The God Of Small Things [Arundhati Roy]

It's easy to forget the greatness in things we haven't yet heard of.

Great resource for understanding: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/anglophone/roy.html

***
"Never again will a single story be told
as though it's the only one."
-John Berger
 ***

Table of Contents
1) Paradise Pickles & Preserves
2) Pappachi's Moth
3) Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti
4) Abhilash Talkies
5) God's Own Country
6) Wisdom Exercise Notebooks
8) Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol
9) Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen, Mrs. Rajagopalan
10) The River in the Boat
11) The God of Small Things
12) Kochu Thomban
13) The Pessimist and the Optimist
14) Work is Struggle
15) The Crossing
16) A Few Hours Later
17) Cochin Harbor Terminus
18) The History House
19) Saving Ammu
20) The Madras Mail
21) The Cost of Living

***
1) Paradise Pickles & Preserves

18:
It was, they whispered to each other, as though she didn't know how to be a girl.
They weren't far off the mark.
Oddly, neglect seemed to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit.

19:
...exploited cheap student labor to render their presentation drawings and to blame when things went wrong.

19:
There goes a jazz tune, Larry McCaslin thought to himself, and followed her into a bookshop, where neither of them looked at books.

20:
He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, infeasible, public turmoil of a nation. The Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy, contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people's eyes and became an exasperating expression.

What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel's eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Esta's words had been. He couldn't be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers' bodies.

33:
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made.
The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much.

***
2) Pappachi's Moth

36:
Ammu said Chacko had never stopped loving Margaret Kochamma. Mammachi disagreed. She liked to believe that he had never loved her in the first place.

37:
Ammu was considering reverting to her maiden name, though she said that choosing between her husband's name and her father's name didn't give a woman much of a choice.

Rahel's new teeth were waiting inside her gums, like words in a pen.

Rahel's toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place). 

38:
Everyone was so used to it that they didn't bother to nudge each other or exchange glances. Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was.

She was twenty-seven that year, and in the pit of her stomach she carried the cold knowledge that, for her, life had been lived. She had had one chance. She made a mistake. She married the wrong man.

39:
He wore old-fashioned spectacles that made him look earnest and completely belied his easygoing charm and juvenile but totally disarming sense of humor. He was twenty-five and had already been working on the tea estates for six years. He hadn't been to college, which accounted for his schoolboy humor. He proposed to Ammu five days after they first met. Ammu didn't pretend to be in love with him. She just weighed the odds and accepted. She though that anything, anyone at all, would be better than returning to Ayemenem. She wrote to her parents informing them of her decision. They didn't reply.

Ammu had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realized that the slightly feverish glitter in her bridegroom's eyes had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whiskey. Straight. Neat.

A congregation of mourners with lantern jaws and broken noses.

When Ammu and her husband moved to Assam, Ammu, beautiful, young and cheeky, became the toast of the Planters' Club. She wore backless blouses with her saris and carried a silver lame purse on a chain. She smoked long cigarettes in a silver cigarette holder and learned how to blow perfect smoke rings. Her husband turned out to be not just a heavy drinker but a full-blown alcoholic with all an alcoholic's deviousness and tragic charm. There were things about him that Ammu never understood. Long after she left him, she never stopped wondering why he lied so outrageously when he didn't need to. Particularly when he didn't need to. In a conversation with friends he would talk about how much he loved smoked salmon when Ammu knew he hated it. Or he would come home from the club and tell Ammu that he saw Meet Me in St. Louis when he'd actually screened The Bronze Buckaroo. When she confronted him about these things, he never explained or apologized. He just giggled, exasperating Ammu to a degree she never thought herself capable of.

She didn't notice the single Siamese soul.

42:
He apologized abjectly for the violence, but immediately began to badger her about helping with his transfer. This fell into a pattern. Drunken violence followed by postdrunken badgering.

Except that now she had two young children. And no more dreams.

Ammu loved her children (of course), but their wide-eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love people who didn't really love them exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them - just as an education, a protection.

Ammu quickly learned to recognize and despise the ugly face of sympathy.

When she looked at herself in her old wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. ... she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile.
Like polishing firewood.

But for the rest of her life she advocated small weddings in ordinary clothes.

Occasionally, when Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the wold like a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this there was something restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the morality of motherhood and divorcee-hood. Even her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank with her little plastic transistor shaped like a tangerine. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.

What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictibility? It was what she ahd battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinte tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.

...she lived in the penumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the grasp of their power. That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous.

Sometimes she was the most beautiful woman that Estha and Rahel had ever seen. And sometimes she wasn't.

The fate of the wretched Man-less woman...she had no position anywhere at all.
She expected from them some token of unhappiness. At the very least.

46:
He was seventeen years older than Mammachi and realized with a shock that he was an old man when his wife was still in her prime....He had always been a jealous man, so he greatly resented the attention his wife was suddenly getting.


47:
Every night he beat her with a brass flower vase.
...He never touched Mammachi again [after that]. But he never spoke to her either as long as he lived.
To some small degree he did succeed in further corroding Ayemenem's view of working wives.

48:
His life's greatest setback was not having the moth that he had discovered named after him.

It was too late for him to assert his claim to the discovery. His moth was named after the Acting Director of the Department of Entomology, a junior officer whom Pappachi had always disliked.

In the years to come, even though he had been ill-humored long before he discovered the moth, Pappachi's Moth was held responsible for his black moods and sudden bouts of temper. Its pernicious ghost - gray, furry and with unusually dense dorsal tufts - haunted every house that he ever lived in. It tormented him and his children and his children's children.

49:
At Pappachi's funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses slid around in her eyes. Ammu told the twins that Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because she loved him. She was used to having him slouching around the pickle factory, and was used to being beaten from time to time. Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kinds of things they could get used to.

52:
A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

"We're prisoners of War," Chacko said. "Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed to shore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter."

- was [all] no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye.

Twinkle was a word with crinkled, happy edges.

54:
Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.

a) Going to Oxford didn't necessarily make a person clever.
b) Cleverness didn't necessarily make a good prime minister.
c) If a person couldn't even run a pickle factory profitably, how was that person going to run a whole country?
d) All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.

57:
Rahel knew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn't.

59:
Rahel didn't know what she suffered from, but occasionally she practiced sad faces, and sighing in the mirror.

61:
This too he had lost (along with his mind)...
Numbers would do.
Numbness would be fine.

64:
Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end.

Chacko studied his treatise on "The Peaceful Transition to Communism" with an adolescent's obsessive diligence and an ardent fan's unquestioning approval.

..."Shall we annihilate them? Surely students aren't People anymore?"

67:
A keg of ancient anger, lit with a recent fuse.

Hers too, was an ancient, age-old fear. The fear of being dispossessed. 

69:
Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

It was a little like having to sweep your footprints away with a broom. Or worse, not being allowed to leave footprints at all.

75:
...because you can't order fear around.

76:
Rahel smiled back at him, pleased to have Chacko mistaken for her father. Like a normal family.

79:
Ammu had told them the story of Julius Caesar and how he was stabbed by Brutus, his best friend, in the Senate. And how he fell to the floor with knives in his back and said, "Et tu, Brute? - then fall, Caesar." 

"It just goes to show," Ammu said, "that you can't trust anybody. Mother, father, brother, husband, bestfriend. Nobody."

80:
Aristocrats were people who didn't blow spit bubbles or shiver their legs. Or gobble.

81:
"Sorry, Ammu," Rahel said.
"Sorry doesn't make a dead man alive," Estha said.

"Don't use the name of the Lord in vain," Baby Kochamma said.
"I'm not," Chacko said, "I'm using it for a very good reason."

***
3) Big Man the Laltain, Small Man the Mombatti

85:
There are big dreams and little ones.

***
4) Abhilash Talkies

91:
Rahel liked all this. Holding the handbag. Everyone pissing in front of everyone. Like friends. She knew nothing then, of how precious a feeling this was. Like friends. They would never be together like this again. Ammu, Baby Kochamma, and she.

93:
Baby Kochamma would not admit to herself that she was looking forward to the picture. She preferred to feel that she was only doing it for the children's sake. In her mind she kept an orgainized, careful account of Things She'd Done For People, and Things People Hadn't Done For Her.

Ammu explained that people always loved best what they identified with.

94:
Excitement Always Leads to Tears

Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.

100:
lemon flavored fear

He pretended not to love them, but he did. He loved them.

could you love the little fellow with the orange in the smelly auditorium? ...but could you love him still?

106:
Rahel froze. She was desperately sorry for what she had said. She didn't know where those words had come from. She didn't know that she'd had them in her. But they were out now, and wouldn't go back in. They hung about that red staircase like clerks in a government office. Some stood, some sat and shivered their legs.

"Rahel," Ammu said, "do you realize what you have just done?"
Frightened eyes and a fountain looked back at Ammu.
"It's all right. Don't be scared," Ammu said. "Just answer me. Do you?"
"What?" Rahel said in the smallest voice she had.
"D'you know what happens when you hurt people?" Ammu said. "When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less."

A cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel's heart. Where its icy legs touched her, she got goosebumps. Six goosebumps on her careless heart.

108:
He knew that if Ammu found out about what he had done with the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, she'd love him less as well. Very much less.

Baby Kochamma looked flushed and excited. She loved not being the cause of ill-feeling.

Chacko often said that his ambition was to die of overeating. Mammachi said it was a sure sign of suppressed unhappiness. Chacko said it was no such thing. He said it was Sheer Greed.

109:
"Ammu," Rahel said, "shall I miss dinner as my punishment?"
She was keen to exchange punishments. No dinner, in exchange for Ammu loving the same as before.
...
"Some things come with their own punishments"
 ...
"No thank you," Rahel said, hoping that if she could somehow effect her own punishment, Ammu would rescind hers. 

Chacko would slip out of bed with a torch and look at his sleeping child. To learn her. Imprint her on his memory. To ensure that when he thought of her, the child that he invoked would be accurate.










***
5) God's Own Country
6) Wisdom Exercise Notebooks
8) Welcome Home, Our Sophie Mol
9) Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen, Mrs. Rajagopalan
10) The River in the Boat
11) The God of Small Things
12) Kochu Thomban
13) The Pessimist and the Optimist
14) Work is Struggle
15) The Crossing
16) A Few Hours Later
17) Cochin Harbor Terminus
18) The History House
19) Saving Ammu
20) The Madras Mail
21) The Cost of Living

Look At The Birdie [Kurt Vonnegut]

Letter 

Feb. 11th 1951

"I'm convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins."

"Maybe the death of the institution of friendship is the death of innovation in the arts."

"This letter is sententious crap, shot full of self-pity. But it's the kind of letter writers seem to write; and since I quit G-E, if I'm not a writer then I'm nothing."

- Kurt Vonnegut

 Confido

The summer had died peacefully in it's sleep....

At one with this sad, sweet allegory ...was Ellen Bowers

and Henry

"What is it every person really wants, more than food almost?"

 "Happiness certainly! But what's the key to happiness?"

"Religion? Security, Henry? Health, dear?"

"What is the longing you see in the eyes of strangers on the street, in the eyes wherever you look?"

"Somebody to talk to! Somebody who really understands! That's what."

"Henry -haven't we been doing more than merely existing?"

"Not according to Confido..."

...which sat by the jam, amid the uncleared breakfast dishes.

Tropic of Capricorn [Henry Miller]

Tropic of Capricorn might as well define this time in my life. Everything started before I ever got a hold of it, and would have continued on regardless of it, but so much thematically resonates with the way things are right now and I -like all examples of the human condition- I found it beautifully helpful. In the book's character of Henry Miller (I need to learn more about the man vs. his own mythology, just as a mental note) I see a man who is inevitably a product of his time, yet striving for timelessness. He's trying to get to something - some true way of being - that goes beyond hats and salaries, beyond culture of the current era. Otherwise I see little else in common with him, yet somehow I feel I could learn from him, even though I am simultaneously repulsed and attracted to his lifestyle - just as I am to my current situation with poly. 

The book is written in a very stream of consciousness fashion with flashes of beat poetics and moments of plot intermingled with descriptions and general philosophy. Miller's various sexual escapades are off set by the shitty relationship he has with his unwanted wife, the mysterious, possibly dead? woman he is dazzled by, and his ever fluctuating level of care about humanity.

Throughout reading I kept imagining how much of this influenced Mad Men, how hard it used to be for atheists and alternatives - even in major cities - and if maybe I should abandon the idea of marriage all together even on the Four Weddings and a Funeral level and commit myself to a life of open love - of poly. Never again expect or commit to a singular soul. Connect where and when I do and let that be it. I tend to be all or nothing, and if I'm going to redefine love, I know myself and I know I can't lead a double life like Miller - and by virtue of my century I don't think I would even have to. The question is 'what do I want', and the answer keeps being 'I don't fucking know' - what are my options? All I know is that I love ---. So I stay. But if he had his way, wouldn't this be the story he wants...just with everyone's consent? What story do I really want? Whatever ends in all the good stuff, obviously. How to get there is its own puzzle.

Mostly I'm left just wanting to read the first book, Tropic of Cancer. Perhaps I can say more then.

I feel like I'm trying to summarize a fascinating person I only just met.

Reality by Majority: Arguments about New Journalism

Senior Seminar

Rough Draft

"...the center of reality is wherever one happens to be, 
and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of."

Northrop Frye

Reality by Majority: Arguments about New Journalism

New Journalism is a style of writing that sparked a lot of controversy among journalists in the 1960s and 70s. It’s commonly marked by a keen, insightful voice, which acts as a filter for the piece and is a stand-in, an alter-ego or hyper-ego of sorts, for the writer. Two major New Journalists were Thomas Wolfe (The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!), who coined the term, and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing). Thomas Wolfe is quoted in True Stories by Norman Sims as having four devices that characterized New Journalism:

            1)”Scene-by-scene construction, telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative”

2) “Witnessing as many of these scenes as possible through extraordinary ‘saturation reporting’, and ‘recording the dialogue in full’. Dialogue powerfully establishes character, Wolfe said.”

3)”Use of third-person point of view, “the technique of presenting every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene as he experiences it.”

4)”Recording details that might be symbolic ‘of people’s status life’ meaning ‘the entire pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they things it is or what they hope to be’. Wolfe said these details – including gestures, habits, manners, customs, and styles – were ‘as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature.” (Sims 236).

           

            So in The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes! by Thomas Wolfe, the reader is amused by the narrator/writer’s repeated exclamation of “Mother dog!” and various other odd words  and phrases followed by the usually excluded exclamation point. In Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72, Hunter S. Thompson introduces a political article with “People still fish in Lake Michigan, but you don’t want to eat what you catch. Fish that feed on garbage, human shit, and raw industrial poisons tend to taste a little strange” (Thompson 136). The writers aren’t seeking to only relay the reality of the facts, they believe in a larger reality – the context of our perception. The constant “!”s by Wolfe make the energetic atmosphere of the car race palpable, and the digressions of Thompson convey not only the conditions of Milwaukee but the political climate as well. The stuff where you “just had to be there” is now communicable.            

These devices may categorize the style, but they also are what make it so controversial as well. The heart of the issue is subjectivity. In Journalism, too much bias discredits the writer as well as the publisher. Without policing for bias, articles that would have been read as “news” become untrustworthy – they’re just the personal insight of the writer, or the editor, or the lobbyist who is best friends with the CEO of the company publishing the work. One wouldn’t be able to know whom to trust for information. Those against New Journalism argue that it is too literary minded and dependant on the filter device, the writer’s insight and ability, rather than focusing on the information and facts of the story.

A hypothetical: a piece of writing is published. The author is an unknown, and the work has captured the attention of readers. Fiction or not, people tend to ask the same questions: how much of this is real or based on real life? Where did you get your information? Who or what are your sources (anecdotes, experience, imagination, interviews, Wikipedia)? Why did you write this? What is your point/intent/anticipated result or influence? In essence, readers hold the writer accountable. Just as with politics and love affairs – we want you to make sense, we want to know your intentions, we want you to follow through, and we want to be told the truth.  Even if you’re bad news (ehem…Thompson), we might still take the bait. Trust can be very powerful. Why? Because we are beings of perception, and no matter how you slice it, our personal “reality” is the only Reality or Truth we can possibly Know. Readers hold writers accountable to maintain the current understanding of Reality.

It’s through this personal philosophy that I have come to understand the New Journalism Argument, and in a kind of looped fashion, it is this perspective which further leads me to the conclusion that New Journalism is indeed truly Journalism in that it conveys real people, real events, and so on as they are experienced to the fullest honesty of the writer (and in his way, Thompson’s dishonesty is his own form of honesty). The perception of the individual cannot be separated from the work. Even in the more subtle ways, there are inevitable marks of “bias”. One writer is going to pick a word or structure a sentence differently than another. In an interview, one journalist will ask different questions than her collogue, and the even the subject being interviewed will answer differently based on who is asking – even down to whether they’re attracted to the interviewer or not. It’s possibly shallow, and silly, and unprofessional, but it is human regardless.

Perception, however, gives way to intention. Comparable to Impressionism in art, is Starry Night any less a painting than The Mona Lisa? Did they both not seek to capture their subjects as they were seen? On the other hand, the intent to be honest can’t guarantee an outcome of “honesty” - but again – whether or not one felt a work is “honest” depends an awful lot on their perception. And their perception is going to be influenced, not only by what they empirically witness, but also by the perceptions of others.

There is a deep alienation in the idea that we are our own little planets of senses just spinning past or colliding with one another, but that’s where trust is most effective. We trust that what is True to most others is Reality – the larger Reality or collective Reality. We obsess over norms and forms and styles, means and measurements and averages. It is why Ronald Weber calls New Journalism a “menace” in Some Sort of Artistic Excitement. The very existence of work like Wolfe and Thompson’s threatens the larger accepted Reality because it is providing us with an alternative and calling it just as True.           

Weber is determined to separate Journalism from New Journalism – to cast one as fact and the other as art. Then, to degrade from art to worse, he points to egotism calling New Journalism “‘I’ writing for an ‘I’ time, personal writing for an age of personalism” (21).  In the end, if New Journalism must cohabitate the definitions of both fiction and non-fiction, then Weber can redeem New Journalism for one reason, an ability to “function in something of the same way for an educated middle class as the early novel did for an emerging economic middle class – it’s bringing the news in engaging fashion.” For me, Weber’s arguments combined with his focus on not only discrediting New Journalism but also slighting Wolfe points to – may I say – a personal problem.

Strangely Weber does not argue that the biggest danger of Wolfe and Thompson is not the reliability of their work, but the connotations within it. When Thompson puts the image of nasty, inedible fish and pollution in your brain, then talks about a political race, you make an association. Even if Thompson was screaming on the page that Nixon was an evil lunatic, it’s nothing compared to “sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine” (Thompson 159) or calling him a “bloodthirsty thug”. It’s not a matter of truth in the events, but in perpetuating a valid perception of an event on impressionable minds. Easily overcome, of course, so long as we’re exposed to a variety of perfectly valid perceptions, I think.

Another hypothetical: if a work influences thought, which influences one’s Reality or a group of people’s Realities, then it is assumed that a writer would want to spread more knowledge and awareness – seeking to define the majority Reality further. They should be deliberate then in whatever they write because –if published- they will be held accountable for influencing people one way or another. More people read Wolfe, enjoy his writing, agree with his perspective, trust his craft, understand or even relate to his Reality – well that would change the majority or collective Reality as well – even for those who disagree, the possibility of seeing the world as Wolfe does cannot be erased from their minds but instead must be incorporated into that perception. That’s the potential power of these works, both the creative and the critiques.

Therefore, Weber is utterly entombed by his own reality – which as an academic would be represented by his education and status – and wants to shoot down and discredit this style just because he doesn’t want to do the work to incorporate it. Just as he is not a presence in my Reality (mainly because he doesn’t have accessible biographical information online), I am not part of his because his focus (perhaps demographic) is not me. Weber quotes Seymour Krim, calling New Journalism “literature for the majority”. Again, Weber clearly subscribes to majority determined Reality – fixated on tradition and definition. Weber is trying to explain something and so he must pull what he knows - just like Wolfe - just like all the other writers we’ve talked about in class. The difference is that Wolfe uses his Reality to open up the world and Weber’s Reality closes the world down.

Citations

Sims, Norman. True Stories. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 235-236. Print.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.

Weber, Ronald. Some Sort of Artistic Excitement. Print.

Wolfe, Thomas. The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes! .

Missing Women [June Spence]

Update Dec 18, 2023: unsure why this basic response for my college writing class with E.H. has gotten more views than anything on this blog, or why the blog has been operating since I was 16 (~2006) but stagnated at 60,000 views over 10 years ago

...wanted to make a note of it somewhere...

***

Missing Women by June Spence is extremely eerie, and reminds me of a recent TV show called Happy Town. It was a terrible show, but it revolved around these missing people and the community they were taken from. The use of the second person is a really interesting twist on turning the actual protagonist of the story into the reader him or herself. It’s alienating, and meant to be. If there is an “us” there has to be a “them”. In this case, “them” is sometimes the women, and mostly the unknown in general. The dark fear of unanswered questions.

            The way Spence illustrates each individual woman’s characteristics is imaginative as well. It isn’t coming from the mouth of police experts, it is town gossip. It’s the juicy culmination of details from friends and family. No one knows the real story – where they were that night. If the girls had really been fighting or if they made up. In essence, even though the characters progress despite their absence (Adelle goes from perfect innocent to elitist anti-social) we really know just as much about them at the end as we do in the beginning. No amount of speculation can locate them. No character analysis can know if they are alive or dead. It’s dark and extremely deep.

            I often like to figure out what sparked an idea in a writer’s mind – what single moment lead to the creation of this story. Here, I bet it was the “Have you seen us?” sign. I bet Spencer saw that and a whole flood of possibilities came to her mind – including writing a story in the second person plural.

            This choice raises so many more questions than if it had been written any other way. Just what are we obsessed with when we talk about things on the news? Aren’t we really exploiting people somehow because it reflects something in us. Spencer even hints that these three women could be any woman in any town in America – and the audience, the reader, wants it that way.

            We never get into the women’s heads. We always have the filter of speculation. Did they run away? The mom may have been involved in drugs, and the daughter may have been pregnant, and the friend may have been a failing neurotic – but we can never know – and that distance makes it even more intriguing somehow. It’s the way of the world today , the world of celebrity – we want to make people into who we want them to be.

[Sherman Alexie]

I have read Sherman Alexie’s work before, and I find him fascinating. He’s just so down to earth. What You Pawn I Will Redeem had a structure to it that I don’t think I would ever personally use. The time signatures are very business-like, but while it works here, I wonder how different it might have been if he just explained with a sentence how time had passed, or allowed the reader to formulate that he was in another place and therefore time. It begins and ends at noon, so I feel that has a significance maybe even beyond the story itself (I wonder how much Spokane mythology is here).

            In terms of the chapter, this story certainly follows a very basic conflict (found grandmother’s regalia), crisis (must get $999), and solution (is given regalia) form. Nevertheless, there are tiny subplots in each time section, always with the other characters involved departing the scene. When it comes to story structure, it’s not about reinventing the wheel – it’s about applying the wheel in new ways to create more complex mechanisms.

            I have talked to a lot of friends about writing, and often there a hang up about plot structure. People like to wave their hands and say “all stories are the same”. Reading A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut, I am familiar with the graph patterns of stories and I think it’s an interesting way to look at a story at its bare minimum. I think “Pawn” could be drawn as a dreamcatcher – which seems oddly stereotypical for some reason – but it’s true. It has a cyclical nature, as though it could be spun and at any moment there is a mini rise and fall of action within it. The inside of the dreamcatcher is an elaborate web of crossing strings and beads, and this seems to accurately describe the relationships Jackson Jackson has with the other people he communicates with. There is a point of no-return where everything changes, and I would say it’s with the police officer. Instead of self-indulgence, he uses to cop’s money to feed the Aleuts. While the outcome is the same (they disappear) Jackson’s conflict has changed. His problem is no longer that he can’t hold onto money because he’s getting drunk, it’s because he is helping someone else.

            Finally, I want to relate to the quote in the chapter, “All good stories are sad.” Alexie’s character Jackson is not Cinderella. The ending is bittersweet. The goal of the plot is accomplished – the crisis is resolved – but was that really the crisis? All through “Pawn” we see homelessness, drunkenness, poverty, and cultural displacement. People come in and out of Jackson’s life until he is the only one left standing. His words, “It’s OK. Indians are everywhere” is misleadingly hopeful. The world is full of these “dispensable people” who are invisible to our mainstream culture, despite having been here first. Jackson is so happy to get the stolen regalia back for $5, but really, shouldn’t it have been free? Shouldn’t he have been given a home and a job and a new life? Isn’t that what he really deserved? So this is a story where nothing is actually resolved or concluded, just rises and falls in the normal turn of life.

Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter [Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni]

Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni implements the movement of time in a compelling way. I loved how natural the flow was between times outside of the current moment of the story. It’s reflective of how we actually think – with little flashes of the past constantly blinking and then evaporating in our minds unless we choose to hold onto it a little longer. Mrs. Dutta’s conflict between old and new is heartbreaking, and interesting from a feminist standpoint. She’s a woman who longs for a life many American women today would frown at – would call her a victim of sorts – but it was her life. She wants to be wanted, needed, once more and her will to live is based on her family. Alone, she has no reason to carry on for herself.

            Divakaruni arranges the flashbacks so that there is a physical response: “The children. A heaviness pulls at Mrs. Dutta’s entire body when she thinks of them.” As she digresses into memory, we are literally pulled down along with her. In this way, it’s not just a memory, but it has a shape and a tone – in this case, disappointment.

The “real time” of the story is taking place all on the same day, but we journey for years between breakfast, laundry, dinner, and finally the written letter. Cooking breakfast this morning is like cooking for 20 years because that scene is extended through a flashback and thought. Each scene still remains significant, however, to character and plot. Mrs. Dutta is living primarily in the past and so it makes sense that the story’s real action takes place in past events, both distant past and recent past. When Mrs. Dutta thinks about Shyamoli’s reaction to her cooking, that’s the recent past. But Mrs. Dutta’s kitchen would be more the distant past.  It isn’t until the letter where she Mrs. Dutta appears at all hopeful or considers much about the future.

Love and Hydrogen [Jim Shepard]

Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard is probably my favorite story so far. In high school, I loved Native Son because of the metaphorical white snow which surrounded Bigger Thomas. His environment was directly expressive of his life and the plot. This story is a lot like that. The place – aboard the doomed Hindenburg – has the effect of the movie Titanic in a lot of ways. For one, we know how it’s going to end, but somehow it still shocks us. Also, the love story aboard the vessel is a secret and as precarious as the ship itself. In the end, Gnuss’ emotion has welled within him, doomed, and just as explosive.

            In this way there is that harmony between the characters and their place, but that harmony is due to conflict. The gay lovers sneak around and enjoy a life much better than what they grew up with. They enjoy food and housing and jobs. They enjoy one another. Nevertheless, this is a golden time and it must come to an end. Who knows Meinert’s intentions with the woman passenger? Maybe he was securing a reputation so that his gay relationship was less suspect, or maybe he really did have feeling for her. Sexuality and relationships are just as precarious as a hydrogen balloon – one can only hope that not too many people are aboard should it explode.

            Further, Meinert’s experiences in another place –a place of war – outshine Gnuss and leave him troubled. Meinert has experienced the sensation of being “like Zeus” and Gnuss can do little better than making him feel like “Pan”.  The truth of course is that, high above in a death cloud, neither has as much control as they’d like to believe they do.

These are the men responsible for maintaining the ship, but their love is distracting. Which is ironic in a way, because life is short and these sorts of things are what make it worth living – but if they hadn’t been enjoying themselves with jobs and food and sex maybe the shit would not have engulfed them in the inferno.

One thing that shouldn’t be forgotten is that Gnuss is a least 10 years younger than Meinert. For Gnuss, this is very well his first true romance, while Meinert has been through war and who knows what else. It is also Gnuss’ mixed emotions – his lust, and his jealousy – that engulf him just as the airship is engulfed. So, one could also see a similar message about youth here – young technology, unweathered, and ultimately defeated. Perhaps the author feels a young mind cannot really have a mastery over love, to know love beyond sex or possession, and will inevitably over tighten his grip and destroy the whole relationship. Only with age and time can real love be appreciated (so a sequel with a happier ending might be on a plane).