TEXTS FOR INDEPENDENT ANALYSIS
“The Collector” by John Fowles
October 31st
Nothing. I psycho-analysed him-this evening.
He would sit so stiffly beside me.
We were looking at Goya's etchings. Perhaps it was the etchings themselves, but he sat and I thought he wasn't really looking at them. But thinking only of being so close to me.
His inhibition. It's absurd. I talked at him as if he could easily be normal. As if he wasn't a maniac keeping me prisoner here. But a nice young man who wanted a bit of chivvying from a jolly girl-friend.
It's because I never see anyone else. He becomes the norm. I forget to compare.
Another time with G.P. It was soon after the icy douche (what he said about my work). I was restless one evening. I went round to his flat. About ten. He had his dressing-gown on.
I was just going to bed, he said.
I wanted to hear some music, I said. I'll go away. But I didn't.
He said, it's late.
I said I was depressed. It had been a beastly day and Caroline had been so silly at supper.
He let me go up and made me sit on the divan and he put on some music and turned out the lights and the moon came through the window. It fell on my legs and lap through the skylight, a lovely slow silver moon. Sailing. And he sat in the armchair on the other side of the room, in the shadows.
It was the music.
The Goldberg Variations.
There was one towards the end that was very slow, very simple, very sad, but so beautiful beyond words or drawing or anything but music, beautiful there in the moonlight. Moon-music, so silvery, so far, so noble.
The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.
Accepting the sadness. Knowing that to pretend it was all gay was treachery. Treachery to everyone sad at that moment, everyone ever sad, treachery to such music, such truth.
In all the fuss and anxiety and the shoddiness and the business of London, making a career, getting pashes, art, learning, grabbing frantically at experience, suddenly this silent silver room full of that music.
Like lying on one's back as we did in Spain when we slept out looking up between the fig-branches into the star-corridors, the great seas and oceans of stars. Knowing what it was to be in a universe.
I cried. In silence.
At the end he said, now can I go to bed? Gently, making fun of me a little bit, bringing me back to earth. And I went. I don't think we said anything. I can't remember. He had his little dry smile, he could see I was moved.
His perfect tact.
I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me.
Not for his sake, but for being alive's.
“Evening in Byzantium” by Irwin Shaw
He took her to dinner that night. Every night thereafter while he stayed in Paris.
She had been a great beauty out of Texas, had conquered New York, then Paris, a tall, slender, wilful girl, with a tilted, narrow dark head. Dear men, her presence demanded when she entered a room, what are you doing here, are you worth the time?
With her, he saw Paris in its best light. It was her town and she walked through it with joy and pride and mischief, lovely legs making a carnival of its pavements. She had small teeth, a dangerous temper. She was not to be taken lightly. She was a puritan about work, her own and that of others. Fiercely independent, she scorned inaction, parasitism. She had come to Paris as a model, during, as she put it, the second half of the rule of Charlemagne. Unschooled, she was surprisingly bookish. Her age was anybody’s guess. She had been married twice. Vaguely, she said. Both men, and others, had made off with money. She bore them no ill will, neither the husbands nor the others. She had tired of modelling, gone with a partner, male, an ex-University professor from Maine, into the exchange-student business. “The kids have to know about each other,” she said. “Maybe they finally won’t be able to be talked into killing each other.” A much older, beloved brother had been lost at Aachen and she was furious against war. When she read the news from Vietnam, and it was particularly bad, she cursed in barracks language, threatened to move to the South Seas with her son.
As she had said the first night, she lived from hand to mouth, but dressed extravagantly. The couturiers of Paris loaned her clothes, knowing that in the places to which she was invited, neither she nor their confections would go unnoticed. She left whatever bed she was in promptly at seven each morning, to make breakfast for her children and send them off to school. Regardless of the night she had spent, she was at her desk promptly at nine a.m. Although Craig kept a suite in a hotel, the wide bed in her room overlooking a garden on the Left Bank became his true Paris address. Her children grew fond of him. “They’re used to men,” she explained. She had outgrown whatever morality she had been exposed to in Texas and ignored whatever conventions were in practice in the society or societies she adorned in Paris.
She was straightforward, funny, demanding, unpredictable, gloriously formed for love-making, affectionate, eager and enterprising, only serious at those moments that demanded seriousness. He had been dormant. He was dormant no longer.
He had fallen into the dull habit of not noticing or appreciating women as women. Now he was immediately conscious of beauty, a sensual smile, a way of walking; his eye had been re-educated, was youthful again, was quick and innocently lascivious for the flick of a skirt, the curve of a throat, womanly movements. Faithful to one, once more he enjoyed the entire sex. It was not the least of the gifts Constance had brought him.
“Long Day’s Journey into Night” by Eugene O’Neill
J A M I E: (In a cruel, sneering tone with hatred in it) Where’s the hophead? Gone to sleep?
(EDMUND jerks as if he’d been struck. There is a tense silence. EDMUND’s face looks stricken and sick. Then in a burst of rage he springs from his chair.)
E D M U N D: You dirty bastard!
(He punches his brother in the face, a blow that glances off the cheekbone. For a second JAMIE reacts pugnaciously and half rises from his chair to do battle, but suddenly he seems to sober up to a shocked realization of what he has said and he sinks back limply.)
J A M I E: (Miserably) Thanks, Kid. I certainly had that coming. Don’t know what made me – booze talking – You know me, Kid.
E D M U N D: (His anger ebbing) I know you’d never say that unless – But God, Jamie, no matter how drunk you are, it’s no excuse! (He pauses – miserably.) I’m sorry I hit you. You and I never scrap – that bad.
(He sinks back on his chair.)
J A M I E: (Huskily) It’s all right. Glad you did. My dirty tongue. Like to cut it out. (He hides his face in his hands – dully.) I suppose it’s because I feel so damned sunk. Because this time Mama had me fooled. I really believed she had it licked. She thinks I always believe the worst, but this time I believed the best. (His voice flutters.) I suppose I can’t forgive her – yet. It meant so much. I’d begun to hope, if she’d beaten the game, I could, too.
(He begins to sob, and the horrible part of his weeping is that it appears sober, not the maudlin tears of drunkenness.)
E D M U N D: (Blinking back tears himself) God, don’t I know how you feel! Stop it, Jamie!
J A M I E: (Trying to control his sobs) I’ve known about Mama so much longer than you. Never forget the first time I got wise. Caught her in the act with a hypo. Christ, I’d never dreamed before that any women but whores took dope! (He pauses.) And then this stuff of you getting consumption. It’s got me licked. We’ve been more that brothers. You’re the only pal I’ve ever had. I love your guts. I’d do anything for you.
E D M U N D: (Reaches out and pats his arm) I know that, Jamie.
J A M I E: (His crying over – drops his hands from his face – with a strange bitterness) Yet I’ll bet you’ve heard Mama and old Gaspard spill so much bunk about my hoping for the worst, you suspect right now I’m thinking to myself that Papa is old and can’t last much longer, and if you were to die, Mama and I would get all he’s got, and so I’m probably hoping –
E D M U N D: (Indignantly) Shut up, you damned fool! What the hell put that in your nut? (He stares at his brother accusingly.) Yes, that’s what I’d like to know. What put that in your mid?
J A M I E: (Confusedly – appearing drunk again) Don’t be a dumbbell! What I said! Always suspected of hoping for the worst. I’ve got so I can’t help – (Then drunkenly resentful) What are you trying to do, accuse me? Don’t play the wise guy with me! I’ve learned more of life than you’ll ever know! Just because you’ve read a lot of highbrow junk, don’t think you can fool me! You’re only an overgrown kid! Mama’s baby and Papa’s pet! The family White Hope! You’ve been getting a swelled head lately. About nothing! About a few poems in a hick town newspaper! Hell, I used to write better stuff for the Lit magazine in college! You better wake up! You’re setting no rivers on fire! You let hick town boobs flatter you with bunk about your future – (Abruptly his tone changes to disgusted contrition. EDMUND has looked away from him, trying to ignore this tirade.) Hell, Kid, forget it. That goes for Sweeny. You know I don’t mean it. No one is prouder you’ve started to make good. (Drunkenly assertive) Why shouldn’t I be proud? Hell, it’s purely selfish. You reflect credit on me. I’ve had more to do with bringing you up than anyone. I wised you up about women, so you’d never be a fall guy, or make any mistakes you didn’t want to make! And who steered you on to reading poetry first? Swinburne, for example? I did! And because I once wanted to write, I planted it in your mind that someday you’d write! Hell, you’re more than my brother. I made you! You’re my Frankenstein!
(He has risen to a note of drunken arrogance. EDMUND is grinning with amusement now.)
Aspect
“Readings in the Theory of English Grammar” by L.L. Iofik, L.P. Chakhoyan, A.G. Pospelova, pp. 74-76
Aspect indicates the aspect, the type, the character of the action. The following classes occur:
1. Durative Aspect. This type represents the action as continuing. We usually employ here the progressive form: “He is eating.” To express different shades of the idea of continuance also other forms are often used, especially remain, keep, keep on, go on, continue with a present participle as predicate after an intransitive, and an infinitive or gerund as object after a transitive. […]
2. Point-action Aspects.The point-action aspects call attention, not to an act as a whole, but to only one point, either the beginning or the final point. There are thus two classes:
a. INGRESSIVE ASPECT. This point-action type directs the attention especially to the initial stage of the action or state: “He awoke early”, i.e., came into a waking state early. “The boat slowed up as it came in.” “They went the moment it cleared.” This idea is expressed in various ways:
aa. The ingressive aspect is often expressed by begin, commence, or start in connection with an infinitive or gerund as object. […]
ab. The ingressive idea is often expressed by the ingressives get, grow, fall, turn, wax, become, run, go, come, set, stare, take (take up as a habit) in connection with a predicate adjective, participle, noun, or a prepositional phrase: “He often gets sick.” […]
b. EFFECTIVE ASPECT. This point-action aspect directs the attention to the final point of the activity or state, to a result that has been reached, hence it often indicates attainment or failure: “The two friends fell out.” “He knocked him out in the fourth round.” […]
3. Terminate Aspect. A large number of simple and compound verbs indicate an action as a whole.Such verbs are called terminates. This aspect is especially associated with the simple form of the verb just as the durative aspect is associated with the progressive form. […] In terminates the action often begins and terminates within a limited period: “He motioned to me.” “He didn’t even wince.” “He hit the mark.” “He handed me a book.” “He shot a duck.” “The bullet pierced his heart.” “She sighed.” “A snowflake lit upon his nose.” “He stumbled and fell.” “The thugs killed him, took his money, and threw him into the river.” “An idea flashed on me.” “This news dashed, shattered, our hopes.” “She misunderstood me.” “I overlooked this item in my calculation.” The terminate aspect is the largest category, and hence is associated with many verbs of quite a different meaning from those just mentioned. Any verbal form that represents the act as a finished whole is a terminate whether the duration of the act be long or short: “He went (here thought of as a finished whole, not as continuing) to church this morning.” “Last summer I built a fine new house.” “Next summer I expect to build a fine new house.” […]
4. Iterative Aspect.This type indicates an indefinitely prolonged succession of like acts: “He pooh-poohs at everything.” “He threw his head back and haw-hawed.” “Outside the wind blew gustily and set a loquacious tassel tap-tapping against a pane.” […]
“A Domestic Conversation” by Dan Poston
He was sitting by the table, staring out the window, when she entered the kitchen. For a moment, she looked at him, ridiculous in his ragged blue robe and uncombed hair, and wanted to roll her eyes. She didn’t, though; he looked up at her all too soon, anxious to share his thoughts.
She turned to the dirty dishes lying on the counters and in the sink, not wanting to encourage him. It was maddening to hear him talk lately.
“Where have you been?”
She clanked dishes into the dishwasher. “Went to the grocery store. Then I was outside raking the leaves.”
Where have you been? Maybe that was the question he wanted her to ask. Why have you been in bed for half the day? Maybe that was it; maybe that was the question he wanted to answer. But she wouldn’t ask it. Not today. She was tired of his answers.
She opened the cabinet and looked at the containers to make sure she had what she needed to bake her chicken casserole tonight. Really, she could do this. She could go on with the day as she’d gone on with every other day before. It didn’t matter if he wanted to sit around all day, looking out every window in the house, amazed at the greatness of his own thoughts. She could go on.
Unless he talked, that is.
“Marianne, do you ever wonder why we do this?”
She focused harder. It was the cloves she was looking for.
“Do what, Henry?” She succeeded in making herself sound as if she were talking to a child.
“All of this. Everything we do.”
She left the cabinet open and found her recipe box on a shelf on the other side of the room. “I don’t know, Henry. Maybe because we have a church social to go to tonight.”
He looked at her and made that “don’t play games with me” face that he had learned to use so aptly as a father. She was too busy thumbing through the recipe cards to take notice.
“You know that’s not what I mean, Marianne.”
She scanned the card quickly. There it was. The cream of mushroom soup. How could she have forgotten that? She walked behind Henry to the large cabinet that held the soup cans and opened the door to peer inside, hating to be so close to him.
“I’m tired of this, Marianne. I’m tired of church socials on weekends and work on weekdays. I’m tired of pretending it all means something, tired of people thinking that we know anything about anything.”
Tired, Henry? Are you still “tired of work” after calling in sick every day this week, lying around like a dead dog? Are you tired of church because you sit in the back and let your arrogant eyes chastise everyone who tries to talk to you? You’re tired, Henry? Well, we’re tired of you. Tired of your life crisis and your “deep thoughts.”
Cream of mushroom soup. There wasn’t any. She’d have to go back down to the grocery store.
“Do you want me to call the church and tell them you aren’t coming?” She walked back to the other side of the room and closed the cabinet door.
“No, Marianne! That’s ridiculous.” He paused. “I just want you to talk with me.”
She scrubbed the counter where the dirty dishes had left stains, trying to ignore the way she felt compelled to turn around and face him.
Finally, he broke the tension, turning his eyes away from her and back to the window. “Marianne, I just need to think about things. I need time to think over the things that I wouldn’t think about otherwise. That’s all.”
There was one spot, a coffee stain that had been there for years, that drove her crazy. She pressed the washcloth into it, grinding back and forth furiously. She half muttered it: “It’s taken you fifty years. …”
“Fifty years for what?” He didn’t understand. Not for a second.
Fifty years, Henry, to see what you know when you’re four years old. To see that the world is big, Henry.
“Fifty years to get tired of everything.” It was a half-truth, at least.
He ignored it. “Marianne, they say even Einstein didn’t know ninety-nine percent of the reasons for why things happen. He just explained what he saw. They’ll tell you about atoms and forces and energy, but they really don’t know anything, Marianne. Not anything.”
She turned around and looked at her husband, throwing the dishcloth back into the sink. He was staring out the window again, consumed in the abstractness of his thoughts. Don’t talk to me about all that, Henry. I don’t know anything about it. Do you know your granddaughter is thinking about having a baby, Henry? Can you feel that? Can you feel the four funerals we went to over the last ten years, the last days we saw each one of our parents? What’s eighty years of life, Henry, and who cares? Who cares, Henry?
“I have to go to the grocery store again. Do you need anything?” She went into the next room to get her coat and purse.
Henry got out of his chair and followed her. “What do you think, Marianne?”
She looked at him for a moment and then breezed past him, through the kitchen to the garage door. “I guess I don’t understand it, Henry.”
He came into the kitchen again, looking urgently at her. “Marianne – ”
She cocked her head towards him, politely, apathetically obedient. “Yes?”
“When are you going to face yourself?”
She sighed, reaching for the keys on the wall and opening the door. “I’m going grocery shopping, Henry.”
She shut the door behind her, letting its echo ring hollowly in the kitchen. There was nothing to say to him today, nothing that mattered more than the fact that she felt like she was choking, in his house and in his car.
“The Catcher in the Rye” by Jerome David Salinger
I was way early when I got there, so I just sat down on one of those leather couches right near the clock in the lobby and watched the girls. A lot of schools were home for vacation already, and there were about a million girls sitting and standing around waiting for their dates to show up. Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they’d be bitches if you knew them. It was really nice sightseeing, if you know what I mean. In a way, it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would happen to all of them. When they got out of school and college, I mean. You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring. – But I have to be careful about that. I mean about calling certain guys bores. I don’t understand boring guys. I really don’t. When I was at Elkton Hills, I roomed for about two months with this boy, Harris Macklin. He was very intelligent and all, but he was one of the biggest bores I ever met. He had one of these very raspy voices, and he never stopped talking, practically. He never stopped talking, and what was awful was, he never said anything you wanted to hear in the first place. But he could do one thing. The sonuvabitch could whistle better than anybody I ever heard. He’d be making his bed, or hanging up stuff in the closet – he was always hanging up stuff in the closet – it drove me crazy – and he’d be whistling while he did it, if he wasn’t talking in this raspy voice. He could even whistle classical stuff, but most of the time he just whistled jazz. He could take something very jazzy, like “Tin Roof Blues,” and whistle it so nice and easy – right while he was hanging stuff up in the closet – that it could kill you. Naturally, I never told him I thought he was a terrific whistler. I mean you don’t just go up to somebody and say, “You’re a terrific whistler.” But I roomed with him for about two whole months, even though he bored me till I was half crazy, just because he was such a terrific whistler, the best I ever heard. So I don’t know about bores. Maybe you shouldn’t feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don’t hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they’re secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me.
READING FICTION
An author is a god, creator of the world he describes. That world has a limited and very special landscape. It is peopled with men and women of a particular complexion, of particular gifts and failings. Its history, almost always, is determined by the tight interaction of its people within its narrow geography. Everything that occurs in a work of fiction – every figure, every tree, every furnished room and crescent moon and dreary fog – has been purposely put there by its creator. When a story pleases, when it moves its reader, he has responded to that carefully created world. The pleasure, the emotional commitment, the human response are not results of analysis. The reader has not registered in some mental adding machine the several details that establish character, the particular appropriateness of the weather to the events in the story, the marvelous rightness of the furnishings, the manipulation of the point of view, the plot, the theme, the style. He has recognized and accepted the world of the author and has been delighted (or saddened or made angry) by what happens in it.
But how does it come about that readers recognize the artificial worlds, often quite different from their own, that authors create? And why is it that readers who recognize some fictional worlds effortlessly are bewildered and lost in other fictional worlds? Is it possible to extend the boundaries of readers’ recognition? Can more and more of the landscapes and societies of fiction be made available to that on looking audience?
The answer to the first of these questions is easy. Readers are comfortable in literary worlds that, however exotic the landscapes and the personalities that people them, incorporate moral imperatives which reflect the value system in the readers’ world. Put another way, much fiction ends with its virtuous characters rewarded and its villains punished. This we speak of as poetic justice. Comedies, and most motion pictures of the recent past, end this way. But such endings are illustrations of poetic justice, and poetic seems to suggest that somehow such endings are ideal rather than “real.” Not much experience of life is required to recognize that injustice, pain, frustration, and downright villainy often prevail, that the beautiful young girl and the strong, handsome hero do not always overcome all obstacles, marry, and live happily ever after, that not every man is strong and handsome nor every woman beautiful. But readers, knowing that, respond to tragic fiction as well – where virtue is defeated, where obstacles prove too much for the men and women, where ponderous forces result in defeat, even death. Unhappy outcomes are painful to contemplate, but it is not difficult to recognize the world in which they occur. That world is much like our own. And unhappy outcomes serve to emphasize the very ideals which we have established in this world as the aims and goals of human activity. Consequently, both the “romantic” comedies that gladden with justice and success and the “realistic” stories that end in defeat provide readers with recognizable and available emotional worlds, however exotic the settings and the characters in those stories might be.
If we look at fiction this way, the answer to the questions “Why is it that some readers are bewildered and lost in some fiction worlds?” is clearly implied. Some fiction worlds seem to incorporate a strange set of moral imperatives. Readers are not altogether certain who are the virtuous characters and who are the villains or even what constitutes virtue and evil. Sometimes tragic oppositions in a fictional world that brooks no compromise puzzle readers who live in a world where compromise has become almost a virtue. Sometimes, particularly in more recent fiction that reflects the ever widening influence of psychoanalytic theory, the landscape and the behavior of characters is designed to represent deep interiors, the less-than-rational hearts and minds of characters. Those weird interiors are not part of the common awareness of readers; the moral questions raised there are not the same moral questions that occupy most of our waking hours. Such fictional worlds (those of Franz Kafka, for example) are difficult to map, and bewildered readers may well reject these underworlds for the sunshine of the surfaces they know more immediately.
Studying Literature
It might be useful to distinguish between three different kinds of discussion that take literature for a subject. Literary history attends to the consequences for literature of the passing of time. Certain forms that were popular in medieval times – the religious allegory, for instance – have waned in popularity and importance. Certain authors have been measurably influenced by their predecessors. Certain features of Elizabethan culture and belief illuminate passages in Shakespeare’s plays. Most of the footnotes in this book provide readers with historical information (the meaning of an archaic word, perhaps, the characteristics of some half-forgotten Creek god, or an allusion to an earlier literary work). Sometimes such information liberates the enduring life of old stories for new readers. Literary criticism, on the other hand, attends to the value of a work. It is good? Bad? Minor? Major? Criticism itself has a history: taste changes over the years; standards of judgment change; cultural forces contribute to critical judgments. But, though information about the history of criticism may help you understand why an author did what he did, it will not significantly help you make your own critical judgment. The story must finally speak for itself to you – no amount of historical justification can really enliven a dead work for a new reader. Unconcerned with both history and criticism, literary theory attends to the craft of literature. How does the author manipulate language (the substance of all literature – and the only substance) in order to create a world which affects his readers? Over many years of incessant examination of literature, observers have noted that certain techniques, certain characteristic uses of language, occur again and again – so frequently that it is useful to name them. Literary theory makes particular use of these observations in its discussion of form and the features on which form depends. Note that theoretical discussions frequently trespass on the discipline of psychology. Theoreticians and critics frequently speak of the effect on readers of an author’s craft – his images, his clever symbols, his vision of mortality, his colors and shapes. But it is dangerous business to assert that certain combinations of words will generate, invariably, the same complex emotional response. What are we to make of the spectacle of two critics, or two teachers, testifying that the same story affects them quite differently? Is one of them wrong? Are both of them wrong, perhaps? Perhaps! But we do the best we can, and we use all the varieties of human experience that authors and critics and theoreticians share in an attempt to respond significantly to significant fiction.
Fiction and Reality
Why do people read fiction (or go to movies)? The question is not so easy to answer as one might suppose. The first response is likely to have something to do with “amusement” or “entertainment”. But you have doubtless read stories and novels (or seen movies) that end tragically. Is it accurate to say that they were amusing or entertaining? Is it entertaining to be made sad or to be made angry by the defeat of “good” people? Or does the emotional impact of such stories somehow enlarge our own humanity? Fiction teaches its readers by providing them a vast range of experience that they could not acquire otherwise. Especially for the relatively young, conceptions of love, of success in life, of war, of malignant evil and cleansing virtue are learned from fiction – not from life. And herein lies a great danger, for literary artists are notorious liars, and their lies frequently become the source of people’s convictions about human nature and human society.
To illustrate, a huge number of television series based on the exploits of the FBI, or the Hawaiian police force, or the dedicated surgeons at the general hospital, or the young lawyers always end with a capture, with a successful (though dangerous) operation, with justice triumphant. But, in the real world, police are able to resolve only about 10 percent of reported crime, disease ravages, and economic and political power often extends into the courtroom. The very existence of such television drama bespeaks a yearning that things should be different; their heroes are heroic in that they regularly overcome those obstacles that we all experience but that, alas, we do not overcome.
Some writers, beginning about the middle of the nineteenth century, were particularly incensed at the real damage which a lying literature promotes, and they devoted their energies to exposing and counteracting the lies of the novelists, particularly those lies that formed attitudes about what constituted human success and happiness. Yet that popular fiction, loosely called escapist, is still most widely read for reasons that would probably fill several studies in social psychology. It needs no advocate. The fiction in this book, on the other hand, has been chosen largely because it does not lie about life – at least it does not lie about life in the ordinary way. And the various authors employ a large variety of literary methods and modes in an effort to illuminate the deepest wells of human experience. Consequently, many of these stories do not retail high adventure (though some do), since an adventurous inner life does not depend on an incident-filled outer life. Some stories, like Toomer’s “Theater” and Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” might almost be said to be about what does not happen rather than what does – not-happening being as much incident, after all, as happening.
All fiction attempts to be interesting, to involve the reader in situations, to force some aesthetic response from him – most simply put, in the widest sense of the word, to entertain. Some fiction aspires to nothing more. Other fiction seeks, as well, to establish some truth about the nature of man – Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” ask the reader to perceive the inner life of central figures. Some fiction seeks to explore the relationships among men – Faulkner’s “Dry September,” Toomer’s “Theater,” and Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” depend for their force on the powerful interaction of one character with another. Still other fiction seeks to explore the connection between men and society – Ellison’s “"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman” and Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground” acquire their force from the implied struggle between men seeking a free and rich emotional life and the tyrannically ordering society that would sacrifice their humanity to some ideal of social efficiency.
We have been talking about that aspect of fiction which literary theorists identify as theme. Theorists also talk about plot, characterization, setting, point of view, and conflict – all terms naming aspects of fiction that generally have to do with the author’s technique. Let us here deal with one story – James Joyce’s “Araby.” Read it. Then compare your private responses to the story with what we hope will be helpful and suggestive remarks about the methods of fiction.
The Methods of Fiction
One can perceive only a few things simultaneously and can hardly respond to everything contained in a well-wrought story all at once. When he has finished the story, the reader likely thinks back, makes readjustments, and reflects on the significance of things before he reaches that set of emotional and intellectual experiences that we have been calling response. Most readers of short stories respond first to what may be called the tone of the opening lines. Now tone is an aspect of literature about which it is particularly difficult to talk, because it is an aura – a shimmering and shifting atmosphere that depends for its substance on rather delicate emotional responses to language and situation. Surely, before the reader knows anything at all about the plot of “Araby,” he has experienced a tone.
North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.
Is the scene gay? Vital and active? Is this opening appropriate for a story that goes on to celebrate joyous affirmations about life and living? You should answer these questions negatively. Why? Because the dead end street is described as “blind,” because the Christian Brothers’ School sounds much like a prison (it sets the boys free), because a vacant house fronts the dead end, because the other houses, personified, are conscious of decent lives within (a mildly ironic description – decent suggesting ordinary, thin-lipped respectability rather than passion or heroism), because those houses gaze at one another with “brown imperturbable faces” – brown being nondescript, as opposed, say, to scarlet, gold, bright blue, and imperturbable faces reinforcing the priggish decency within.
Compare this opening from Faulkner’s “Dry September”:
Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like fire in a dry grass – the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro.
The tone generated by “bloody twilight,” “rainless days,” “fire in a dry grass” is quite different from the blind, brown apathy of “Araby.” And unsurprisingly, Faulkner’s story involves movement to a horrifying violence. “Araby,” on the other hand, is a story about the dawning of awareness in the mind and heart of the child of one of those decent families in brown and blind North Richmond Street. Tone, of course, permeates all fiction, and it may change as the narrative develops. Since short stories generally reveal change, the manipulation of tone is just one more tool used in the working of design.
Short stories, of course, are short, but this fact implies some serious considerations. In some ways, a large class of good short fiction deals with events that may be compared to the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The events animating the story represent only a tiny fraction of the characters’ lives and experiences; yet, that fraction is terribly important and provides the basis for wide understanding both to the characters within the story and to its readers. In “Araby,” the plot, the connected sequence of events, may be simply stated. A young boy who lives in a rather drab, respectable neighborhood develops a crush on the sister of one of his playmates. She asks him if he intends to go to a charity fair that she cannot attend. He resolves to go and purchase a gift for her. He is tormented by the late and drunken arrival of his uncle who has promised him the money he needs. When the boy finally arrives at the bazaar, he is disappointed by the difference between his expectation and the actuality of the almost deserted fair. He perceives some minor events, overhears some minor conversation, and finally sees himself “as a creature driven and derided by vanity.” Yet this tiny stretch of experience out of the life of the boy introduces him to an awareness about the differences between imagination and reality, between his romantic infatuation and the vulgar reality all about him. We are talking now about what is called the theme of the story. Emerging from the workaday events that constitute its plot is a general statement about intensely idealized childish “love,” the shattering recognition of the false sentimentality that occasions it, and the enveloping vulgarity of adult life. The few pages of the story, by detailing a few events out of a short period of the protagonist’s life, illuminate one aspect of the loss of innocence that we all endure and that is always painful. In much of the literature in the section on innocence and experience, the protagonists learn painfully the moral complexities of a world that had once seemed uncomplicated and predictable. That education does not always occur, as in “Araby,” at an early age, either in literature or life.
Certainly theme is a centrally important aspect of prose fiction, but “good” themes do not necessarily ensure good stories. One may write a wretched story with the same theme as “Araby.” What, then, independent of theme, is the difference between good stories and bad stories? Instinctively you know how to answer this question. Good stories, to begin with, are interesting; they present characters you care about; however fantastic, they are yet somehow plausible; they project a moral world you recognize. One of the obvious differences between short stories and novels requires that story writers develop character rapidly and limit the number of developed characters. Many stories have only one fleshed character; the other characters are frequently two-dimensional projections or even stereotypes. We see their surface only, not their souls. Rarely does a short story have more than three developed characters. Again, unlike novels, short stories usually work themselves out in restricted geographical setting, in a single place, and within a rather short period of time.
We often speak of character, setting, plot, theme, and style as separate aspects of a story in order to break down a complex narrative into more manageable parts. But it is important to understand that this analytic process of separating various elements is something we have done to the story – the story (if it is a good one) is an integrated whole. The closer we examine the separate elements, the clearer it becomes that each is integrally related to the others.
It is part of the boy’s character that he lives in a brown imperturbable house in North Richmond Street, that he does the things he does (which is, after all, the plot), that he learns what he does (which is the theme), and that all of this characterization emerges from Joyce’s rich and suggestive style.
Consider this paragraph:
Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
This paragraph furthers the plot. But it suggests much more. Te boy thinks of his friend’s sister even when he carries parcels for his aunt during the shopping trips through a crowded and coarse part of town. In those coarse market streets the shop-boys cry shrill “litanies,” the girl’s name springs to his lips in strange “prayers and praises,” and the boy confesses a confused “adoration.” Further, he bears “his chalice safely through a throng of foes.” Now the words litanies, prayers, praises, adoration all come from a special vocabulary that is easy to identify. It is the vocabulary of the church. The chalice and the throng of foes come from the vocabulary of chivalric romance, which is alluded to in the first line of the quoted paragraph. Joyce’s diction evokes a sort of holy chivalry that characterizes the boy on this otherwise altogether ordinary shopping trip. This paragraph suggests to the careful reader that the boy has cast his awakening sexuality in a mold that mixes the disparate shapes of the heroic knight, winning his lady by force of arms, and the ascetic penitent, adoring the holy virgin, mother of god.
Playing the word game, of course, can be dangerous. But from the beginning of this story to its end, a certain religious quality shimmers. That now-dead priest of the story’s second paragraph had three books (at least). One is a romantic chivalric novel by Sir Walter Scott; one is a sensational account of the adventures of a famous rogue; one is what a priest might be expected to have at hand – an Easter week devotional guide. That priest who read Scott’s novels might have understood the boy’s response – that mixture of religious devotion and romance. Shortly after the shopping trip, the boy finally speaks to the girl, and it is instructive to see her as he does. He stands at the railings and looks up (presumably) at her, she bowing her head towards him. “The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.” Skip the petticoat, for a moment. Might the description of Mangan’s sister remind the careful reader of quite common sculptured representations of the Virgin Mary? But the petticoat! And the white curve of her neck! This erotic overlay characterizes the boy’s response. The sexuality is his own; the chivalry, the religious adoration, comes from the culture in which he is immersed – comes from Scott, the ballads sung in the market place, the “Arab’s Farewell to his Steed” sung by the boy’s uncle. And it is the culture that so romanticizes and elevates the boy’s yearning.
He finally gets to Araby – “the word called to him through the silence in which his soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over him.” His purpose is to serve his lady – to bring her something from that exotic place. What he finds is a weary-looking man guarding a turnstile, the silence that pervades a church after a service, and two men counting money on a salver (that tray is called a salver by design). And in this setting he overhears the courtship of a young lady by two gentlemen:
“O, I never said such a thing!”
“O, but you did!”
“O, but I didn’t!”
“Didn’t she say that?”
“Yes, I heard her.”
“O, there’s a … fib!”
This is Araby, this is love in a darkened hall where money is counted. Is it any wonder that the boy, in the moment of personal illumination that Joyce calls an epiphany, sees himself as a creature driven and derided by vanity?
“Araby” is a careful, even a delicate story. Nothing much happens – what does occur largely in the boy’s perception and imagination. The story focuses on the boy’s confusion of sexual attraction with the lofty sentiments of chivalry and religion. The climax occurs when he confronts the darkened, money-grubbing fair and the utterly banal expression of the sexual attraction between the gentlemen and the young lady. The result is a sudden deflation of the boy’s ego, his sense of self, as he recognizes his own delusions about the nature of love and the relationship between men, women, heroism, god, and money.
We would like to conclude with a discussion of one feature of fiction that sometimes proves troublesome to developing readers. Often the events of a story, upon which much depends, puzzle or annoy readers. Why does that fool do that? Why doesn’t X simply tell Y the way he feels and then the tragedy would be averted? In a sense, such responses reflect the intrusion of a reader into the world of the story. The reader, a sensible and sensitive person, understands some things about life after all and is oppressed by the characters’ inability to understand at least as much. Characters choose to die when they might with a slight adjustment live. They risk danger when with a slight adjustment they might proceed safely. They suffer the pain of an unfortunate marriage when with a little trouble they might be free to live joyously. If the “whys” issuing from the reader are too insistent, too sensible, then the story must fail, at least for that reader. But many “whys” are not legitimate. Many are intrusions of the reader’s hindsight, the reader’s altogether different cultural and emotional fix. Henry James urged that the author must be allowed his donnée, his “given.” He creates the society and the rules by which it operates within his own fictional world. Sometimes his creation is so close to the reader’s own world that it is hardly possible to object. Black readers will recognize the inner life of Wright’s man who lived underground even if the events are bizarre. Those who have grown up in a small southern town will recognize the atmosphere of Faulkner’s “Dry September” and Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man.” But few readers of this book know 1895 Dublin and Irish middle-class society, which plays a brooding role in “Araby” (as it does in almost all of Joyce’s work). None know the futuristic world of Harlan Ellison’s Harlequin. In every case, we must finally imagine those worlds. If we cannot, the events that take place in them will be of no consequence. If those worlds are unimaginable, then the stories must fail. If they too much strain belief or remain too foreign to the reader’s heart, they must likewise fail. But all response to fiction depends on the reader’s acquiescence to the world of the author and his perceptions of the moral consequences of acts and attitudes in that world. At best, that acquiescence will provide much pleasure as well as emotional insight into his own existence.