thin white garment nor the slippers which she wore. Her hair was uncovered and the sun's rays brought a golden gleam from its brown meshes. She did not take the broad, beaten road which led to the far-off plantation of Valmondé. She walked across a deserted field, where the stubble bruised her tender feet, so delicately shod, and tore her thin gown to shreds. This story seems fitting to follow Chesnutt's "The Sheriff's Children" since it deals with very similar issues. A rather wealthy white woman distresses when her baby born (of a white father) is of mixed race. Somewhere, though, the empathic response Chopin could have elicited is wasted in her attempt to add a snappy ending. It's akin to describing brusquely a tragic situation only so later you can attempt to double the tragedy by explaining its needlessness. For dealing with issues of race, of motherhood, Chopin may have been ahead of her time. But for emulating so poorly other short story writers, she is quite deserving in criticism. Try out her novel, The Awakening. I'm told that any novel which starts with an article (be it definite or indefinite) is worth reading. Day 34: Kate Chopin - "The Story of an Hour" - 1894 When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. Chopin professed an admiration for Guy de Maupassant, and the connection is easy to see after reading these two stories. They have that certain O. Henry ring (William Sydney Porter), a twist of fate or tragic irony reversing the reader's earlier take on the story. While these are fun to read twice (once not knowing the twist, and then once to see the clues you might have missed), they don't provide a longevity and a depth that some of the other stories have thus far. Chopin is lauded today for this story's latent feminism which seems more projected upon it than issuing forth. It is almost impossible to describe the story without giving away the ending, and if you find yourself reading more and more within this genre ("tricky-ending"), you'll find that you'd seen it coming from paragraph 3. Chopin's trick works until you expect it, until you find yourself inadvertently watching the magician's "dummy" hand which has had the coin all along. Day 35: Sandra Cisneros - "The House on Mango Street," "Hairs," "My Name," "The Monkey Garden," "Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes" - 1983 There were sunflowers big as flowers on Mars and thick cockscombs bleeding the deep red fringe of theater curtains. There were dizzy bees and bow-tied fruit flies turning somersaults and humming in the air. Sweet sweet peach trees. Thorn roses and thistle and pears. Weeds like so many squinty-eyed stars and brush that made your ankles itch and itch until you washed with soap and water. There were big green apples hard as knees. And everywhere the sleepy smell of rotting wood, damp earth and dusty hollyhocks thick and perfumy like the blue-blond hair of the dead. [from "The Monkey Garden"]
These
stories, if you were wondering, were all taken from a book titled The
House on Mango Street which Cisneros published in 1983. It is a
collection of short-shorts (more aptly called "vignettes") which tell of a
young girl, Esperanza, and her life. For once, though, The Story
and Its Writer does an injustice by only including four vignettes (when
the book contains 44); it's akin to excerpting "Paradise Lost" or
cliffsnotesing a book and considering the abridgement itself literature
(note: to the editors of the OED: the word "cliffsnotesing" is used here as
a verb and by the peculiar figure Jason Bulger on Sunday, July 18, 2004 from
his residence in San Francisco). Luckily I own a copy of The House
on Mango Street so I can right Ann Charters' wrong. You might
suggest: "At least Charters is making her readers aware of the text!"
and to that I would reply that otherwise she provides the smallest
representative unit of a writers' work, and here she incorrectly assumes
that these vignettes are meant to stand on their own as stories.
Furthermore, she includes the first and last such vignette, yet even more
proof of Charters' trailering crime (OED, please note that the verb trailer
here is used not in the sense of "to trailer a boat" but "to create a
trailer for a movie," references ibid.). UPDATE: I have just finished The House on Mango Street, and I must say it was wonderful. I'm still debating whether Charters was justified in her theft, but I'm glad at least that I was able to read the book. I don't know, though, that others who didn't have the book, would've decided to read it based on the excerpts provided. As I said, they don't really stand on their own. The book was filled with poetry, with wonderful imagery and with a longing to escape an oppressive environment--but not escape it completely. Esperanza feels an obligation to return to Mango Street somehow. It is through her writing that the character is able to reconcile her ambivalence toward the place and somehow lift it one notch above the filth at which she first saw it. Wonderful writing. Good, quick read. Day 36: Joseph Conrad - "Heart of Darkness" - 1899, 1902 Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.
Chinua Achebe
wrote a piece called "An Image of Africa: Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,'" and
it speaks volumes about the story and echoes many of the faults I found with
the story/novella. At the outset, though, I have to say that this
story is worth reading of only because it is contentious and
thought-provoking. Day 37: Julio Cortázar - "A Continuity of Parks" - 1967 He remembered effortlessly the names and his mental image of the characters; the novel spread its glamour over him almost at once. He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him, and at the same time feeling his head rest comfortably on the green velvet of the chair with its high back, sensing that the cigarettes rested within reach of his hand, that beyond the great windows the air of afternoon danced under the oak trees in the park.
"Ostensibly..."
I want to begin. It's tempting to start every one thus since it's the
multilayering which makes literature so wonderful. Describing superb
writing you wish to impart upon your reader that at first the text
made you feel a certain way: you wish to find some empathic connection so
that they are guided along with you... or misguided along with you,
since both of us know that the rest of my sentence that begins
"Ostensibly..." will end with a poignant reversal, some expected twist.
And when the twist is revealed (perhaps one of many), the reader shares your
"Aha!" moment, if only on a smaller scale (since they had less invested than
you, since they have not actually read what you're discussing).
Imagine a movie critic selling a flick she enjoyed: "You might have thought
that Burt Lancaster was a stiff actor and perhaps too charismatic,
but everything works out in Elmer Gantry." It's this comparison
we critics so desperately try to make (or call it a "contrast"—it's the
same thing). I want to tell you that Cortázar's story does one thing
wonderful, and that his short-short should be praised for that, but then,
when you're not expecting it, his sudden, postmodern Poe-like twist takes
you for a loop. This is what I want to do, but I shall resist.
Because the "one thing" and the "twist" are relative and will be somehow
diminished if I tried, in nearly as many words as the author actually did
it, to describe to you his novel technique. Try reading
Hopscotch, for which
he's rather well-known. Day 38: Stephen Crane - "An Open Boat" - 1897 "If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?" Crane published this story when he was twenty-six years old. Three years later he would be dead, his corpus totaling some fourteen books. Though his Red Badge of Courage was a work of fiction for Crane who'd never been in a battle, "An Open Boat" is a story based on the sinking of the Commodore which he'd been aboard as it sank. The third person narration in the story is amazing because anticipates narrative film forty years later as the perspective narrows and widens. The reader gets the sense that one of the men aboard the lifeboat is central to the story, that he is the guide. But the narration allows for any outcome. "Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing," Crane writes. There is a certain futility that accumulates when one experiences hope and despair alternatively...repetitively. The wounded captain directs the men where to row, the portly cook bails water from the dinghy and the oiler and the correspondent alternate at the oars. The excerpt above is oft-quoted as the outcome grows bleaker and as the men's energy is depleted by the waves that continually crash over the bow. Day 39: Don DeLillo - "Videotape" - 1996 The chance quality of the encounter. The victim, the killer, and the child with a camera. Random energies that approach a common point. There's something here that speaks to you directly, saying terrible things about forces beyond your control, lines of intersection that cut through history and logic and every reasonable layer of human expectation. A child captures a crime on videotape, a murder. It's a story about tragedy, about innocence destroyed in an instant. It's a modern tale about voyeurism, about the twenty-first century's appetite for gore, for grit, for the real in this post-postmodern era. Everything's packaged and fed to us one dose at a time so we crave that which is so corporeal, so shocking that it once would have made us sick. Now the tugging fascination is the only thing we've left to feel; it's all that remains. DeLillo, in his story, brings us from the familiar to the horrific, through the lens of a child (literally), but from the perspective of a spectator in a home watching television. Imagine the people who, in slow motion, watched as an American President suffered a similar fate in 1963. You can see the brains—the life—blown from his head. And we watch it in slow motion, frame by terrible frame. "You have to see this," we say to our friends in the next room munching on potato chips. They hurry to the screen so as not to miss the moment, the cataclysm. We're familiar with the medium; we expect certain things at certain times. This is in many ways more frightening than any act that could be caught on videotape. Day 40: Junot Diaz - "Fiesta, 1980" - 1996 He didn't say nothing to nobody, not even to moms. He just pushed past her, held up his hand when she tried to talk to him, and jumped into the shower. Rafa gave me the look and I gave it back to him; we both knew Papi had been out with the Puerto Rican woman he was seeing and wanted to wash off the evidence quick.
Nobody believes
me when I tell them that I dream in Spanish but it is true. It's dead
true. I have no reason to lie about that, especially to you. I
have a couple extra letters to choose from and my 'r's sound different, not
rolled so much as tapered. Charlie, that's what we called Junot as
little kids, he spoke so fluidly that at night when I went home I heard the
words in my dream world. But waking—so painful!—because no one
believes me. Day 41: Isak Dinesen - "The Blue Jar" - 1942 And when I am dead you will cut out my heart and lay it in the blue jar. For then everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue round me, and in the midst of the blue world my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently, like a wake that sings, like the drops that fall from an oar blade." A little later she asked them: "Is it not a sweet thing to think that, if only you had patience, all that has ever been, will come back to you?"
Isak Dinesen is
the nom de plume of the Baroness Karen Blixen of Denmark, who chose
to write in English out of devotion to her British lover, Denys
Finch-Hatton. She is well known for her memories of Africa in the book
Out of Africa (1937). "The Blue Jar" is a story Poe would have
appreciated, I think. Not that he's the benchmark toward which all
author's aspire, but he did have a thing or two to say about the short
story. Dinesen's story is short, to the point, has a dab of the
macabre and has a sentimentalism that can't be dismissed. Partly due
to its brevity, the story can't be accused of melodrama; still the romantic
notions abound. Soul mates exist, love is everlasting, symbols of love
are sometimes as important as the people involved—these are ideas posited in
"The Blue Jar." Day 42: Ralph Ellison - "Battle Royal" - 1952 Blindfolded, I could no longer control my emotions. I had no dignity. I stumbled about like a baby or a drunken man. The smoke had become thicker and with each new blow it seemed to sear and further restrict my lungs. My saliva became like hot bitter glue. A glove connected with my head, filling my mouth with warm blood. It was everywhere.
A frequently
excerpted section of Ellison's book The Invisible Man, "Battle Royal"
tells the story of a young man's encounter with a raucous group of drunk
white men, and the blind boxing match which prefaced his dignified speech on
the topic of race relations in the "reconstructed" south. Afterward,
the bellicose spectators encourage the black children to grab money from a
carpet in the floor. It turns out to be electrified, but the kids
still grab for it. Some are thrown on the mat. "It was as though
I had rolled through a bed of hot coals," the narrator says. Day 43: Louise Erdrich - "The Red Convertible" - 1984 I was the first one to drive a convertible on my reservation. And of course it was red, a red Olds. I owned that car along with my brother Henry Junior. We owned it together until his boots filled with water on a windy night and he bought out my share. Now Henry owns the whole car, and his younger brother Lyman (that's myself), Lyman walks everywhere he goes.
Erdrich's story
starts where it ends, vice versa. It's told in the vernacular, by a
narrator who writes like he talks like he thinks of things fresh off the top
of his head. Lyman's story is about his brother, but it's about war,
too. It's about Vietnam in the sorta way that a war can follow people
home, can follow home fathers and brothers and sisters and mothers.
War follows us all home in some way. So when you fight a war it might
follow you home, only the "might" is put in there out of respect. It
doesn't really belong. Day 44: William Faulkner - "A Rose for Emily" - 1931 The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing-table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. "Everything has a bit of death in it," someone famous once said...shoot, who was that... "Around every corner you will find the macabre, so long as you wish to notice it," and that's another one. Someone important said those. Your usual quotarian: politician, literary figure, imperial magistrate. They may well have been talking about William Faulkner, who, like Flannery O'Connor, writes often about the South, and, like Edgar Allen Poe, employs an occasional resolution of the gruesome order...What was I saying? Well, of course Flannery O'Connor came after Faulkner... Did any of you read The Hamlet, by Faulkner? I tried to read it on account of that one Dylan song, but I was pretty busy with things—you know how things can get you busy all the time... well I never did finish the book. Anyway, this story is about Emily, an anachronism by the time the story is told. Holed up in her house, she relies only on her manservant and the local government which continues to offer a reprieve from her property taxes (per the Colonel's kind order). She buys some monogrammed toilet things...oh, that's not that important for this part... Well, she's a pathetic character, then. That's about all I can say. It's a bit other-worldly like Poe, but there's emotion buried nicely among the "jalousie"s and the "nobless oblige"s. It's a nice story. Sort of surprises you at the end but not if you were paying attention (or had read it before). Day 45: William Faulkner - "That Evening Sun" - 1931 But fifteen years ago, on Monday morning the quiet, dusty, shady streets would be full of Negro women with, balanced on their steady, turbaned heads, bundles of clothes tied up in sheets, almost as large as cotton bales, carried so without touch of hand between the kitchen door of the white house and the blackened washpot beside a cabin door in Negro Hollow.
Quentin's
casual telling of Nancy and Jesus' story adds to its effectiveness, giving
it an extemporaneous quality. It reminded me of language I've
encountered in Carver and Kerouac; repetitive lines to enhance or illuminate
certain feelings or descriptions: "Nancy looked at us. Her eyes went
fast, like she was afraid there wasn't time to look, without hardly moving
at all. She looked at us, at all three of us at one time." I had
a problem, though, with the narrator's introduction which pegged him as
Faulkner-esque, speaking of his town entering modernity with the paving of
the streets and such. For later he reverts to his nine-year-old
perspective. The two can co-exist, but the first part should mesh
better with the latter part. Listen to me telling Bill Faulkner how to
tell a story. Would he be rolling in his grave? Nah. Day 46: F. Scott Fitzgerald - "Babylon Revisited" - 1931
They were waiting. Marion sat behind the coffee service in a dignified
black dinner dress that just faintly suggested mourning. Lincoln was
walking up and down with the animation of one who had already been talking.
They were anxious as he was to get into the question. He opened it
almost immediately:
It seems this
story has always existed in my life in some respect. It holds a place
in my heart—bad or good, who can say. True, it's a wonderful story,
but if you knew how wedged it was... Day 47: Gustave Flaubert - "A Simple Heart" - 1877 As for Félicité, she went into Virginie's room every morning from sheer force of habit and looked round it. It upset her not having to brush the child's hair anymore, tie her bootlaces, or tuck her up in bed; and she missed seeing her sweet face all the time and holding her hand when they went out together. For want of something to do, she tried making lace, but her fingers were too clumsy and broke the threads. She could not settle anything, lost her sleep, and, to use her own words, was "eaten up inside."
Here, in one of
the few short stories he wrote, the author of Madame Bovary (think
"The Kugelmass Episode"!) gives us a heroine in the form of a maidservant.
Any class of person can be noble or ignoble, Flaubert said. Does that
mean the story is devoid of subordination?...hardly. One could argue
that his choice of a protagonist helped along the pathos in the story since,
illiterate and "simple" (as the title states), we are more likely to feel
sorry for her terrible lot in life. Her nephew sails to America and
dies; America to her is a word and the globe which Monsieur Bourais shows
her goes far beyond her grasp of the world. Flaubert and the reader
clearly have something over Félicité, so how do we ensure that we're not
benefiting because of some other's sad lot in life? Good writing, I
suppose. Every story in this book has been filled with tragedy, so you
could argue that it is routinely exploited for our amusement (hopefully our
growth in emotional complexity). Flaubert's choice of a character who
lacks even meager advantages in life opens the question for exploration.
At this moment, I can still vividly interpret the end of the story two ways,
one for and one against this suggested maneuvering. Idolatry in the
form of a parrot in place of the Holy Ghost...chew on it for a while and see
if you see things differently than I. Is this merely a case of envy?
Flaubert said that every detail he chose to include was significant in
some way, and I largely think him truthful in this statement. Can
you imagine including a host of details and guaranteeing the necessity of
each? I should think it easier to memorize the dictionary backwards,
starting at "zygote." Day 48: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - "The Revolt of 'Mother'" - 1891 Nobility of character manifests itself at loop-holes when it is not provided with large doors. Sarah Penn's showed itself to-day in flaky dishes of pastry. So she made the pies faithfully, while across the table she could see, when she glanced up from her work, the sight that rankled in her patient and steadfast soul—the digging of the cellar of the new barn in the place where Adoniram forty years ago had promised her their new house should stand.
I'm brought in
to read ONE story for this series—ONE story—and I get this one! How
can I not say something about the canon? How can I let Charters and
her cohorts get away with this? Such a blatant thievery of valuable
space! Day 49: Mary Gaitskill - "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" - 1997
The phone rang five times before he got up to answer it. It was his
friend Norm. They greeted each other and then Norm, his voice strangely
weighted, said, "I saw the issue of Self with Kitty in it."
This story is
one of those that was implanted in my brains by aliens on September 4, 1999.
I don't know why, but it's always been with me—even before I read it the
first time, and not really the same way as "Babylon Revisited." It's
sort of like I had deja vu about reading it...the first time. Day 50: Tess Gallagher - "Rain Flooding Your Campfire" - 1997 Mr. G's story, the patched-up version I'm about to set straight, starts with a blind man arriving at my house. But the real story begins with my working ten-hour days with Norman Roth, a blind man who hired me because he liked my voice. As much as I criticized Charters for her inclusion of Freeman's "Revolt..." I must praise her for including this story. It's not a perfect story (is there such a thing? Of course!), but its themes are very intriguing. It deals with memory, with objectivity, and with writing (and that whole can of worms). You see, Gallagher lived with and knew intimately Raymond Carver (they married shortly before his death in 1988), whose story "Cathedral" appears in this collection as well. What if, Gallagher asks, there was another side to that mysteriously wonderful story of Carver's? Gallagher, presumably "my wife" in "Cathedral," happens to be an author in her own right, and decided to pen this story to "set the record straight," so to speak. But is that possible? The result is still a work of fiction—perhaps stuffed with more facts, but no difference in type. To sharply contrast the romantic cathedral which the narrator of "Cathedral" draws for the blind man, Gallagher's narrator suggests it was a missile he'd cut out of paper to show him (after watching a documentary on nuclear war). "Rain Flooding Your Campfire" also deals with blindness and the disappearing reservation that comes along with being in the company of someone who can't see you. She ends her story with the narrator naked on the porch, leading Norman (the blind man) back inside on a cloudy night. I don't appreciate "Cathedral" any less, and I'm glad to have had a chance to read this story. Page 1 /\/\/\/ Page 2 /\/\/\/ Page 3 /\/\/\/ Page 4 /\/\/\/ Page 5 /\/\/\/ Info
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Page 2 statistics: 25 stories 21 authors 316 pages 4 translations 16 ♂ / 9 ♀ |
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