Grostesques

Anderson's peculiarly insightful third person narrator explains grotesques by means of a grotesque who dreams of other grotesques. His style is meandering and hypotactic, explaining things in a story-telling quality. I couldn't help but to think of O'Connor the entire time I read this, not necessarily because of the similarities, but because of how his explanation of grotesques seems to work well with how things play out in her highly interpretable short stories. Some of his own tactics are similar to O'Connor's--for instance, the deliberate naming of certain characters over others is typical of O'Connor (in "Paper Pills" the old man is named Doctor Reefy and the girl remains the girl). Of course, Anderson's narrative is told with all of the vital information in the beginning, so we know of everything that will happen, and the excitement is in the details. O'Connor's stories, contrarily, have climactic and often frightening endings. His narrator seems to pass mild judgment on his characters and their situations, but very vaguely, as in the case of: "The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story." He then goes on to supply us with a curious tale of twisted apples that, in their improbable sweetness, are certainly meant to be emblematic of Doctor Reefy himself (or at least his weird knuckles).

Anderson depicts his characters as vague silhouettes with big, pop-out features, like "a white beard and a huge nose and hands," or simply "with a white mustache." Facial hair seems to be of some unknown relevance, as it is one of the few physical attributes we're offered. He has deliberately given his character limited depth in the first paragraph, only to zoom in on more specific details. Perhaps this means to bring our attentions to the sentiments, the curious moments, and the profound details that create a grotesque character, rather than the mere plot of his life.

Hemingway Just Knows Things

Quite like the rest of Hemingway's great material, "Hills Like White Elephants" manages to say very little and mean a whole lot. He has manipulated the story so that the context is relatively obvious, and the content has us wondering what the hell anybody is talking about before we're able to piece together that Jig is uncertain about her procedural abortion while the Man is all for it. In the end, we'd like to think, "Uh-oh" about a pregnant girl (specifically not a woman, and with a childish name like Jig) downing beers and absinthe, and yet there's something about the terse, abstract dialogue that is too distinctly recognizable and real in its casual delivery. We are left with some curiosity as to what will come of their situation--especially when we don't know how convoluted it truly is. The story ends with Jig in what sounds like a huff, but our concern is limited based on a lack of intimacy between the readers and the characters. Similarly to listening in on a stranger's conversation, we are listening in on their conversation without being offered any insight to either character from the Narrator. He delivers the dialog almost journalistically, as though he'd heard it and jotted it down. There are lengthy exchanges during which we're not even offered a "the man said" or a "said the girl." The conversation stands by itself--we are merely eavesdropping. For instance, we can consider what it would be like to sit at a bar and suddenly over-hear something like this:

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig,' the man said. 'It's not really an operation at all."

The girl looked at the ground the the table legs rested on.

"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in."

Our ears would be open to the conversation the entire time, despite the abortion language being very subtle throughout their exchange. The promise of an operation, or a human dissection equipped with a vacuum, is Hemingway's most disconcerting detail. The bulk of their argument, oddly enough, stems from the tiniest mention of an operation.

Hemingway's low style functions with the sole purpose of getting information across quickly, no fuss. His many conjunctions squeeze in details conversationally, recalling details as if they came to mind the second he wrote them down, without restructuring thoughts or ideas for suspensive purposes. The diction, too, is quick and colloquial.

Before:

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

After:

The girl flexed her legs from the sitting position and pressed the firm ground upon which she walked directly towards the station's end. Plentiful fields of grains and tall trees followed the industrious banks of the Ebro on the opposite side of the bustling station. In a far off distance that exceeds the river, as we've seen it earlier, there is tremendous landscape of white mountains. The cloud's densely cast shadow progressed forward throughout the vast fields of grain that she had witnessed mere moments earlier through the scope of the trees.

Mary Explains It All in a Low Style

Christopher Durang's play is as delightfully absurd as the religious content within it. The discussion of Sister Mary's oratory bears an interesting connection to what Lanham speculates about hight and low style--especially as a matter of public vs. private--and how public renditions of speech (quite like Mary's Q&A-style sermon) tend to vary in terms of sincerity. Sister Mary, a genuine nun despite her ignorance, speaks in a low style which is, to use a few of Lanham's words, informational, plain, transparent, comic, sincere, everyday, natural, etc. Mind you, there is much to be said about the play format enabling Durang to write in this lower style, in part because the concepts she discusses are deliberately low in taste, but also because the occasional stage direction inadvertently aids the reader in understanding the tone, regardless of it being there for the actor/director. There are considerably few stage directions, but when they do appear, they do something peculiar: "(Sudden joyful energy:) Yes, they are! What people who ask that question often don't realize is that sometimes the answer to our prayers is

"no," and later, "(Full of faith and joy:) But every bad thing that happens to us, God has a special reason for. God is the good Shepherd, we are His flock." (390). This is an interesting facet to reading a play rather than ordinary dialogue situated within the narrative, in that it lets an outside authority explain how the text is to be read (or acted), when we are ordinarily left to interpret the text as it is, with no guidance. It would be fairly difficult to register the emotions behind Sister Mary's obnoxious teachings without these various tips. We are told in the writer's notes that Sister Mary is to be portrayed as innocent and mildly lovable, particularly in her relationship with Thomas. I noticed the insubordinate doggie-master situation pretty clearly, but it seemed only a matter of wild degradation and not of love.

Sister Mary's dogmatic teachings are smooth and easy to digest, despite their occasional emotional ambiguity: "When he speaks ex cathedra, we must accept what he says at that moment as dogma, or risk hell fire; or, now that things are becoming more liberal, many, many years in purgatory." (382). This sort of preaching isn't exactly suspensive. It feels very much to the point, even though it's lengthened by a conversational "or." Many of the other statements follow suit in this fair, diplomatic, straight-forward approach. Curiously, the casually honest style conflicts with the disingenuous (or simply ridiculous) thoughts she has. She is devoutly faithful to her God and her teachings, but she is more so faithful to her wonderful self, her wretched personal experiences, and her authority before the highly passive audience. The four ex-students show up merely to embarrass her, and yet she is not the least bit embarrassed.

They allow her to contradict herself in such a way that is beyond embarrassment territory, and falls straight into dark, absurdist humor. Throughout, we trust her to be consistently absurd in her teachings, and yet the final scene is beyond our expectations (I would think), and yet it's still not an earth shattering result. Often times in literature we are offered a foreshadowing, or a great sense of impending doom (take, for instance, D.H. Lawrence's "Rocking Horse Winner") that builds to disaster. Lawrence's higher style makes it all the more clear, whereas the simple style in Durang's play is, while seemingly casual and sincere, actually very deceptive in terms of plot progression. A pensive sermon quickly turns homicidal, and we never even saw it coming.

Poor Minnie?

Faulkner’s prose is almost profoundly clear and digestible throughout the whole story. Its paratactic structure makes use of nearly every kind of sentence. Lengthy cumulative ones, highly suspensive ones filled with prepositional and qualifying phrases, and occasional short pithy sentences as well. It’s curious that in a work deeply concerned with shifting its point-of-view for effect, the sentences themselves frequently do their own sort of shifting via strong verb style and prepositional phrases. “Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass---the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.” (Section I). There’s something about his account of action that reads like stage directions—quickly uttered and to the point, especially when he’s writing live action. “The barber went swiftly up the street where the sparse lights, insect-swirled, glared in rigid and violent suspension in the lifeless air. The day had died in a pall of dust; above the darkened square, shrouded by the spent dust, the sky was as clear as the inside of a brass bell. Below the cast was a rumor of the twice-waxed moon.” (Section III). His expository moments are marked by careful details that are somehow positioned specifically in space—either through, above, or below something else. The overall structure is customized accordingly with the subject matter.

The scenes with the men noticeably thrive off of the dialogue, differently from the descriptive moments that spend time portraying Minnie Cooper and her feverish temperament. The true action plays out within the conversational disputes of the men. On a basic level, we know that some of them adhere to Southern etiquette, like Mr. McLendon, whereas others, like the barber, have mercy on the alleged criminal. The first section is probably the only place in the story in which we can understand how these people are thinking, the weight of the situation, the characters involved, the latent cultural mentality of the time, and so forth. We can see how harsh and stubborn McLendon is whenever he comes up because he is allowed to move around, respond to people, and eventually freak out.

Contrarily, there’s very little said about the inner-workings of Minnie. We learn through lengthy descriptions of her haggard appearance, her socioeconomic status, her age (mind you, Faulker has a weird way of dodging specificity with this and with other things. Why doesn’t he know if she’s 38 or 39? Or whether she has 3 or 4 voile dresses? He knows plenty of other specifics—why not these?) and we also learn a limited amount about what has happened to her. The only implication of her thoughts is in her hysteria, or her fever. We can assume that, affected by both illness and a potentially traumatic rape incident (one that is never proven true) she’s probably gone mad. Laughing really loudly throughout a movie is atypical behavior. Still, while she was traumatized by the rape, there is something about her character as it is described by Faulkner in the narrative that is so blindingly mysterious and inaccessible. It’s interesting that he spends the most time describing her as she appears to society. It seems to say something about the sort of damaged woman she always was in the eyes of others, an old maid hiding behind colorful dresses. The incident, whatever it truly is, sparked something unusual in her, but we don’t have access to it. All we see are the reactions of others, the “Shhhhhhhh”s and the “Poor girl! Poor Minnie!”

Stranger in the Village

James Baldwin wrote this essay around the time that Ralph Ellison grappled with similar content in his novel, Invisible Man. They are both concerned with the competing senses of whiteness and blackness, and particularly with the black man's suggested behavior towards white men in a time when there was slight obligation to prove themselves to be civil and agreeable. Ellison writes, "Overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you til they vomit or bust wide open." He installs this mindset in his narrator for a decent chunk of the novel, and it is later tested by a number of contending ideals. Baldwin writes, "This smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine worked as will in this situation as it had in the situation for which it was designed, which is to say it did not work at all." (160). It's curious that, for the non-fiction writer like Baldwin, it's not so easy to hide these incredibly fragile sentiments behind dialogue or contrived circumstances. Baldwin can use only what his experience/observations offer him, and with that, his approach contrarily uses a more philosophical tone in the thick of the essay to argue what he figures to be at the core of these racial disputes: America's unyielding (and at times self-deprecating) concern with the race problem . This is mixed in with anecdotal moments (without them, this essay would be maybe 70% less effective) that show a clearer context than the other historical circumstances mentioned within. Despite the rich language and personal manner through which he presents his arguments, the piece is essentially a case study, and yet the case is presented at first as something to hook us with imagery, and later is juxtaposed with with bizarre treatment of blacks in America. One of the difficulties of this essay has to do with the philosophical/anthropological approach's occasional lack of precision. I trust Baldwin's claims, but the lack of specificity in places might weaken his argument for those who'd beg to differ.

The most enticing thing about Baldwin's writing is his heavy sentence management. With that, it looks as though each sentence is tightly packed, could stand on its own, or has enough content and inherent meaning to serve as a "topic sentence" of sorts. There's something about these loaded, suspensive sentences that offer a sense of diplomacy, and at times take the tone of the inaugural addresses we looked at. The proof is in the chiasmus: "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." We know exactly what he means, based on the evidence he supplied before that statement, but he's managed to put a lid on--or categorize--the particular feeling (like Joyce describes) of an inescapable history (161). His ability to pinpoint immense historical abstracts, or even feelings that people have, is remarkable. The sentences are handled with care and sensitivity towards his argument, and also with a self-conscious ear towards his own sophisticated language and content.

Similarly, he writes, "I tried not to think of these so lately baptized kinsmen, of the price paid for them, or the peculiar price they themselves would pay, and said nothing about my father, who having taken his own conversion too literally never, at the bottom, forgave the white world (which he described as heathen) for having saddled him with a Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of him, they themselves no longer believed." (161) This is one of many, many sentences in which Baldwin takes his sweet suspensive time laying out the facts that are not to be missed or saved for the next sentence. It's exhaustive, but seemingly necessary for him to tie in his father's experience with conversion in the very same sentence that discusses him digesting the notion of paid religious conversion--a concept his father knew something about, and with that, manages to explain how his father was tied to a cause that people no longer believed in. Throughout the whole, Baldwin has an arsenal of these incredibly thick, argumentative sentences that are chock full of details that support his claim, all within a single breath, as if there's no time to waste on the matter.

I couldn't determine whether or not, throughout the entire course of the essay, he has maintained the same tone, or even what exactly the tone is. Is it strictly philosophical or contemplative? Angry and bitter? Pained and sentimental? It reads like a weird amalgamation of them all.

Goodbye To All That

Didion's prose is lucid, elegant, and makes use of both conversational and descriptive techniques. As far as the entire piece is concerned, I will say that the content wore me down a little. I never really know what to make of personal essays like this, or ones that have an explicit moral to them but go out of their way to make it ambiguous to the reader, with hopes that maybe they'll relate or agree under its unidentifiable terms. The sentiment is stuffed inside of moment after moment of vivid descriptions and vague anecdotes, all usually delivered within long sentences.

Her introductory paragraph has a few polysyndetic sentences that successfully bundle together her abstract ideas of youth: "When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off at DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again." (1) The sentence is marked by its conjunctions and additional thoughts, cramming into one sentence the fullness that first impression--marked by familiar sensations of something unknown to her. The short sentence ("In fact it never was.") that follows is the kind of conversational additive that Nabokov employs in Lolita. Curiously, Didion tends to do this throughout the piece, giving it a more conversational feel in places. I can almost hear her reciting it to a 'new face' at a party she she attended when she was 32, or something like that. It happens when she isolates thoughts in parentheses, offering information that isn't vital, but that deepens her description on a personal level, as in the case of: "I was making only $65 or $70 a week then ("Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie's hands, I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by the editor of the magazine for which I worked)..."(2).

Didion occasionally uses the second person to strengthen her argument, which I believe to be something along the lines of: We are all idealistic when we're young and then we grow out of it and that is that. She assumes that her audience has some sort of relationship with the experiences she mentions: "I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again." I wonder if she's using the second person to imply that many of us feel these same sensations (I, for one, do not love the first person who ever touched me and I think the same goes for many people I know--unless we're talking about nurturing mommy touches), or if she simply got tired of using "I."

The question of her intended audience for this piece is curious, because while it's worth reading the piece for its astute moments like, "I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspectives" (5), there's an underlying implication that there she has in incentive in telling us about her experiences in New York as a genuine West Coast person. The essay begins abstractly with the mention of beginnings and endings. Is she trying to say that life is not like it is in the movies, with a clear beginning and end? Reading it now, it all seems a little too obvious. But perhaps it was less so when it was published.

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath's prose seems to take the verb style more than anything we've read so far. The curious thing about it is that, in showing how insane her narrator is, she writes sentences that demonstrate the narrator either doing this, or processing things as they happen. Quite like with Joyce, objects have a sense of agency, and we continue to watch them perform a variety of tasks, "Pale green loopy ferns and spiked leaves of a much darker green filled the ceramic pots on teh end table and the coffee table and the magazine table." (127). This sentence seems to contain all of the techniques that Plath uses the demonstrate the observant eye of a crazy person. The repetition of certain words and conjunctions has an exhausted quality, drawn-out and tired.

Since this chapter is meant to demonstrate Esther's plunge into insanity, the writing tends to follow suit, and it does so pretty ironically. When Esther is revealing something crucial to her condition, the sentences shorten up: "I was still wearing Betsy's white blouse and dirndl skirt. They drooped a bit now, as I hadn't washed them in my three weeks at home. The sweaty cotton gave of a sour but friendly smell. I hadn't washed my hair for three weeks, either. I hadn't slept for seven nights."The sentences become more simple as her thoughts continue, and yet the thoughts get more complex. Most the sentence-length variations occur around the word sleep, which is increasingly absent in the narrator's story.

The sentences aren't generally suspensive, and tend to work so that the narrator is doing something directly, or something else is doing something. This works differently from Nabokov, whose inner monologue dwells in thoughts and anecdotes, cries out to things that aren't present, and revolves around himself. Ester describes things flatly, just as she sees them,

perhaps to get across some sort of triviality or distaste for mundane details--or any of the things that drive her insane. The straight forward sentences are Plath's most prevalent device in expressing her character's disillusionment.