"Orion"

This short story by Jeanette Winterson was first published in 1988.  It dramatizes contemporary gender wars by retelling one version of the myth of Orion, a mighty hunter, in which Orion meets Artemis, a mythic female hunter, rapes her, and is killed by her with a scorpion. 

Sounds like a feminist revenge fantasy, or at least a representation of an ancient, and ongoing, gender power struggle.  But it’s more than that.

Winterson knows the mythological literature in which heroes are typically male, often hunters or warriors, on a quest for an object or place in the world, or, in the case of religious heroes, for eternal life in another world.  Women in mythology, though they might be goddesses, are typically objects of desire (distractions from the quest), mothers, wives, or helpers to the male heroes.  While the men are out performing feats of strength and courage, women are more often at home tending the hearth.

Winterson explicitly presents the story of Orion and Artemis as “the old clash between history and home. Or to put it another way, the immeasurable, impossible space that seems to divide the hearth from the quest.”

If it’s a simple feminist revenge fantasy, then why is the story entitled after the male “hero,” and why is it Orion who gets immortalized in a constellation, where to this day “he does his best to dominate the skyline”?

If it is simply a representation of the ancient gender binary between quest and hearth, then how is it that Artemis rejects marriage, childbirth, and home-making in order to be a great hunter?  While the original story itself challenges this binary, it also reinforces the polarity as an either-or choice.

By invoking the myth Winterson also reinforces the ancient difference between male and female social roles, but she challenges it by having Artemis, not simply reject the traditional female role, but redefine it in terms of self-knowledge:

“She found that the whole world could be contained within one place because that place was herself… What would it matter if she crossed the world and hunted down every living creature as long as her separate selves eluded her?”

Artemis comes to realize that “Leaving home meant leaving nothing behind.  It came too, all of it, and waited in the dark.”  Quest and hearth are one.  The ultimate quest is the journey to the self.

This wisdom eludes Orion.  For him the quest is all about hyper-masculinity, power, and domination.  Thus his rape of Artemis.

Yes, Artemis kills him in his sleep, and while this act of revenge suggests a struggle between feminist power and masculine power, it is more than that.  After Orion rapes Artemis, he falls asleep, but after Artemis murders Orion, she wakes up:

“Artemis lying beside dead Orion sees her past changed by a single act…She is not who she thought she was.  Every action and decision has led her here.  The moment has been waiting the way the top of the stairs waits for the sleepwalker.  She had fallen and now she is awake.”

When she sees Orion’s body becoming food for lizards, she covers him with rocks to create a high mound, which, when she views it from a distance looks like a monument. 

By rejecting the social norms of her day, Artemis begins to awaken to self-knowledge and to recognize the false binary of quest and hearth.  The gender power struggle overtakes her, but, again, she awakens to new self-knowledge.  Her “burial” of Orion demonstrates respect for his humanity, despite his cruelty to her.  This act of redemption takes her to a new level: “Finally, at the headland, after a bitter climb to where the woods bordered the steep edge, she turned and stared out, seeing the shape of Orion’s mound, just visible now, and her own footsteps walking away.  Then it was fully nigh, and she could see nothing to remind her of the night before except the stars.”

The story offers three larger contexts in which to view the myth and the story that Winterson draws out of it. 

First there is the context of history: the ancient myth transformed into a modern feminist story in 1988.  What future transformations will unfold in history?  “Monuments and cities would fade away like the people who build them.  No resting place or palace could survive the light years that lay ahead. There was no history that would not be rewritten…”

Second is the context of medieval alchemy: “Tertium non data. The third is not given. That is, the transformation from one element into another, from waste matter into best gold is a process that cannot be documented.  It is fully mysterious.”  Artemis’s transformations from gender rebel to self-conscious individual to stargazer could not have been predicted, nor can future transformations to come.

Third is the context of astronomy:  “Every 200,000 years or so the individual stars within each constellation shift position.  That is, they are shifting all the time, but more subtly than any tracker dog of ours can follow.  One day if the earth has not voluntarily opted out of the solar system, we will wake up to a new heaven whose dome will again confound us.  It will still be home but not a place to take for granted.”  For now, Orion still dominates the skyline (though “he glows very faint, if at all, in November.  November being the month of Scorpio.”) But what of that “new heaven” to come?

This past November it seemed a new transformation was on the horizon, but it was not to be.  Orion still dominates the skyline.  But what of that “new heaven” to come?

"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

In this 1973 short story Ursula Le Guin dramatizes the Utilitarian idea of the greatest happiness for the greatest number at the expense of a minority (see previous post).  Omelas is a town in which all but one are happy.  Their “utopia” is only made possible by the suffering of a child who is kept imprisoned in miserable conditions behind a locked door.

The residents of Omelas know the child is there:

 “…they all understand that  their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” 

The situation is explained to the children of Omelas between the ages of eight and twelve.  They are taken to see the suffering child and told that such is the price of everyone else’s happiness.  Though they are “always shocked and sickened by the sight,” though they “feel disgust…anger, outrage, impotence,” though they “may brood over it for weeks and years,” most of them eventually come to accept the terms which guarantee the happiness of the majority.

There are a few though, adolescents and adults, who decide to walk away from Omelas:

“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.  The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the place of happiness.  I cannot describe it at all.  It is possible it does not exist.  But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas), Omelas is “Salem O” backwards, that is Salem, Oregon, which Le Guin saw on a highway sign from her rearview mirror.  Salem, of course, reminds us of Salem, Massachusetts, famous for the witch hunt that resulted in nineteen townspeople being hung and one man, who refused to enter a plea, being pressed to death by heavy stones on his chest.  In this classic example of scapegoating, the upstanding citizens of Salem projected their own guilt onto a few and sought to purge themselves by victimizing those few.

Is it possible to walk away from Omelas?  Or is it an unavoidable reality that the happiness of the many depends on the “necessary evil” of suffering by a few? 

Is Omelas a utopia or is it an image of the real world in which prosperous countries exploit the resources and labor of poor countries, in which the wealthy hoard their riches at the expense of the needy, in which the security of the majority depends on those who put their lives at risk in the military, in which the privileged enjoy their status by looking down on those with less, in which the fortunate give themselves the credit and blame the unfortunate for their adversity?

Is the true utopia one in which suffering does not exist, or is at least always relieved, or is at least equally shared?

Are the ones who walk away from Omelas “into the darkness” the ones who are unable to come to terms with evil in the world and live out their lives in despair?

Are they the idealists who live in a dream world refusing to accept the reality that full equality is impossible and that one person’s gain is always someone else’s loss?

Or are they the ones who work for economic and social justice instead of accepting the world as it is, the ones who “seem to know where they are going” as they seek amelioration of suffering and injustice, if not its absolute erasure.

Is Utilitarianism based on the inevitable reality of necessary evils or does it simply rationalize unnecessary evils for the benefit of the majority?

For that matter, is happiness the greatest good, especially if it is contingent on another’s misery?  What about virtue?  Is it better to be happy and unethical or unhappy and virtuous? Are the ones that walk away from Omelas seeking a higher good than happiness? (see next post)

"A Horseman in the Sky"

Christian ethics (see previous posts on “The Bishop and the Candlesticks” and “Bartleby the Scrivener”) is based on the “divine command” theory of ethics, which in turn is usually based on a sacred text, purporting to embody the word of a supreme deity.  Good and bad behavior is determined by an appeal to the authority of a higher power.  These commands, such as “Thou shalt not kill,” don’t usually include any exceptions, qualifiers or guidance on how to choose when one command comes in conflict with another or when special circumstances such as war or self-defense arise.   The appeal to authority removes the burden of having to think through and develop one’s own moral code, but the absence of exceptions often leaves the believer in a moral dilemma with no way out.  As shown in “Bartleby” and “The Bishop and the Candlesticks,” divine commands often set an impossibly high standard.  They might work in fiction, but not necessarily in reality.

There are those who believe that religion is necessary to morality, but the deontological theory of ethics is based on our human ability to think for ourselves.  We don’t need religion to tell us that killing and other harmful acts are wrong.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that such prohibitions are necessary to the viability of human society, not to mention our own self-interest.  In *The Lord of the Flies* by William Golding human nature is represented as selfish and cruel, once the thin layer of socialization has been stripped away; yet the novel appeals to our innate good sense about the need for a moral code.  When Piggy asks, “Which is better—to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?” there is little doubt about the right answer.   Certain behaviors are intrinsically wrong, and we have a practical and moral duty to refrain from them.  However, in certain situations it may be our duty to kill, as in war.  Under most wartime conditions, a soldier will kill the enemy without question.  Not only is it a matter of following legal military orders, but it is also a matter of kill or be killed.  But what if that duty conflicts with another one?  What if the “enemy” is a friend or family member, to whom we also have certain obligations of concern? 

Such is precisely the dilemma of Carter Druse in Ambrose Bierce’s 1889 Civil War story “A Horseman in the Sky.”  A native Virginian, Druse chooses to join the Union side.  When he tells his father of his decision, the elder Druse accepts his son’s choice, telling him “Well, go, sir, and whatever may occur do what you conceive to be your duty.” 

Later, Druse is assigned to keep watch on a cliff overlooking his comrades in the valley below as they prepare for a sneak attack on a Confederate camp site.  Should they be detected by the enemy, not only would their plan fail but they would themselves be in a “perilous” position.  Druse falls asleep on his watch, but awakes in time to see a Confederate horseman on the cliff looking down on the five regiments of Federal infantry.  From his hidden location, Druse can easily kill the horseman and save his comrades from detection, but the horseman happens to be his father. 

After a struggle with his conscience, Druse shoots the horse, causing both horse and rider to plunge down the side of the cliff.  Presumably, Druse can satisfy his conscience that he has fulfilled his military duty (and saved his comrades) while also refraining from shooting his own father.  Clearly, though, by shooting the horse, Druse is responsible for his father’s death.  On the other hand, his father had told him to do his duty “whatever may occur.”  The question is, which duty is the higher one in this situation, his familial duty or his military duty?  Which is worse, patricide or treason?

A similar ethical dilemma arises in Susan Glaspell’s short story “Trifles” (see Jan. 19, 2011 post).  Two women struggle between their duty to reveal evidence of a crime and their duty to protect their friend, who has apparently murdered her husband.  Believing there were extenuating circumstances that may have justified the murder, the women end up concealing evidence.   

Whatever we may think of the actions taken by the characters in the two stories, the point is that deontological ethics, like divine command theory, may not help us when we are confronted with two bad choices.

But is the main function of either story to question the efficacy of deontological ethics?  Probably not.  As stated in my blog post on “Trifles,” the main point of the story had to do with the way the male characters dismiss and trivialize the women, thereby overlooking the evidence the women have found. It is not just that the women conceal the evidence, but that the men can’t conceive they might find something significant while sorting through the domestic “trifles” of the suspect.

So, what is the main point of “A Horseman in the Sky”?  Is it an anti-war story, suggesting that war itself is immoral, forcing soldiers to commit horrible acts that they would never commit in civilian life?  Is it about the twisted ironies of life, in which a father’s advice to his son is turned against him?  Or is it about Carter Druse’s character?  After all, he makes his decision to join the Federal Army while his mother lies on her deathbed.  What does that say about his devotion to familial duty? Couldn’t he have waited until after her impending death?  Why does he not struggle with his conscience over abandoning his dying mother?  And, what does it say about his devotion to military duty that he is asleep at his post and only by chance awakes in time to see the Confederate horseman?  Does his struggle with his conscience before shooting the horse suggest a moral advance over his failed duty to his mother?  Or, does his shooting of the horse represent yet another failure to take responsibility for his actions by allowing him to tell himself he didn’t kill his own father?

On a different level, does his decision to join the Federal Army represent an admirable loyalty to the Union (and perhaps an opposition to slavery) or does his disloyalty to his own state (and family)represent yet another failure of character?

Like all good literature, the story is rich with possible interpretations and with implications for our own human reflections on ethics, character, and the ironies of life.

"The Maypole of Merry Mount"

I started thinking about this blog post on May Day, but life (to be specific, knee replacement surgery) intervened.  Now I’m finally getting it posted just under the May wire.

The tradition of the maypole isn’t always associated strictly with the month of May, however.  In some countries it is erected during mid-summer celebrations.  And this short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (published 1836) is based on such an occasion in the early American colony of Mount Wollaston, a.k.a. Merry Mount, which was adjacent to the better known Plymouth colony in the 1620s.

The rivalry between the two colonies, one Puritan and one Anglican, and the historical incident in which John Endicott cut down the maypole at Merry Mount are documented by historians from both colonies.  William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation describes the Merry Mount colonists and their ringleader Thomas Morton as “licentious,” “dissolute,” and “profane.”   Their maypole is an “idol,” around which the merrymakers engage in drunken dancing, “inviting the Indian women for their consorts…frisking together like so many fairies, or furies…”  Thomas Morton, in his New English Canaan, mocks the “precise Seperatists” of Plymouth, who “make a great show of Religion but no humanity,” and their leader Captain Miles Standish as “Captain Shrimp.”

In the preface to his story Hawthorne notes that the historical facts “have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously, into a sort of allegory.”  “Jollity and gloom,” says the narrator of the story, “were contending for an empire.”

In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne offers two world views for comparison, using one to critique the other, finding fault with both, and suggesting that each could learn from the other. (See blog post Oct. 24, 2012). In “The Maypole of Merry Mount” Hawthorne uses the nominally Anglican but actually more secular/commercial colony of Merry Mount to invoke pre-Christian paganism, referencing not only the maypole itself and the American Indians, but also the “Golden Age,” “fairies and nymphs,” “ancient fable,” and “Comus,” the Greek God of immoderate pleasure, excess, revelry, and disorder.  Similar to The Scarlet Letter, 17^th century Puritanism is contrasted with excessive hedonism and untempered pleasure seeking.

In this story the Puritans emerge victorious as they cut down the maypole, punish the wrongdoers, and invite the newly married “Lord and Lady of the May” into their more sober community.  Yet the narrator, while acknowledging the historical triumph of Plymouth over Merry Mount, does not spare the Puritans.  They are “dismal wretches”—“grim,” “stern,” “darksome,” hard-hearted, and punitive.  The whipping post is their maypole.  If the merrymakers of Merry Mount indulge in excessive pleasure seeking, the Puritans seem almost to take sadistic pleasure in an excess of pain and punishment.

More than an historical allegory, the story represents a process of maturation from a child-like view of the world as playground to the inevitable encounter with evil and suffering that accompanies a “coming of age.”  Yet, the story seems to question whether the Puritan view of the world as a crucible of suffering, a “vale of tears,” is really superior. 

The newly married couple who join the Puritan community offer some hope of a healthier outlook.  Even before the Puritans arrive to cast their shadow over the mirth and merriment of Merry Mount, the young couple has a “presentiment” of future “care and sorrow and troubled joy,” thus chastening the youthful exuberance and carefree quality of their wedding celebration.  Later, their devotion to each other and their willingness to suffer, each for the other, in the face of Puritan judgment and punishment, softens the “iron man,” Endicott, who lifts a wreath of roses from the ruined maypole and throws it over their heads, thereby holding open the possibility that flowers and sunshine may mix and mingle with Puritan gloom.

As Hawthorne says elsewhere, “Life is made up of marble and mud.”  Neither youthful hedonism nor age-worn cynicism captures its complexity.  Wisdom, truth, and healthy human community lie somewhere between the two extremes.

"Too Much Happiness"

Not only does Alice Munro write short stories as complicated as novels (see blog post May 18, 2012), she wrote a “short story” based on the actual biography of Sophia Kovalevsky, the first woman in Europe to receive a Ph.D. (in mathematics), the first woman to be “appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe” and “one of the first females to work for a scientific journal as an editor” (Wikipedia).  It would take considerable research to decide to what extent “Too Much Happiness” is really fiction and to what extent it might be classified as “creative non-fiction.” 

Regardless, Sophia Kovalevsky makes a fascinating study.  Not only was she a brilliant mathematician, she was also a novelist, and she co-wrote a play called The Struggle for Happiness, a title which better fits her life than does the title of Alice Munro’s story.  However, “Too much happiness” is said to have been the actual last words of Sophia Kovalevsky.

The phrase is cryptic.  Can there be too much happiness?  Is the tone sincere? Ironic? Is it part of her drug-induced, deathbed delirium?  The story (and the biography) seems to be more about a woman whose pursuit of happiness is repeatedly being derailed.  Denied a university education as a woman in her home country of Russia, she engaged in a marriage of convenience in order to get the required husband’s (or father’s) signature to study abroad.  Though she achieves academic success, as a woman, she is denied employment as a professor until later in life, when she receives a visiting professorship at Stockholm University in Sweden.

After she falls in love with her husband and bears their child, he later commits suicide.  After caring for their daughter for a year, she puts the child in the care of her sister in order to pursue her career in mathematics. 

In middle age she falls in love again, but the relationship is rocky, and though they vow to marry “in the spring” (of 1891), she contracts pneumonia on her train trip back to Stockholm and dies shortly thereafter. 

Her life represents the classic woman’s conflict between professional career and personal relationships.  From a Freudian perspective it is the conflict of ego and power vs. love and pleasure.  Only society seems to be set up so that men can reasonably expect to achieve both, whereas women are expected to choose.  Sophia tries to achieve both, only to be thwarted by social convention, circumstance, and time.

Based on the biographical accounts, it is fair to say that “Too Much Happiness” is factually accurate.  However, Munro gives the story her own shape.  Sophia’s last words have been documented, but the prediction of her own death, however playful, that occurs at the beginning of the story may be fictional.  Strolling through a Paris cemetery with her mid-life lover, Sophia recalls the superstition that visiting a cemetery on New Year’s Day presages one’s death before the end of that year.  “One of us will die this year,"Sophia pronounces, and the story ends with her death on February 10, 1891. 

During her train trip back to Stockholm, she visits her late sister’s husband and son and her academic mentor and his two sisters, all the while flashing back to her first discovery of trigonometry, her efforts to educate herself in mathematics, her marriage, her professional achievements, her family relationships, motherhood, the loss of her husband and sister, and her mid-life affair with Maksim.  Thus her life is presented as a retrospective as she travels from her long-distance lover back to her home and place of work.

The word “happiness” appears four times in the story, once at the end in her deathbed last words and  three times on one page when she writes her friend and former classmate of her impending marriage to Maksim: “…it is to be happiness after all.  Happiness after all.  Happiness.”

The word “happy” appears four times:  On an occasion when Maksim rejects her saying she “should make her way back to Sweden…she should be happy where her friends were waiting for her,” ending with a “jab” that her “little daughter” would have need of her.  On another when her teenage nephew expresses no more ambition in life than to “be an omnibus boy and call out the stations,” and Sophia replies, “Perhaps you would not always be happy calling out the stations.”  Again, when telling her former mentor of her upcoming marriage, she says, “Meine Liebe, I order you, order you to be happy for me.”  And finally, in a flashback to her first discovery of trigonometry when she recalls, “She was not surprised then, though intensely happy.”

Two of the four uses of “happy” refer to her personal life and two to the happiness found in work, as if true happiness is found in balancing both.  The repetition of “happiness” when writing to her friend about marrying Maksim seems to tip the scale in favor of the personal. Had she found “too much happiness” in her work to the detriment of her personal life?  Was the hope of finding happiness in both “too much” to wish for? We can speculate on the meaning of her last words, but the title of Munro’s story seems ironic, for, more often than not, Sophia seems to fall far short of “too much happiness.”

And there is always the possibility that the drug a doctor gives her on the train, a drug which “brought solace…when necessary, to him,” might have elevated her mood to a state of euphoria, such that, indeed, just before her death, it felt like “too much happiness.”

Her final delirium also included references to her “husband,” confused with Bothwell, who had been accused but acquitted of murdering the consort of Mary Queen of Scots before marrying her himself, possibly by force and subterfuge.  Is this an association of marriage with the deception, violence, and distrust that had accompanied her own actual and hoped for marriages?

She also talked about her novel and a “new story,” in which she hoped to “discover what went on” under the “pulse in life,” something “Invented, but not.”  She found herself “overflowing with ideas…of a whole new breadth and importance and yet so natural and self-evident that she couldn’t help laughing.”  The language suggests, not only the euphoria of literary creation, but also, perhaps, that “intense” happiness she associated with mathematical discovery.

Kovalevsky had made the connection between art and science in a quote which Alice Munro uses as a headnote to her story:  “Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science.  Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy.”

Is there any wonder that the literary Alice Munro would find fodder for fiction in the actual biography of a mathematician who, not only linked fantasy and science, but was also a novelist and playwright? Thus does the real become unreal and the unreal become real, the truth become fiction and fiction become truth.

"Fiction"

Someone once said that an Alice Munro short story is as complicated as any novel.  This 2009 story is proof positive.  O. Henry could have learned a lot from her (see http://yourbrainonbooks.blogspot.com/2011/12/gift-of-magi.html). 

 “Fiction” can be read  as the tragic story of a woman on a constant quest for ego-enhancement, for whom relationships are a means to the end of her own fulfillment, or it can be read as a comic story of a woman who repeatedly makes herself look ridiculous by her own self-importance.

 It can be read as a realistic representation of human experience as a maze of coincidences and intersections, a tangle of relationships, of memories, of forgetting, of recognition and non-recognition, of curiosity of story-telling, of manipulation, of complex motives, of self-creation and re-creation.

 It can be read as an ironic statement on the complexity of human experience, the mixed messages, the missed messages, the strange combination of false successes and real failures, of the reality of unreality and the unreality of reality.

 It can be read as a social commentary on the modern state of relationship roulette, of marriage, adultery, divorce, blended families, same-sex relationships; of individualism, the serial making, breaking and remaking of social ties; of the fragmentation in our social fabric and the fragility of social bonds; of the strange web of interconnectedness with its brokenness, and its mendedness.

 It can be read as the carefully crafted juxtaposition of a story within a story and the asymmetry of two different memories of the same episode from two different perspectives, in which what is marginal in one memory is central in the other.

 It can be read as the universal story of a failed quest for redemption, in which we humans are doomed to a cycle of continual compensation for our imperfections, like Sisyphus forever rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down once we get it to the top.

 But the story is called “Fiction,” and in the last line the main character imagines turning her disappointing experience into a “funny story.”  Thus the story “Fiction” is framed by references to story-telling, and at the center of the story is another “fictional” story.  Our attention is thus drawn to the relationship between fiction and truth, unreality and reality, to the significance of writing, reading, and the experience of textuality.

 The poet Donald Murray has said that “All writing is autobiography,” and there is a school of literary criticism that seems to say, by turns, that all reading is autobiography and/or that all writing is about writing and/or about reading.  This self-reflexive approach to fiction can begin to feel like a hall of mirrors, which is somewhat how the story “Fiction” feels.

 Alice Munro, who was divorced and remarried, became a writer and book-seller (a somewhat self-reflexive situation in its own right).  Her story “Fiction” is about Joyce, a music teacher, whose husband rejects her for the mother of one of her students.  Later, after Joyce has become the third wife of a college professor and left teaching to become a professional cellist, she crosses paths again with that former student, Christie, who has married the friend of Joyce’s second husband’s son by his first wife.

 As if this tangled maze of relationships were not enough, Christie has just published a book of short stories, one of which, “Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”), recounts the story of a child whose mother moves in with her music teacher’s husband.  (The title suggests a coming of age story.)

 To the extent that Christie’s story is based on her own experience, her memory of it is very different from Joyce’s memory of the same episode.  Joyce barely remembers the details of Christie’s account (if they actually happened) and certainly had no knowledge, much less memory, of the events from Christie’s perspective.  She had no idea that Christie had been so lovingly attached to her as her music teacher and she has no awareness of having manipulated Christie in order to gain access to details of the relationship between her husband and Christie’s mother, at least as Christie tells it.  The layers of complexity continue to mount.  The hall of mirrors makes it ever more difficult to distinguish between the flesh and blood of reality and the reflections distorted in the mirrors of memory and of fiction.

 We read Alice Munro’s story about Joyce, who reads Christie’s story about the memory of her relationship with Joyce, which Joyce compares with her own memory of Christie.  If all reading (and writing) is autobiography, then all writing (and reading) is memory, and all memory is a distorted mirror image of the reality that actually took place.  Thus all fiction is memory and all memory is fiction.

 In Joyce’s memory Christie is a minor character, whose name Joyce can barely recall.  In Christie’s memory Joyce is a central character, the adored teacher.  Even when, as an adult, Christie realizes how Joyce had “used” her, she is able to forgive because of the beauty of the music and the “love” of the teacher, however false.  “It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one person could come of the great unhappiness of another.”

 Joyce is so moved by the story and its conveniently self-justifying (for Joyce) moral that she takes her copy of Christie’s book back to the bookstore (Alice Munro was a book-seller) to have it signed by the author (Alice Munro was a published author).  Despite Joyce’s attempt to draw attention to herself, Christie is utterly oblivious as to who she is.  Memory, it seems, is one thing; recognition is another.

 In the end Joyce is as unimportant to Christie as Christie once was to Joyce.  Just as Christie salvaged her disappointment through fiction, so Joyce attempts to salvage hers by imagining that “This might even turn into a funny story that she would tell someday.”

 Just as Joyce has used Christie to construct a mental “story” of the life her husband was living with Christie’s mother, so Christie uses the memory of Joyce to create her work of fiction, and perhaps Joyce will again use Christie, this time to create her own “funny story.”

 Not only are we all figments of our own imaginations, but we are figments of others’ imaginations, as they are figments of ours.  Thus does the real become unreal and the unreal become real, the truth become fiction and fiction, the story we tell ourselves and others, become truth.

"The Gift of the Magi"

In case you can’t find the significance in “The Gift of the Magi,” O. Henry is sure to tell you.

As if the title were not enough, he directly compares the young couple “who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house” to the wise men “who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger.”  And then he declares them “the wisest” of “all who give and receive gifts….They are the magi.”

Unwise because they sell their most valuable possessions, Della her hair and Jim his watch, so that she can buy him a watch chain and he can buy her a set of combs.  Yet wise because their love for each other is greater than their love for their “greatest treasures.”

The message is sentimental, beautiful, and hard to miss:  human love is by far the greatest gift, greater than any material gift, regardless of its value.

I have no quarrel with the message, but it might have been more effectively delivered if O. Henry had just told the story and spared us the commentary.

And forgive me if I find the buying and selling of hair somewhat discomforting, to say the least, but maybe that’s because of my daughter’s recent meeting with the rather strange proprietor of Leila’s Hair Museum in Kansas City (http://oisforobscure.blogspot.com/2011/10/leilas-hair-museum.html).  Beyond that, though, hair is traditionally associated with power and sexuality.  Think Samson and Rapunzel.  Is there a subliminal and, no doubt, wholly unintended message in Della giving up her power and taming her sexuality?  Does she turn herself into the traditional submissive, modest wife of the Victorian era, sacrificing her independence and assertiveness on the altar of love and marriage?  Or am I stretching it a bit?

And Jim, selling his father’s watch.  Would it be a stretch to see that act as symbolic of an Oedipal killing of the father?  Probably.  But, if you see it that way, then, perhaps his newly shorn Della is, Oedipally speaking, a substitute for his, no doubt, very proper Victorian mother.

Now we’ve really gone out on an interpretive limb.  You can be the judge of whether “The Gift of the Magi” is a sweet, simple, sentimental story of love and sacrifice or whether it masks a representation of darker depths hidden in the human psyche.  In any case, Merry Christmas! (Or, should I say "Bah, Humbug!"?)

"A Christmas Memory"

When I read this story by Truman Capote as a teenager, it didn’t make much of an impression.  Reading it again recently, I dismissed it at first as a “nice, sentimental story,” but really nothing of significance.

I know better than that though.  There is always something of significance to be found in the texts that humans produce, even if they are unintended, sometimes especially if they are unintended.  In “A Christmas Memory” there is, of course, the irony of the seven-year-old boy and the 60+-year-old woman, who is “still a child,” being best friends, and there is the pathos of the two marginalized family members clinging to each other’s companionship.  But beyond irony and poignancy, where is the significance to be found?

In rereading and rethinking the story, I noticed that while the first-person narrator is called by the nickname “Buddy,” we don’t know his real name (though we assume it is the author), and the woman, his distant cousin, is never named.  Buddy refers to her throughout as “my friend.”  The other “relatives” in the house are also unnamed, but they are the ones who seem to occupy the center of the household, in which Buddy and his friend are outsiders.

The lack of names for the relatives can be explained from the perspective of the narrator and his friend:  “…though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole too much aware of them.”  But why the lack of specific identity for the two main characters?  Perhaps their namelessness underscores their status as near outcasts in the family (at least in their eyes).  Could part of the significance lie in the importance of belonging and community, even if it is a family community, to individual identity?  As Buddy and his friend turn to each other to reinforce their sense of self, we recognize the formative power of relationships.  Though their family situation is sad, the two characters experience great joy and delight together.

And it is this irony which brings us to the larger significance of the story.  While there are religious references in this “Christmas” story, there is no mention of Christ’s birth, though such a reference would fit well with the larger pattern in the narrative of life and light emerging from darkness.

Christ’s birth, however, is less important than the season of the natural year, the darkening days, the coming winter solstice, and the return of the sun’s light.  The most meaningful religious pattern in the story is more pagan than Christian.

This pantheistic theme is reinforced by the most explicit religious reference in the story when Buddy’s friend exclaims, while gesturing toward “clouds and kites and grass”:  “I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself.  That things as they are…just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him.  As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

And, years later, when Buddy learns of his friend’s death, on a December morning, it is the kites they made for each other their last Christmas together that he imagines “rather like hearts…hurrying toward heaven.”

Like the rebirth of light in the midst of winter’s darkness, it is the memory of human joy and delight two unlikely friends created together that somehow brightens the reality of death and loss.

Thus does “A Christmas Memory” reenact the ancient mythic theme of spring emerging from winter, light from darkness, and life from death.  Such is the significance of the story, and in that spirit, I wish you all a most Happy Winter Solstice!

"The Overcoat" (and more on The Namesake)

The Namesake (see previous post) makes multiple references to Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat.” Professional scholars of literature have special terminology for such reference. “Allusion” is one term, but the other is “intertextuality,” the latter suggesting a closer relationship between the two texts besides one merely mentioning the other. Just as Beloved (see previous posts) can be understood in a larger context of mythological and Biblical traditions, so The Namesake can be read, not only in the context of the hero’s quest myth and coming of age stories, but also, given the significance that Nikolai Gogol plays in the narrative, in relationship to the Russian writer’s works.

Unlike Gogol in The Namesake, the main character of “The Overcoat” is the son of a native Russian family who lives and works in St. Petersburg. Gogol’s short story is not a multicultural one of immigration and assimilation, but it is a story of identity. Unlike Gogol in The Namesake, however, Akakiy Akakievitch does not have to struggle with multiple identities. Quite the opposite. He struggles to achieve any sense of identity at all.

Both narratives include a scene in which the main character receives his birth name, Gogol, after the Russian writer, and Akakiy, after his own father. In each case, the main character receives his name somewhat as an afterthought, without careful intention, though the name “Gogol” has special significance to Gogol’s father, whereas Akakiy receives his name more or less by default, other choices suggested by his godparents having been rejected by his mother. Gogol’s father is a major presence and influence in his life, but Akakiy’s father never appears in the story at all and is never referred to except in the naming scene.

We do know that Akakiy’s father was a government official, and Akakiy himself is a “perpetual titular councilor” in an unnamed government department who seems to live in complete isolation without family or friends. At work he is an object of derision when he is recognized at all. His job consists of copying documents, like a human Xerox machine. He is so devoted to his work that he takes it home with him, apparently having nothing else to live for. When asked to do anything slightly original, he begs to be given his copying tasks back. Other than an occasional pathetic outburst when the ridicule by his peers at work becomes too much, Akakiy is as nameless and faceless as the government bureaucracy in which he toils.

Only when Akakiy’s overcoat becomes so worn that it can no longer keep out the cold, does he begin to show an interest in anything outside of work. He bargains with the tailor to get a good price, scrimps, sacrifices, and goes without in order to save up enough money, and is eventually able to acquire a handsome new coat. His new attire brings unaccustomed attention, congratulations, and pleasantries from his coworkers. They insist the coat must be “christened” (as Akakiy was after his name was decided upon) and invite him to a party. This “christening” party offers symbolic hope that Akakiy might receive a new identity and a new life.

At the party, he is overwhelmed by the noise and sociability, drinks more than he is used to, and stays up well past his usual bedtime. On the way home through dark and deserted streets, he is accosted and robbed of his attractive new coat (his new identity?). He tries to assert himself, seeking help from the night watchman and the next night from the district of police and finally from a “certain prominent personage.” But they all rebuff him, insisting that he has not followed proper procedures or filled out the proper forms, and then, heading home in a snowstorm wearing his old coat, he catches a fever, grows delirious, and finally breathes his last.

At this point Gogol’s somewhat “realistic” story, though a bit bizarre, to say the least, turns into a gothic tale, for a dead man, resembling Akakiy, begins to be seen on the Kalinkin Bridge accosting passersby and stealing their coats. Eventually Akakiy takes his final revenge, as his ghost steals the coat of that “prominent personage” who had treated him so rudely, an event that somewhat humbles the behavior of that “prominent personage.” Meanwhile, the ghost disappears and is seen no more.

Symbolically, the ghost could be said to represent the regrets of all those who had abused Akakiy in life, including the “prominent personage,” who had felt some temporary remorse after mistreating the poor copyist in search of his overcoat. Or the ghost could function as a kind of revenge fantasy for all those nameless, faceless civil servants performing their mechanical tasks in their unknown bureaucratic departments, suffering daily slights and abuses from their superiors and coworkers alike. Or perhaps the ghost is poor Akakiy’s buried humanity, his only identity, finally asserting itself postmortem.

Unlike Gogol in The Namesake, on a quest for self-definition among competing identities, Akakiy seeks only to provide himself with the basic necessities of survival and to preserve some semblance of human dignity. By comparison, Gogol’s “identity crisis” seems like self-indulgence, a luxury afforded only to the fortunate.

Or, does the significance lie in the difference between the burdens bequeathed to them by their fathers: Gogol carrying the name of the Russian writer whose book, Gogol’s father believes, had once saved his life, and the legacy of his Bengali immigrant experience in the U.S.; Akakiy carrying the name of a silent, faceless, absent father with no legacy at all to pass on to his son? Better a complicated legacy from one’s past than none at all? Perhaps the intertextual relationship between the two works is one more of contrast than similarity.

Another major contrast is the style of the two works. The Namesake relates its story in an understated, matter-of-fact manner that makes the unusual multicultural experience of the Ganguli family seem ordinary. “The Overcoat,” on the other hand, for all Nikolai Gogol’s reputation as a realist, is exclamatory, melodramatic, and fantastic in style, making the unremarkable life of a minor Russian bureaucrat seem extraordinary.

Regardless of the contrasts, both stories dramatize the universal dilemma of identity, whether it be culturally complex or a matter of simple humanity.