Handout questions about In the Lake of the Woods.
View powerpoints.
Work on essay (Question 8 or 9) or short story. Essay due on Thursday.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Friday, 2/13/09 -2/23/09
1. Finish Reading in the Lake of the Woods--test on Tuesday, when we return.
2. Brainstorm ideas for your companion writing project: "The Bits and Pieces" Story
3. This story can be in any genre--fiction, poetry, or dramatic (play or screenplay).
Try to use different kinds of documents: transcripts of interviews, "emails", letters, legal documents,receipts, tickets, book excerpts, dictionary definitions of specific words, other "found" items, etc.
Think about using visuals: baby pictures, drawings, other photos, cartoons, etc.
Think about using newspaper headlines to provide dates, times, and settings.
Be creative and imaginative--fill your "story" with "bits and pieces."
2. Brainstorm ideas for your companion writing project: "The Bits and Pieces" Story
3. This story can be in any genre--fiction, poetry, or dramatic (play or screenplay).
Try to use different kinds of documents: transcripts of interviews, "emails", letters, legal documents,receipts, tickets, book excerpts, dictionary definitions of specific words, other "found" items, etc.
Think about using visuals: baby pictures, drawings, other photos, cartoons, etc.
Think about using newspaper headlines to provide dates, times, and settings.
Be creative and imaginative--fill your "story" with "bits and pieces."
Monday, February 9, 2009
More on In the Lake of the Woods critical essay
PLAUSIBILITY OF DENIAL:
Tim O'Brien, My Lai, and America
by H. Bruce Franklin
[Originally in The Progressive, December 1994] This awareness generates for O'Brien a tortured dialectic of concealment and exposure, which in turn spins the dazzlingly intricate webs of imagination and memory that constitute his fiction. In these webs, imagined acts of escape are often the desired alternative to the remembered acts of slaughter. One needs to know all this to understand the deepest meanings of O'Brien's latest novel, In the Lake of the Woods.
The main action takes place in late September, 1986, near the mouth of the Rainy River, on the Minnesota edge of the Lake of the Woods, whose labyrinthine shoreline of 25,000 miles extends deep into the Canadian wilderness. Vietnam veteran and would-be U.S. Senator John Wade has just suffered a humiliating defeat in the primary because it was revealed that he had taken part in the My Lai massacre and then altered his service record to conceal his participation. He and his wife Kathy, from whom he had also hidden his dreadful secret, have fled to a remote cabin, where they are futilely attempting to resurrect their relation and their lives, built, as they now both know, on layers of concealment, illusion, and lies. On the seventh night, Kathy vanishes along with the only boat at the cabin. More than a month later, John borrows another small boat, ostensibly to search for her, heads into the remote recesses of the lake, and also disappears.
On one level, the book is a mystery story. What happened to Kathy Wade? Did she wander off and die accidentally? Did she deliberately flee, either alone or with a lover? Is she still lost in the wilderness? Did she and John conspire to disappear together and begin a new life? Or did John murder her? All of these are presented as possibilities, but the novel is not as indeterminate or unresolved as it may seem. As in Going After Cacciato, some events did happen while others take place only in the imagination. True, the purported writer of the book, who speaks to us in footnotes and authorial comments--and who hints that his own life has important resemblances to that of both John Wade and Tim O'Brien--ends by suggesting that we can choose to believe whichever scenario we wish. However, all the possible scenarios, with one exception, are presented only in the eight chapters entitled "Hypothesis," where they are liberally sprinkled with "maybe" and "perhaps." Each of these hypothetical scenarios is merely an act of imagination. Each involves some form of escape from the hideous event that did happen, outlined in the chapters "What He Remembered," "How the Night Passed," and "What He Did Next," titles indicating the actuality that can be recalled.
Although John cannot remember whether or not he murdered his wife, enough details surface from the depths of his memory--not his imagination--to allow readers to reconstruct the gruesome scene. Unless, O'Brien suggests, readers would rather indulge in elaborate fantasies of denial.
On the night of Kathy's disappearance, John got out of bed in a murderous rage, poured a kettle full of boiling water on each houseplant in the cabin, and then poured another kettle full of boiling water on Kathy's face. Fragments of her screaming death agony, buried deep under layers of denial, later keep erupting from Wade's memory. He next concealed the crime by carefully weighting both her body and the boat and burying each at the bottom of the lake. He thus reenacts once again the murder he committed at My Lai and his attempts to expunge all records--and memory--of this act that was too awful to be possible.
My Lai, in Wade's mind, has become just a nightmare of "impossible events": "This could not have happened. Therefore it did not." The most grisly detail of Kathy's death, repeated several times in the novel, evokes the same response:
Puffs of steam rose from the sockets of her eyes.
Impossible, of course.
But My Lai did happen, as we know. Or do we? That is the most troubling question posed by the novel, which includes page after page of the actual testimony and other evidence of the massacre that was not an aberration but a sample of how the United States conducted its genocidal war against the people of Vietnam. At My Lai, American soldiers did not just slaughter some five hundred unarmed people. They sodomized young girls, raped women in front of their children, bayoneted children in front of their mothers, and used babies for target practice. Does John Wade's frenzied murder of the houseplants seem "impossible"? Then, suggests O'Brien, so must Lieutenant Calley's actions: "He reloaded and shot the grass and a palm tree and then the earth again. `Grease the place,' he said. `Kill it.'" This was, after all, the U.S. strategy for much of Vietnam, especially My Lai's province of Quang Ngai, as O'Brien reminds us in his The New York Times Magazine essay.
In Vietnam, John Wade was so adept at making things disappear that he acquired the nickname Sorcerer. He had perfected his magic expertise as a young boy, who needed it to build means of denial about his own identity as the son of an alcoholic father who killed himself. Performing his magic tricks before a mirror, John had learned how to construct mirrors inside his own mind to deflect reality and to hide behind. Wade is a magician, a master of illusion. And so is O'Brien, who is such a wizard of narrative that he can make the most implausible fantasies seem believable. But this does not mean that In the Lake of the Woods (any more than Going After Cacciato) should be read as magic realism, in which the products of imagination have the same ontological status as actual material events. Magic, O'Brien recognizes, is an art of illusion.
Of course imaginary events are also real. The event that did happen, Wade's murder of his wife, just like the fantasies of escape offered as alternatives to it, is a fiction that takes place only in a novel. But each scenario, whether remembered or merely imagined, has a significant reality, the reality of fiction.
Not everything, however, is fiction. There is another kind of reality--represented by My Lai in 1968 and O'Brien's own experience around My Lai the following year. And in this experience, as O'Brien tells us over and over again, he, like his fictive John Wade and like the American nation itself, committed acts so horrible that they continually evoke denial.
The one great failure of In the Lake of the Woods is its quite unconvincing presentation of Wade's senate campaign amid the scene of the late 1980s. O'Brien makes almost no attempt to show how the revelations about Wade's acts in Vietnam devastate his candidacy and thus destroy his life. One might even wonder whether such would be the effect. In fact, his cynical campaign manager at one point regrets not having had the opportunity to use Wade's participation in My Lai: "`Could've made it work for us. Whole different spiel. . . . A village is a terrible thing to waste.'"
Certainly there are now men sitting in the U.S. Senate who killed many more Vietnamese civilians than John Wade did, and falsifying one's records is hardly an insurmountable barrier to a senate seat, as suggested by Oliver North's near win in Virginia.
Nevertheless, In the Lake of the Woods does connect to the most essential truths about Vietnam's role in the politics and culture of the nation in the 1980s and 1990s. Just over two years after Kathy and John Wade vanish in fiction, the denial that O'Brien is dramatizing was given its most succinct statement by President George Bush in his inaugural address: "The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory."
Tim O'Brien, My Lai, and America
by H. Bruce Franklin
[Originally in The Progressive, December 1994] This awareness generates for O'Brien a tortured dialectic of concealment and exposure, which in turn spins the dazzlingly intricate webs of imagination and memory that constitute his fiction. In these webs, imagined acts of escape are often the desired alternative to the remembered acts of slaughter. One needs to know all this to understand the deepest meanings of O'Brien's latest novel, In the Lake of the Woods.
The main action takes place in late September, 1986, near the mouth of the Rainy River, on the Minnesota edge of the Lake of the Woods, whose labyrinthine shoreline of 25,000 miles extends deep into the Canadian wilderness. Vietnam veteran and would-be U.S. Senator John Wade has just suffered a humiliating defeat in the primary because it was revealed that he had taken part in the My Lai massacre and then altered his service record to conceal his participation. He and his wife Kathy, from whom he had also hidden his dreadful secret, have fled to a remote cabin, where they are futilely attempting to resurrect their relation and their lives, built, as they now both know, on layers of concealment, illusion, and lies. On the seventh night, Kathy vanishes along with the only boat at the cabin. More than a month later, John borrows another small boat, ostensibly to search for her, heads into the remote recesses of the lake, and also disappears.
On one level, the book is a mystery story. What happened to Kathy Wade? Did she wander off and die accidentally? Did she deliberately flee, either alone or with a lover? Is she still lost in the wilderness? Did she and John conspire to disappear together and begin a new life? Or did John murder her? All of these are presented as possibilities, but the novel is not as indeterminate or unresolved as it may seem. As in Going After Cacciato, some events did happen while others take place only in the imagination. True, the purported writer of the book, who speaks to us in footnotes and authorial comments--and who hints that his own life has important resemblances to that of both John Wade and Tim O'Brien--ends by suggesting that we can choose to believe whichever scenario we wish. However, all the possible scenarios, with one exception, are presented only in the eight chapters entitled "Hypothesis," where they are liberally sprinkled with "maybe" and "perhaps." Each of these hypothetical scenarios is merely an act of imagination. Each involves some form of escape from the hideous event that did happen, outlined in the chapters "What He Remembered," "How the Night Passed," and "What He Did Next," titles indicating the actuality that can be recalled.
Although John cannot remember whether or not he murdered his wife, enough details surface from the depths of his memory--not his imagination--to allow readers to reconstruct the gruesome scene. Unless, O'Brien suggests, readers would rather indulge in elaborate fantasies of denial.
On the night of Kathy's disappearance, John got out of bed in a murderous rage, poured a kettle full of boiling water on each houseplant in the cabin, and then poured another kettle full of boiling water on Kathy's face. Fragments of her screaming death agony, buried deep under layers of denial, later keep erupting from Wade's memory. He next concealed the crime by carefully weighting both her body and the boat and burying each at the bottom of the lake. He thus reenacts once again the murder he committed at My Lai and his attempts to expunge all records--and memory--of this act that was too awful to be possible.
My Lai, in Wade's mind, has become just a nightmare of "impossible events": "This could not have happened. Therefore it did not." The most grisly detail of Kathy's death, repeated several times in the novel, evokes the same response:
Puffs of steam rose from the sockets of her eyes.
Impossible, of course.
But My Lai did happen, as we know. Or do we? That is the most troubling question posed by the novel, which includes page after page of the actual testimony and other evidence of the massacre that was not an aberration but a sample of how the United States conducted its genocidal war against the people of Vietnam. At My Lai, American soldiers did not just slaughter some five hundred unarmed people. They sodomized young girls, raped women in front of their children, bayoneted children in front of their mothers, and used babies for target practice. Does John Wade's frenzied murder of the houseplants seem "impossible"? Then, suggests O'Brien, so must Lieutenant Calley's actions: "He reloaded and shot the grass and a palm tree and then the earth again. `Grease the place,' he said. `Kill it.'" This was, after all, the U.S. strategy for much of Vietnam, especially My Lai's province of Quang Ngai, as O'Brien reminds us in his The New York Times Magazine essay.
In Vietnam, John Wade was so adept at making things disappear that he acquired the nickname Sorcerer. He had perfected his magic expertise as a young boy, who needed it to build means of denial about his own identity as the son of an alcoholic father who killed himself. Performing his magic tricks before a mirror, John had learned how to construct mirrors inside his own mind to deflect reality and to hide behind. Wade is a magician, a master of illusion. And so is O'Brien, who is such a wizard of narrative that he can make the most implausible fantasies seem believable. But this does not mean that In the Lake of the Woods (any more than Going After Cacciato) should be read as magic realism, in which the products of imagination have the same ontological status as actual material events. Magic, O'Brien recognizes, is an art of illusion.
Of course imaginary events are also real. The event that did happen, Wade's murder of his wife, just like the fantasies of escape offered as alternatives to it, is a fiction that takes place only in a novel. But each scenario, whether remembered or merely imagined, has a significant reality, the reality of fiction.
Not everything, however, is fiction. There is another kind of reality--represented by My Lai in 1968 and O'Brien's own experience around My Lai the following year. And in this experience, as O'Brien tells us over and over again, he, like his fictive John Wade and like the American nation itself, committed acts so horrible that they continually evoke denial.
The one great failure of In the Lake of the Woods is its quite unconvincing presentation of Wade's senate campaign amid the scene of the late 1980s. O'Brien makes almost no attempt to show how the revelations about Wade's acts in Vietnam devastate his candidacy and thus destroy his life. One might even wonder whether such would be the effect. In fact, his cynical campaign manager at one point regrets not having had the opportunity to use Wade's participation in My Lai: "`Could've made it work for us. Whole different spiel. . . . A village is a terrible thing to waste.'"
Certainly there are now men sitting in the U.S. Senate who killed many more Vietnamese civilians than John Wade did, and falsifying one's records is hardly an insurmountable barrier to a senate seat, as suggested by Oliver North's near win in Virginia.
Nevertheless, In the Lake of the Woods does connect to the most essential truths about Vietnam's role in the politics and culture of the nation in the 1980s and 1990s. Just over two years after Kathy and John Wade vanish in fiction, the denial that O'Brien is dramatizing was given its most succinct statement by President George Bush in his inaugural address: "The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory."
Mon. 2/9/09 My Lai
Research the My Lai massacre: (go to links)
1. What was it?
2. Who were the main "characters" involved in it?
pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/trenches/my_lai.html
In "The Lake of the Woods," O'Brien does not employ chronological narrative;
Why? How does the structure support the themes of the text?
Post your answers for credit here.
Workshop:
2nd period
Assignment for Wednesday: Read to page 146 Ch. 17
On its surface, In the Lake of the Woods suggests the classic locked-room mystery turned on its head. Sometime between the night and late morning of September 19, 1986, a woman vanishes near Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota, "where the water was everything, vast and very cold, and where there were secret channels and portages and bays and tangled forests and islands without names." While the traditional locked-room mystery presents investigators - and readers - with the seemingly impossible, the disappearance of Kathy Wade poses too many possibilities, a wilderness of hypotheses. There are too many places she could have gone, too many things that could have happened to her.
As Tim O'Brien gradually reveals in this haunting, morally vertiginous novel, there were too many reasons for Kathy to vanish. All of them are connected to her husband, John, an attractive if morally confused 40-year-old politician whose career has lately ended in a defeat so humiliating that it has driven the Wades to an isolated cabin in the Minnesota woods.
A long-buried secret has resurfaced to bury John alive; perhaps it has buried Kathy along with him. John's disgrace originated in "a place with secret trapdoors and tunnels and underground chambers populated by various spooks and goblins, a place where magic was everyone's hobby...a place where the air itself was both reality and illusion, where anything might instantly become anything else."
Its geographic epicenter is the village of Thuan Yen in Vietnam. It was there, eighteen years before, that John Wade was transformed from a boy with a gift for performing magic tricks (his platoon-mates knew him as "Sorcerer") into an entranced killer.
What happened at Thuan Yen was not fiction. The events that took place there were widely reported and documented in official U.S. Army hearings and are known today as the My Lai massacre. At the heart ofIn the Lake of the Woods is its brutal re-creation of this wound in John Wade's history and his country's. Because Wade was one of many killers, Tim O'Brien intersperses his narrative with the testimony of real figures like Lieutenant Rusty Calley and U.S. Army Investigator William V. Wilson--not to mention Presidents Richard Nixon and Woodrow Wilson. Just as John's and Kathy's associates--his mother and campaign manager, her sister and co-worker--try to decipher the events at Lake of the Woods, those historical witnesses posit partial explanations for America's mysteriously aligned obsessions with politics and violence.
Clausewitz observed that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Tim O'Brien suggests that politics, at least in its American variety, is a continuation of needs more basic and more terrible even than the need for power. The craving for love, he reminds us, can drive the human soul toward acts of desperation, deceit, and even violence.
For O'Brien, as for the unnamed investigator who is his narrator, all explanations are hypotheses rather than proofs. Beyond the mystery of Kathy's disappearance and John's role in it, and even beyond the mystery of My Lai, are other riddles: What predisposed John to become a murderer? What sort of magic enabled him to make his past vanish for twenty years, and what disappeared along with it? How could he love Kathy with such self-annihilating ferocity while keeping an essential part of himself hidden from her? Was Kathy a victim of John's deceptions or a participant in them? Is John an autonomous moral agent or another victim-of a bad childhood or a bad war or the murderous pastel sunlight of Vietnam? With In the Lake of the Woods, O'Brien has reinvented the novel as a magician's trick box equipped with an infinite number of false bottoms. Kathy's disappearance remains a "magnificent giving over to pure and absolute Mystery." John believes that "to know is to be disappointed. To understand is to be betrayed." This brave and troubling novel neither betrays nor disappoints, but brings the reader into a direct confrontation with the insoluble enigmas of history, character, and evil.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Almost from this novel's first page we know that Kathy Wade will vanish, and it is not long before we discover that her disappearance will remain unsolved. What, then, gives In the Lake of the Woodsits undeniable suspense? What does it offer in place of the revelations of traditional mysteries?
2. Instead of a linear narrative, in which action unfolds chronologically, Tim O'Brien has constructed a narrative that simultaneously moves forward and backward in time: forward from John and Kathy's arrival at the cabin; backward into John's childhood, and beyond that to Little Big Horn and the War of Independence. It also moves laterally, into the "virtual" time that is represented by different hypotheses about Kathy's fate. What does the author accomplish with this narrative scheme? In what ways are his different narrative strands connected?
3. What does O'Brien accomplish in the sections titled "Evidence"? What information do these passages impart that is absent from the straightforward narrative? How do they alter or deepen our understanding of John as a magician, a politician, a husband, and a soldier who committed atrocities in wartime? What connections do they forge between his private tragedy and the pathologies of our public life and history? Does the testimony of (or about) such "real" people as Richard Nixon, William Calley, or George Custer lend greater verisimilitude to John's story or remind us that it--and John himself--are artifices?
4. Who is the narrator who addresses us in the "Evidence" sections? Are we meant to see him as a surrogate for the author, who also served in Vietnam and revisited Thuan Yen many years after the massacre? (See Tim O'Brien, "The Vietnam in Me," in The New York Times Magazine, October 3, 1994, pp. 48-57.) In what ways does O'Brien's use of this narrator further explode the conventions of the traditional novel?
5. One of the few things that we know for certain about John is that he loves Kathy. But what does John mean by love? How do John's feelings for his wife resemble his hopeless yearning for his father, who had a similar habit of vanishing? In what circumstances does John say "I love you"? What vision of love is suggested by his metaphor of two snakes devouring each other? Why might Kathy have fallen in love with John?
6. Although it is easy to see Kathy as the victim of John's deceptions, the author at times suggests that she may be more conscious (and therefore more complex) than she first appears. We learn, for example, that Kathy has always known about John's spying and even referred to him as "Inspector Clouseau," an ironic counterpoint to John's vision of himself as "Sorcerer." At a critical moment she rebuffs her husband's attempt at a confession. And in the final section of "Evidence," we get hints that Kathy may have planned her own disappearance. Are we meant to see Kathy as John's victim or as his accomplice, like a beautiful assistant vanishing inside a magician's cabinet?
7. Why might John have entered politics? Is he merely a cynical operator with no interest in anything but winning? Or, as Tony Carbo suggests, might John be trying to atone for his actions in Vietnam? Why might the author have chosen to leave John's political convictions a blank?
8. John's response to the horrors of Thuan Yen is to deny them: "This could not have happened. Therefore it did not." Where else in the novel does he perform this trick? How does John's way of coping with the massacre compare to the psychic strategies adopted by William Calley or Paul Meadlo? Do any of O'Brien's characters seems capable of acknowledging terrible truths directly? How does In the Lake of the Woods treat the matter of individual responsibility for evil?
9. Each of this novel's hypotheses about events at the cabin begins with speculation but gradually comes to resemble certainty. The narrator suggests that John and Kathy Wade are ultimately unknowable, as well; that any attempt to "penetrate...those leaden walls that encase the human spirit" can never be anything but provisional. Seen in this light, In the Lake of the Woods comes to resemble a magician's trick, in which every assertion turns out to be only another speculation. Given the information we receive, does any hypothesis about what happened at Lake of the Woods seem more plausible than the others? With what certainties, if any, does this novel leave us?
top of the page
Critical Praise
" A risky, ambitious, perceptive, engaging, and troubling novel...a major attempt to come to grips with the causes and consequences of the late 20th century's unquenchable appetite for violence, both domestic and foreign. "
—Chicago Tribune
"A relentless work full of white heat and dark possibility. "
—The Boston Globe
"At bottom, this is a tale about the moral effects of suppressing a true story, about the abuse of history, about what happens to you when you pretend there is no history. "
—The New York Times Book Review
"A memorable mystery story charged with haunting ambiguity...If any American novelist is creating more beautifully written, emotionally harrowing tales than Tim O'Brien, I don't know who it could be. "
—Entertainment Weekly
"An unrelenting exploration of the darkest recesses of the human heart and psyche. O'Brien's approach is bold, ambitious, and intriguing. "
—Houston Chronicle
"This remarkable book is about the slipperiness of truth, the weight of forgetting, and the way two people disappear into themselves, and, ultimately, into the Lake of the Woods. "
—The New Yorker
"O'Brien's clean, incantatory prose always hovers on the edge of dream.... No one writes better about the fear and homesickness of a boy adrift amid what he cannot understand, be it combat or love. "
—Time
Monday, February 2, 2009
Tuesday, February 3 Writers Circle
Writers Circle
Read, share "Sedaris style" creative nonfiction or second person short stories.
Prepare Gannon entries--must be mailed before Friday. 1-3 poems.
Next book: In the Lake of the Woods (Tim O'Brien)
Read, share "Sedaris style" creative nonfiction or second person short stories.
Prepare Gannon entries--must be mailed before Friday. 1-3 poems.
Next book: In the Lake of the Woods (Tim O'Brien)
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