Thank you for making the effort to finish reading Fugitive Pieces. Those of you who have not finished the book have the weekend to complete it. We will have a short essay test on Tuesday and your short stories will be due then.
The next book we will read is a poetry cycle by Rita Dove that won her the Pulitzer Prize.
The cycle consists of 31 poems about her grandparents. It's called thomas and Beulah. Rita dove's daughter attended the university of rochester and she has spoken here several times. She's an interesting and challenging poet. She was the first African-American woman to be Poet Laureate of the United States.
Please visit her website:
http://people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b/
Friday, October 2, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
More info Equivel
Like Water for Chocolate's full title is: Like Water for Chocolate: A novel in monthly installments with recipes, romances and home remedies.
The phrase "like water for chocolate" comes from the Spanish "como agua para chocolate". This phrase is a common expression in some Spanish speaking countries and was the inspiration for Laura Esquivel's novel title (the name has a double-meaning). In some Latin American countries, such as Mexico, hot chocolate is made not with milk, but with water instead. Water is boiled and chunks of milk chocolate are dropped in to melt thus creating the hot chocolate. The saying "like water for chocolate," alludes to this fact and also to the common use of the expression as a metaphor for describing a state of passion or -sometimes- sexual arousal. In some parts of Latin America, the saying is also equivalent to being "boiling mad" in anger.[8]
This is the story of Tita (Lumi Cavazos), a young woman growing up during the Mexican Revolution. Tita lives with her mother and two sisters, Rosaura and Gertrudis, on a
large ranch; her father died shortly after her birth. As the youngest daughter of the family, Tita, by long-standing tradition, can never marry; it is her responsibility to care for her mother into old age. Tita is raised in the kitchen, learning to cook and take care of household responsibilities from early childhood, and she is aware of the family tradition. She falls in love anyway, with a young man named Pedro (Marco Leonardi). When Pedro asks for Tita's hand in marriage and is refused, he agrees to marry Rosaura instead -- so he can be near Tita, the true love of his life. Tita pours heartbreak and anger into her cooking, and her feelings are magically transferred to the rest of her family.
In literature, magic realism often combines the external factors of human existence with the internal ones. It is a fusion between scientific physical reality and psychological human reality. It incorporates aspects of human existence such as thoughts, emotions, dreams, cultural mythologies and imagination
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/likewater/
http://www.salon.com/oct96/interview961104.html
An interview with the author...
SparkNotes
Like Water for Chocolate is a popular novel, published in 1989 by first-time Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel. The novelLaura Esquivel follows the story of a young girl named Tita who longs her entire life for her lover, Pedro, but can never have him because of her domineering mother's traditional belief that the youngest daughter must not marry but take care of her mother until the day she dies. Tita is only able to express her passions and feelings through her cooking, which causes the people who taste it to experience what she feels.The novel was originally published in Spanish as Como agua para chocolate and has been translated into thirty languages; there are over three million copies in print worldwide.
The novel makes heavy use of magical realism. The novel was made into a film in 1993.[4] It earned all 11 Ariel awards of the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures, including the Ariel Award for Best Picture, and became the highest grossing foreign film ever released in the United States at the time.
Laura Esquivel Biography
Like Water for Chocolate (Criticism): Information and Much More ...
As a site for the crucial link between food and life, .... In Like Water for Chocolate, magic realism becomes an appropriate vehicle for the expression of ...
www.answers.com/topic/like-water-for-chocolate-novel-7 - 47k
The phrase "like water for chocolate" comes from the Spanish "como agua para chocolate". This phrase is a common expression in some Spanish speaking countries and was the inspiration for Laura Esquivel's novel title (the name has a double-meaning). In some Latin American countries, such as Mexico, hot chocolate is made not with milk, but with water instead. Water is boiled and chunks of milk chocolate are dropped in to melt thus creating the hot chocolate. The saying "like water for chocolate," alludes to this fact and also to the common use of the expression as a metaphor for describing a state of passion or -sometimes- sexual arousal. In some parts of Latin America, the saying is also equivalent to being "boiling mad" in anger.[8]
This is the story of Tita (Lumi Cavazos), a young woman growing up during the Mexican Revolution. Tita lives with her mother and two sisters, Rosaura and Gertrudis, on a
large ranch; her father died shortly after her birth. As the youngest daughter of the family, Tita, by long-standing tradition, can never marry; it is her responsibility to care for her mother into old age. Tita is raised in the kitchen, learning to cook and take care of household responsibilities from early childhood, and she is aware of the family tradition. She falls in love anyway, with a young man named Pedro (Marco Leonardi). When Pedro asks for Tita's hand in marriage and is refused, he agrees to marry Rosaura instead -- so he can be near Tita, the true love of his life. Tita pours heartbreak and anger into her cooking, and her feelings are magically transferred to the rest of her family.
In literature, magic realism often combines the external factors of human existence with the internal ones. It is a fusion between scientific physical reality and psychological human reality. It incorporates aspects of human existence such as thoughts, emotions, dreams, cultural mythologies and imagination
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/likewater/
http://www.salon.com/oct96/interview961104.html
An interview with the author...
SparkNotes
Like Water for Chocolate is a popular novel, published in 1989 by first-time Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel. The novelLaura Esquivel follows the story of a young girl named Tita who longs her entire life for her lover, Pedro, but can never have him because of her domineering mother's traditional belief that the youngest daughter must not marry but take care of her mother until the day she dies. Tita is only able to express her passions and feelings through her cooking, which causes the people who taste it to experience what she feels.The novel was originally published in Spanish as Como agua para chocolate and has been translated into thirty languages; there are over three million copies in print worldwide.
The novel makes heavy use of magical realism. The novel was made into a film in 1993.[4] It earned all 11 Ariel awards of the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures, including the Ariel Award for Best Picture, and became the highest grossing foreign film ever released in the United States at the time.
Laura Esquivel Biography
Like Water for Chocolate (Criticism): Information and Much More ...
As a site for the crucial link between food and life, .... In Like Water for Chocolate, magic realism becomes an appropriate vehicle for the expression of ...
www.answers.com/topic/like-water-for-chocolate-novel-7 - 47k
Laura Esquivel Website
Laura Esquivel Website
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.writingresource.info/esquivel_laura.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.writingresource.info/likewater.html&usg=__Ks7Ft8how0eID3LYKei8L-7G1JA=&h=171&w=130&sz=9&hl=en&start=34&tbnid=WH7tR6DIGncOhM:&tbnh=100&tbnw=76&prev=/images%3Fq%3DLaura%2BEsquivel%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26sa%3DN%26start%3D20&safe=on
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.writingresource.info/esquivel_laura.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.writingresource.info/likewater.html&usg=__Ks7Ft8how0eID3LYKei8L-7G1JA=&h=171&w=130&sz=9&hl=en&start=34&tbnid=WH7tR6DIGncOhM:&tbnh=100&tbnw=76&prev=/images%3Fq%3DLaura%2BEsquivel%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26sa%3DN%26start%3D20&safe=on
Laura Esquivel bio
Esquivel was born in 1951 in Mexico, the third of four children of Julio Caesar Esquivel, a telegraph operator, and his wife, Josephina. In an interview with Molly O'Neill in the New York Times, Esquivel explained, "I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room. The smell of nuts and chilies and garlic got all mixed up with the smells from the chapel, my grandmother's carnations, the liniments and healing herbs." These experiences in her family's kitchen provided the inspiration for Esquivel's first novel.
Esquivel grew up in Mexico City and attended the Escuela Normal de Maestros, the national teachers' college. After teaching school for eight years, Esquivel began writing and directing for children's theater. In the early 1980s she wrote the screenplay for the Mexican film Chido One, directed by her husband, Alfonso Arau, and released in 1985. Arau also directed her screenplay for Like Water for Chocolate, released in Mexico in 1989 and in the United States in 1993. First published in 1989. the novel version of Like Water for Chocolate became a best seller in Mexico and the United States and has been translated into numerous languages. The film version has become one of the most popular foreign films of the past few decades. In her second, less successful novel. Ley del amor, published in English in 1996 as The Law of Love, Esquivel again creates a magical world where love becomes the dominant force of life. The novel includes illustrations and music on compact disc to accompany it. Esquivel continues to write, working on screenplays and fiction from her home in Mexico City.
Esquivel grew up in Mexico City and attended the Escuela Normal de Maestros, the national teachers' college. After teaching school for eight years, Esquivel began writing and directing for children's theater. In the early 1980s she wrote the screenplay for the Mexican film Chido One, directed by her husband, Alfonso Arau, and released in 1985. Arau also directed her screenplay for Like Water for Chocolate, released in Mexico in 1989 and in the United States in 1993. First published in 1989. the novel version of Like Water for Chocolate became a best seller in Mexico and the United States and has been translated into numerous languages. The film version has become one of the most popular foreign films of the past few decades. In her second, less successful novel. Ley del amor, published in English in 1996 as The Law of Love, Esquivel again creates a magical world where love becomes the dominant force of life. The novel includes illustrations and music on compact disc to accompany it. Esquivel continues to write, working on screenplays and fiction from her home in Mexico City.
Like Water for Chocolate Laura Esquivel
First published in 1989, Laura Esquivel's first novel, Como agua para chocolate: novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores, y remedios caseros, became a best seller in the author's native Mexico. It has been translated into numerous languages, and the English version, Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies, enjoyed similar success in the United States. The film version, scripted by the author and directed by her husband, Alfonso Arau, has become one of the most popular foreign films of the past few decades. In a New York Times interview, Laura Esquivel told Manalisa Calta that her ideas for the novel came out of her own experiences in the kitchen: "When I cook certain dishes, I smell my grandmother's kitchen, my grandmother's smells. I thought: what a wonderful way to tell a story." The story Esquivel tells is that of Tita De la Garza, a young Mexican woman whose family's kitchen becomes her world after her mother forbids her to marry the man she loves. Esquivel chronicles Tita's life from her teenage to middle-age years, as she submits to and eventually rebels against her mother's domination. Readers have praised the novel's imaginative mix of recipes, home remedies, and love story set in Mexico in the early part of the century. Employing the technique of magic realism, Esquivel has created a bittersweet tale of love and loss and a compelling exploration of a woman's search for identity and fulfillment.
First published in 1989, Laura Esquivel's first novel, Como agua para chocolate: novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores, y remedios caseros, became a best seller in the author's native Mexico. It has been translated into numerous languages, and the English version, Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies, enjoyed similar success in the United States. The film version, scripted by the author and directed by her husband, Alfonso Arau, has become one of the most popular foreign films of the past few decades. In a New York Times interview, Laura Esquivel told Manalisa Calta that her ideas for the novel came out of her own experiences in the kitchen: "When I cook certain dishes, I smell my grandmother's kitchen, my grandmother's smells. I thought: what a wonderful way to tell a story." The story Esquivel tells is that of Tita De la Garza, a young Mexican woman whose family's kitchen becomes her world after her mother forbids her to marry the man she loves. Esquivel chronicles Tita's life from her teenage to middle-age years, as she submits to and eventually rebels against her mother's domination. Readers have praised the novel's imaginative mix of recipes, home remedies, and love story set in Mexico in the early part of the century. Employing the technique of magic realism, Esquivel has created a bittersweet tale of love and loss and a compelling exploration of a woman's search for identity and fulfillment.
First published in 1989, Laura Esquivel's first novel, Como agua para chocolate: novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores, y remedios caseros, became a best seller in the author's native Mexico. It has been translated into numerous languages, and the English version, Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies, enjoyed similar success in the United States. The film version, scripted by the author and directed by her husband, Alfonso Arau, has become one of the most popular foreign films of the past few decades. In a New York Times interview, Laura Esquivel told Manalisa Calta that her ideas for the novel came out of her own experiences in the kitchen: "When I cook certain dishes, I smell my grandmother's kitchen, my grandmother's smells. I thought: what a wonderful way to tell a story." The story Esquivel tells is that of Tita De la Garza, a young Mexican woman whose family's kitchen becomes her world after her mother forbids her to marry the man she loves. Esquivel chronicles Tita's life from her teenage to middle-age years, as she submits to and eventually rebels against her mother's domination. Readers have praised the novel's imaginative mix of recipes, home remedies, and love story set in Mexico in the early part of the century. Employing the technique of magic realism, Esquivel has created a bittersweet tale of love and loss and a compelling exploration of a woman's search for identity and fulfillment.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Week 4/13-17 The Hours
Monday, 4/13---View more of of film The Hours. Discuss how the film adapts and changes elements of the novel--i.e. Clarissa and Louis scene
Wednesday, 4/15 ---Continue work on The Hours short story assignment.
Continue reading The hours. Finish the book over the break.
Check out the videos on this web page about Michael Cunningham.
Check out our writing workshop page: contempwriters.forumotion.net
Wednesday, 4/15 ---Continue work on The Hours short story assignment.
Continue reading The hours. Finish the book over the break.
Check out the videos on this web page about Michael Cunningham.
Check out our writing workshop page: contempwriters.forumotion.net
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
More discussion questions
Discussion Questions
Questions from the Publisher's Reading Guide:
1. Clarissa Vaughan is described several times as an "ordinary" woman. Do you accept this valuation? If so, what does it imply about the ordinary, about being ordinary? What makes someone, by contrast, extraordinary?
2. Flowers and floral imagery play a significant part in The Hours. When and where are flowers described? What significance do they have, and with what events and moods are they associated? How do flowers affect Virginia? Clarissa?
3. Cunningham plays with the notions of sanity and insanity, recognizing that there might be only a very fine line between the two states. What does the novel imply about the nature of insanity? Might it in fact be a heightened sanity, or at least a heightened sense of awareness? Would you classify Richard as insane? How does his mental state compare with that of Virginia? Of Laura as a young wife? Of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway? Does insanity (or the received idea of insanity) appear to be connected with creative gifts?
4. Virginia and Laura are both, in a sense, prisoners of their eras and societies, and both long for freedom from this imprisonment. Clarissa Vaughan, on the other hand, apparently enjoys every liberty: freedom to be a lesbian, to come and go and live as she likes. Yet she has ended up, in spite of her unusual way of life, as a fairly conventional wife and mother. What might this fact indicate about the nature of society and the restrictions it imposes? Does the author imply that character, to a certain extent, is destiny?
5. Each of the novel’s three principal women, even the relatively prosaic and down-to-earth Clarissa, occasionally feels a sense of detachment, of playing a role. Laura feels as if she is "about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed" [p. 43]. Clarissa is filled with "a sense of dislocation. This is not her kitchen at all. This is the kitchen of an acquaintance, pretty enough but not her taste, full of foreign smells" [p. 91]. Is this feeling in fact a universal one? Is role-playing an essential part of living in the world, and of behaving "sanely"? Which of the characters refuses to act a role, and what price does he/she pay for this refusal?
6. Who kisses whom in The Hours, and what is the significance of each kiss?
7. The Hours is very much concerned with creativity and the nature of the creative act, and each of its protagonists is absorbed in a particular act of creation. For Virginia and Richard, the object is their writing; for Clarissa Vaughan (and Clarissa Dalloway), it is a party; for Laura Brown, it is another party, or, more generally, "This kitchen, this birthday cake, this conversation. This revived world" [p. 106]. What does the novel tell us about the creative process? How does each character revise and improve his or her creation during the course of the story?
8. How might Richard’s childhood experiences have made him the adult he eventually becomes? In what ways has he been wounded, disturbed?
9. Each of the three principal women is acutely conscious of her inner self or soul, slightly separate from the "self" seen by the world. Clarissa’s "determined, abiding fascination is what she thinks of as her soul" [p. 12]; Virginia "can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul . . . It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance" [pp. 34–35]. Which characters keep these inner selves ruthlessly separate from their outer ones? Why?
10. Each of the novel’s characters sees himself or herself, most of the time, as a failure. Virginia Woolf, as she walks to her death, reflects that "She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric" [p. 4]. Richard, disgustedly, admits to Clarissa, "I thought I was a genius. I actually used that word, privately, to myself" [p. 65]. Are the novel’s characters unusual, or are such feelings of failure an essential and inevitable part of the human condition?
11. Toward the end of Clarissa’s day, she realizes that kissing Richard beside the pond in Wellfleet was the high point, the culmination, of her life. Richard, apparently, feels the same. Are we meant to think, though, that their lives would have been better, more heightened, had they stayed together? Or does Cunningham imply that as we age we inevitably feel regret for some lost chance, and that what we in fact regret is youth itself?
12. The Hours could on one level be said to be a novel about middle age, the final relinquishment of youth and the youthful self. What does middle age mean to these characters? In what essential ways do these middle-aged people—Clarissa, Richard, Louis, Virginia —differ from their youthful selves? Which of them resists the change most strenuously?
13. What does the possibility of death represent to the various characters? Which of them loves the idea of death, as others love life? What makes some of the characters decide to die, others to live? What personality traits separate the "survivors" from the suicides?
14. If you have read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, would you describe The Hours as a modern version of it? A commentary upon it? A dialogue with it? Which characters in The Hours correspond with those of Woolf’s novel? In what ways are they similar, and at what point do the similarities cease and the characters become freestanding individuals in their own right?
15. For the most part, the characters in The Hours have either a different gender or a different sexual orientation from their prototypes in Mrs. Dalloway. How much has all this gender-bending affected or changed the situations, the relationships, and the people?
16. Why has Cunningham chosen The Hours for the title of his novel (aside from the fact that it was Woolf’s working title for Mrs. Dalloway)? In what ways is the title appropriate, descriptive? What do hours mean to Richard? To Laura? To Clarissa?
Questions from the Publisher's Reading Guide:
1. Clarissa Vaughan is described several times as an "ordinary" woman. Do you accept this valuation? If so, what does it imply about the ordinary, about being ordinary? What makes someone, by contrast, extraordinary?
2. Flowers and floral imagery play a significant part in The Hours. When and where are flowers described? What significance do they have, and with what events and moods are they associated? How do flowers affect Virginia? Clarissa?
3. Cunningham plays with the notions of sanity and insanity, recognizing that there might be only a very fine line between the two states. What does the novel imply about the nature of insanity? Might it in fact be a heightened sanity, or at least a heightened sense of awareness? Would you classify Richard as insane? How does his mental state compare with that of Virginia? Of Laura as a young wife? Of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway? Does insanity (or the received idea of insanity) appear to be connected with creative gifts?
4. Virginia and Laura are both, in a sense, prisoners of their eras and societies, and both long for freedom from this imprisonment. Clarissa Vaughan, on the other hand, apparently enjoys every liberty: freedom to be a lesbian, to come and go and live as she likes. Yet she has ended up, in spite of her unusual way of life, as a fairly conventional wife and mother. What might this fact indicate about the nature of society and the restrictions it imposes? Does the author imply that character, to a certain extent, is destiny?
5. Each of the novel’s three principal women, even the relatively prosaic and down-to-earth Clarissa, occasionally feels a sense of detachment, of playing a role. Laura feels as if she is "about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed" [p. 43]. Clarissa is filled with "a sense of dislocation. This is not her kitchen at all. This is the kitchen of an acquaintance, pretty enough but not her taste, full of foreign smells" [p. 91]. Is this feeling in fact a universal one? Is role-playing an essential part of living in the world, and of behaving "sanely"? Which of the characters refuses to act a role, and what price does he/she pay for this refusal?
6. Who kisses whom in The Hours, and what is the significance of each kiss?
7. The Hours is very much concerned with creativity and the nature of the creative act, and each of its protagonists is absorbed in a particular act of creation. For Virginia and Richard, the object is their writing; for Clarissa Vaughan (and Clarissa Dalloway), it is a party; for Laura Brown, it is another party, or, more generally, "This kitchen, this birthday cake, this conversation. This revived world" [p. 106]. What does the novel tell us about the creative process? How does each character revise and improve his or her creation during the course of the story?
8. How might Richard’s childhood experiences have made him the adult he eventually becomes? In what ways has he been wounded, disturbed?
9. Each of the three principal women is acutely conscious of her inner self or soul, slightly separate from the "self" seen by the world. Clarissa’s "determined, abiding fascination is what she thinks of as her soul" [p. 12]; Virginia "can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul . . . It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance" [pp. 34–35]. Which characters keep these inner selves ruthlessly separate from their outer ones? Why?
10. Each of the novel’s characters sees himself or herself, most of the time, as a failure. Virginia Woolf, as she walks to her death, reflects that "She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric" [p. 4]. Richard, disgustedly, admits to Clarissa, "I thought I was a genius. I actually used that word, privately, to myself" [p. 65]. Are the novel’s characters unusual, or are such feelings of failure an essential and inevitable part of the human condition?
11. Toward the end of Clarissa’s day, she realizes that kissing Richard beside the pond in Wellfleet was the high point, the culmination, of her life. Richard, apparently, feels the same. Are we meant to think, though, that their lives would have been better, more heightened, had they stayed together? Or does Cunningham imply that as we age we inevitably feel regret for some lost chance, and that what we in fact regret is youth itself?
12. The Hours could on one level be said to be a novel about middle age, the final relinquishment of youth and the youthful self. What does middle age mean to these characters? In what essential ways do these middle-aged people—Clarissa, Richard, Louis, Virginia —differ from their youthful selves? Which of them resists the change most strenuously?
13. What does the possibility of death represent to the various characters? Which of them loves the idea of death, as others love life? What makes some of the characters decide to die, others to live? What personality traits separate the "survivors" from the suicides?
14. If you have read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, would you describe The Hours as a modern version of it? A commentary upon it? A dialogue with it? Which characters in The Hours correspond with those of Woolf’s novel? In what ways are they similar, and at what point do the similarities cease and the characters become freestanding individuals in their own right?
15. For the most part, the characters in The Hours have either a different gender or a different sexual orientation from their prototypes in Mrs. Dalloway. How much has all this gender-bending affected or changed the situations, the relationships, and the people?
16. Why has Cunningham chosen The Hours for the title of his novel (aside from the fact that it was Woolf’s working title for Mrs. Dalloway)? In what ways is the title appropriate, descriptive? What do hours mean to Richard? To Laura? To Clarissa?
The Hours Themes/Quiz Questions
Begin a discussion by posting a response to one of the questions below. This will count for a quiz/participation grade.
1. Cunningham’s novel is full of juicy themes: love, fame, art, and insanity are just a few. Start a commentary on one of them.
2. Discuss some of the leitmotifs Cunningham uses in the novel. Flowers, mirrors,
reading, cooking, etc.
3. Comment on this discussion question:
What does the novel have to say about the relationship of art to madness? Can the brand of “insanity” that the mentally unbalanced characters experience instead be called a heightened state of awareness, a strengthened ability to see something that is invisible to others?
1. Cunningham’s novel is full of juicy themes: love, fame, art, and insanity are just a few. Start a commentary on one of them.
2. Discuss some of the leitmotifs Cunningham uses in the novel. Flowers, mirrors,
reading, cooking, etc.
3. Comment on this discussion question:
What does the novel have to say about the relationship of art to madness? Can the brand of “insanity” that the mentally unbalanced characters experience instead be called a heightened state of awareness, a strengthened ability to see something that is invisible to others?
Monday, April 6, 2009
The Hours Project
Please read to page 99 in The Hours for Wednesday.
The Hours Project
Similar to Michael Cunningham's The Hours, think about plotting a story with a cast of characters that are interwoven through at least two different time periods and/or histories.
1. Be sure to try to use parallel incidents, images/symbols, dialogue, etc.
The Hours Project
Similar to Michael Cunningham's The Hours, think about plotting a story with a cast of characters that are interwoven through at least two different time periods and/or histories.
1. Be sure to try to use parallel incidents, images/symbols, dialogue, etc.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Homework/ interview with Michael Cunningham
Read to PAGE 49 for Monday!!!!!
http://www.contactmusic.com/new/home.nsf/interviewee/cunninghamhare
http://www.contactmusic.com/new/home.nsf/interviewee/cunninghamhare
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
wikipedia entry:
14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Mrs Dalloway continues to be one of Woolf's best-known novels.
Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time, and in and out of the characters' minds, to construct a complete image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.
Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[1]
Plot summary
Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth at Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband -- she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic Peter Walsh. Peter himself complicates her thoughts by paying a visit, having returned from India that day.
Septimus Smith, a veteran of World War I, spends his day in the park with his wife Lucrezia. He suffers from constant and indecipherable hallucinations. He commits suicide by jumping out of a window.
Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party, and gradually comes to admire the act -- which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his own happiness.
Style
In Mrs Dalloway all of the action, excepting flashbacks, takes place on a single day in June. It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling; every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, alternating her narration with omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, direct interior monologue, and soliloquy.[2] The narration follows at least twenty characters in this way, but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.
Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text that is often hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Woolf herself derided Joyce's novel (the Hogarth Press, run by her and her husband Leonard, turned down the chance to publish the novel in England).
Themes
Feminism
As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies both sexual and economic repression. She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a politician, but she is still able to express herself in the parties she throws[3].
Sally Seton, whom Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent woman[3]: she smoked cigars, once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag, and made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. When Clarissa meets her in the present day, she turns out to be a perfect housewife, having married a rich man and had five sons.
Lesbianism
Clarissa Dalloway is strongly attracted to Sally at Bourton -- 20 years later, she still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about women "as men feel" (from "Mrs Dalloway", Penguin Popular Classics 1996, page 36 OR Harcourt, Inc. (2005), Page 35), but she does not recognize these feelings as signs of homosexuality.
She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it - a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (Woolf, 36)
Mental illness
Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the treatment of mental illness and depression[3]. Woolf lashes out at the medical discourse through Septimus' decline and ultimate suicide: his doctors make snap judgments about his condition, talk to him mainly through his wife, and dismiss his urgent confessions before he can make them.
There are similarities in Septimus' condition to Woolf's own struggles with bipolar disorder (they both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek, and Woolf once attempted to throw herself out of a window as Septimus finally does)[3]. Woolf eventually committed suicide by drowning.
Existential issues
When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half an hour, he notes that his relationship to the girl was "made up, as one makes up the better part of life." By focusing on character's thoughts and perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance of private thoughts, rather than concrete events, in a person's life. Most of the plot points in Mrs. Dalloway are realizations that the characters make in their own heads[3].
Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasized as a woman who appreciates life. Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people together and create happy moments. Her charm, according to Peter Walsh who loves her, is a sense of joie de vivre, always summarized by the sentence, "There she was." She interprets Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life, and her mood remains light even when she figures out her marriage is a lie.
Film adaptation
A film version of Mrs Dalloway was made in 1997 by Dutch feminist film director Marleen Gorris. It was adapted from Woolf's novel by British actress Eileen Atkins and starred Vanessa Redgrave in the title role. The cast included Natascha McElhone, Lena Headey, Rupert Graves, Michael Kitchen, Alan Cox, Sarah Badel and Katie Carr.
Mrs Dalloway was a key element of the plot of both the Michael Cunningham novel The Hours and its subsequent screen adaptation. Cunningham's title was derived from Woolf's original title for Mrs Dalloway.
14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Mrs Dalloway continues to be one of Woolf's best-known novels.
Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time, and in and out of the characters' minds, to construct a complete image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.
Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[1]
Plot summary
Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth at Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband -- she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic Peter Walsh. Peter himself complicates her thoughts by paying a visit, having returned from India that day.
Septimus Smith, a veteran of World War I, spends his day in the park with his wife Lucrezia. He suffers from constant and indecipherable hallucinations. He commits suicide by jumping out of a window.
Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party, and gradually comes to admire the act -- which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his own happiness.
Style
In Mrs Dalloway all of the action, excepting flashbacks, takes place on a single day in June. It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling; every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, alternating her narration with omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, direct interior monologue, and soliloquy.[2] The narration follows at least twenty characters in this way, but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.
Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text that is often hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Woolf herself derided Joyce's novel (the Hogarth Press, run by her and her husband Leonard, turned down the chance to publish the novel in England).
Themes
Feminism
As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies both sexual and economic repression. She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a politician, but she is still able to express herself in the parties she throws[3].
Sally Seton, whom Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent woman[3]: she smoked cigars, once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag, and made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. When Clarissa meets her in the present day, she turns out to be a perfect housewife, having married a rich man and had five sons.
Lesbianism
Clarissa Dalloway is strongly attracted to Sally at Bourton -- 20 years later, she still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about women "as men feel" (from "Mrs Dalloway", Penguin Popular Classics 1996, page 36 OR Harcourt, Inc. (2005), Page 35), but she does not recognize these feelings as signs of homosexuality.
She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it - a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (Woolf, 36)
Mental illness
Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the treatment of mental illness and depression[3]. Woolf lashes out at the medical discourse through Septimus' decline and ultimate suicide: his doctors make snap judgments about his condition, talk to him mainly through his wife, and dismiss his urgent confessions before he can make them.
There are similarities in Septimus' condition to Woolf's own struggles with bipolar disorder (they both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek, and Woolf once attempted to throw herself out of a window as Septimus finally does)[3]. Woolf eventually committed suicide by drowning.
Existential issues
When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half an hour, he notes that his relationship to the girl was "made up, as one makes up the better part of life." By focusing on character's thoughts and perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance of private thoughts, rather than concrete events, in a person's life. Most of the plot points in Mrs. Dalloway are realizations that the characters make in their own heads[3].
Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasized as a woman who appreciates life. Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people together and create happy moments. Her charm, according to Peter Walsh who loves her, is a sense of joie de vivre, always summarized by the sentence, "There she was." She interprets Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life, and her mood remains light even when she figures out her marriage is a lie.
Film adaptation
A film version of Mrs Dalloway was made in 1997 by Dutch feminist film director Marleen Gorris. It was adapted from Woolf's novel by British actress Eileen Atkins and starred Vanessa Redgrave in the title role. The cast included Natascha McElhone, Lena Headey, Rupert Graves, Michael Kitchen, Alan Cox, Sarah Badel and Katie Carr.
Mrs Dalloway was a key element of the plot of both the Michael Cunningham novel The Hours and its subsequent screen adaptation. Cunningham's title was derived from Woolf's original title for Mrs Dalloway.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Animal Dreams discussion questions
Answer 1 of these questions fully in a well-developed essayusing text references for
test credit.
Kingsolver on Animal Dreams
Animal Dreams was the first novel I wrote on purpose, so it's more calculated thematically than The Bean Trees. The question I beganwith was this: why do some people engage with the world and its problems, while others turn their backs on it? And why is it that these two sorts of people often occur even in the same family? I'm very curious about this because I'm a human rights activist myself. So I invented two sisters with apparently opposite personalities, and then I invested them with a family and began to work backwards to find the point in their shared history that would have pushed them into opposite directions.
1. Why are Hallie and Codi different? What happened that caused them to take such different life paths? How and why does Codi change? Why does she become more engaged with the world?
2. One theme of the novel is the relationship between humans and the natural world. What does the novel have to say about the difference between Native American and Anglo American culture in relation to nature? How do creation stories, such as the Pueblo creation legend and the Garden of Eden story, continue to influence culture and behavior?
3.How do you feel about Doc Homer? What kind of parent was he, and why? In what ways did his strange point of view serve as a vehicle for the novel's themes of memory, amnesia, and identity?
test credit.
Kingsolver on Animal Dreams
Animal Dreams was the first novel I wrote on purpose, so it's more calculated thematically than The Bean Trees. The question I beganwith was this: why do some people engage with the world and its problems, while others turn their backs on it? And why is it that these two sorts of people often occur even in the same family? I'm very curious about this because I'm a human rights activist myself. So I invented two sisters with apparently opposite personalities, and then I invested them with a family and began to work backwards to find the point in their shared history that would have pushed them into opposite directions.
1. Why are Hallie and Codi different? What happened that caused them to take such different life paths? How and why does Codi change? Why does she become more engaged with the world?
2. One theme of the novel is the relationship between humans and the natural world. What does the novel have to say about the difference between Native American and Anglo American culture in relation to nature? How do creation stories, such as the Pueblo creation legend and the Garden of Eden story, continue to influence culture and behavior?
3.How do you feel about Doc Homer? What kind of parent was he, and why? In what ways did his strange point of view serve as a vehicle for the novel's themes of memory, amnesia, and identity?
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Finish Animal Dreams
For Friday, Finish Animal Dreams, Read this essay, and post a response
Mar 25, 2009
Animal Dreams | The Search for Identity
In the following essay, the author discusses the search for identity in Kingsolver's novel.
The unifying theme in all the different strands of plot that make up Animal Dreams is Codi Noline's recovery of wholeness in her own psyche and in her relationship with her environment, both human and natural. This takes her on an exploration of the nature of memory and its problematic relationship to truth and self-identity, a theme in which her father, Doc Homer, is deeply involved also. Ultimately, Codi learns that the search for individual identity is by itself not enough to grant her the peace, security, and sense of belonging she craves; she must also understand the relationship between human culture and the natural world.
The framework within which Kingsolver traces this journey is in the form of a circle. The novel begins and ends on All Soul's Day, which takes place in the first week of November; it is the Roman Catholic day of commemoration of the dead. This is significant for Codi because in her life the dead cast a long shadow; the scars left by the early loss of her mother and her miscarriage at the age of fifteen prevent her from living fully in the present. Deceptions engineered by her father about their family origins have had a similarly deleterious effect on Codi's life. In this novel, there are skeletons from the past that need to be confronted and exorcised.
For Codi, however, the very act of remembering the past is fraught with ambiguity. Memory is a minefield. Looking back, the mind distorts, forgets, invents, plays tricks. Codi remembers things that according to others she could not have witnessed, and yet she does not remember other events that are recalled clearly by her sister and by other townsfolk. As she says, "Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin." Nonetheless, Codi is compelled to delve into the past to find out whether recalling and understanding it can relieve the acute aimlessness and rootlessness that afflict her. Otherwise, she fears she will never possess a solid sense of her own identity.
Indeed, as Codi describes herself during the course of the novel, it is almost as if she is with the dead herself. Like a specter, she lacks definition and substance. She comments that she cannot remember half of what happened to her before the age of fifteen. She knows little about her origins, other than that her family came from Illinois (and even that piece of information later proves to be only a half-truth). "I guess I'm nothing," she says to Loyd, "The Nothing Tribe." This is in contrast to the surety with which Loyd knows his own background. Similarly, Codi laments in a letter to Hallie, "My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction somebody points me in." The word mechanical is significant; Codi's life lacks conscious, organic connection to its roots in family and community, and to nature itself.
It is clear from the extreme language Codi uses to describe herself that she is in mental disarray; there is an emptiness at her core that leaves her perhaps only one traumatic event away from complete disintegration. Subconsciously, she knows and fears this. She has a recurring nightmare in which she suddenly goes blind, and she realizes midway through the novel that this dream is not about losing her vision but about losing "the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all."
This fear of nonexistence, of being nothing and existing nowhere, is what drives Codi to recover her memories of the past, hoping they will help her establish just who she is. With this in mind, she questions the women of the town who knew her when she was a child, and there are one or two moments of cathartic release when she is almost overwhelmed by memories as they come flooding back.
But to find the vital ingredient that will in part end her alienation from the society in which she was born and raised, Codi must penetrate the distortions that have been erected by her father, Doc Homer. As urgently as Codi needs to delve into the past, Doc Homer has over the years felt compelled to cover it up.
Doc Homer is a curious character. One of his hobbies is photography, but he does not record things simply as they are. He takes a photograph of one thing and then tinkers with it to make it look like something else—clouds are made to look like animals, for example, or a clump of five cacti comes to resemble a human hand. When Codi first visits him, he is working on an elaborate procedure to make a photograph of two old men sitting on a stone wall look like a stone wall with two extra rocks balanced on top. Later, it transpires that this is Doc Homer's way of preserving his memories. He takes a memory from the past and tries to revive it by concocting a "photograph" of something else that reminds him of it. For example, he photographs a shadow of a cactus because it reminds him of an extremely unusual aerial view of a river in a desert he saw many years ago in wartime. So he tries to construct out of the photograph an illusion that will resemble and call up in his mind that particular river.
Codi does not know what the point of this activity is although she acknowledges there is "a great deal of art" involved in the process. It is ironic that Doc Homer tries so hard in this unorthodox fashion to preserve certain images from the past, whilst so earnestly trying to obscure another, more pertinent fact: he is descended from the Nolinas family, which had such a bad reputation in the town. Perhaps, like all of us, Doc Homer wants to preserve the acceptable memories and screen out the unacceptable ones, but it is curious that both approaches involve a falsification. Doc Homer's photographs look like one thing but are in fact something else. It is clear that they are a metaphor for the idea that the personal histories that humans construct for themselves are more related to their own psychic needs than to anything that may have actually happened in their lives.
The novel implies that this may not of itself be a bad thing. In fact, a similar realization forms a vital part of Codi's final act of self-acceptance. She has always been puzzled by the fact that she remembers the moment when her mother, at the time of her death, was taken away by helicopter. The incident took place when Codi was only three, and others tell her that she was not there, so she could not possibly remember it. However, when Viola takes her to the field at the crest of the canyon where the incident happened, Codi remembers it vividly. Viola tells her it does not matter whether she was actually there or not: "No, if you remember something, then it's true ... In the long run, that's what you've got."
This understanding gives Codi comfort and release. Her memory is vindicated and doubt is removed. This is the final incident in the novel, and it takes place, like the first chapter, on All Soul's Day. The wheel has turned full circle. Instead of the fate of her mother being a source of pain to her, Codi now remembers the helicopter, with her mother in it, rising "like a soul," a phrase which suggests ascension to heaven, a religious notion that Codi, who tends to believe that death is final, has not for a moment entertained before.
This, however, is only part of the truth that Codi discovers during the course of the novel. She also learns that to be complete humans must not only understand their personal heritage, they must also align themselves and their communities with the laws, structures, and processes that operate in the natural world. The elusive secret of peace of mind lies in the mysterious congruence between the human and the natural worlds.
This point is made clear when Codi, accompanied by Loyd, examines the ancient dwellings at the Santa Rosalia Pueblo. She observes that although they are the products of human hands, they can barely be distinguished from nature itself:
The walls were shaped to fit the curved hole in the cliff, and the building blocks were cut from the same red rock that served as their foundation. I thought of what Loyd had told me about Pueblo architecture, whose object was to build a structure the earth could embrace. This looked more than embraced. It reminded me of cliff-swallow nests, or mud-dauber nests, or crystal gardens sprung from their own matrix: the perfect constructions of nature.
On an earlier visit to another Pueblo sacred place, Codi makes a similar observation as she looks at the stones that make up the building: "There was something familiar about the way they fit together ... They looked just like cells under a microscope." She remarks that the dwelling does not even look as if it was built: "It looks like something alive that just grew there." Yet within this completely natural-looking structure, an entire human culture flourished.
What these images symbolize is a harmony between human civilization and nature that is the secret of the fuller, more expansive life that often eludes the individual self, preoccupied as it is with trying to alleviate the pain lodged in the vault of memory. It is significant that the patterns discernible in these natural buildings share the same structures as the cellular structure of the human physiology, something that runs far deeper than the transitory content of the individual mind.
There is more than a hint of this search for a harmony with nature that would relieve the human experience of pain in Doc Homer's odd hobby. It is as if in his photographs he is trying to merge the human with the natural—the men, for example, become indistinguishable from the stone wall—or to point out that there are forms in nature that are orderly and have the power to give the soul rest. Memories that may be disturbing can be quieted by being absorbed into images of nature's serene permanence.
When Codi finally understands the threefold secret of living—her own family origins and memories; her place in the community of Grace; and the human as a reflection of the natural—she can at last discover who she really is. And she does not have far to look. She points out early in the novel that her full name, Cosima, means order in the cosmos. Most of her life she has regarded this as a joke since she knows how little it resembles the life she has been leading. But by the end, when she is in a committed relationship with Loyd, pregnant with his baby, productive in her community, and knowing how to live in the embrace of nature, she is truly Cosima, a part of the great harmonious whole, taking simple pleasure in being alive.
Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Animal Dreams, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles and reviews about contemporary American fiction.
©2000-2009 Enotes.com Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Mar 25, 2009
Animal Dreams | The Search for Identity
In the following essay, the author discusses the search for identity in Kingsolver's novel.
The unifying theme in all the different strands of plot that make up Animal Dreams is Codi Noline's recovery of wholeness in her own psyche and in her relationship with her environment, both human and natural. This takes her on an exploration of the nature of memory and its problematic relationship to truth and self-identity, a theme in which her father, Doc Homer, is deeply involved also. Ultimately, Codi learns that the search for individual identity is by itself not enough to grant her the peace, security, and sense of belonging she craves; she must also understand the relationship between human culture and the natural world.
The framework within which Kingsolver traces this journey is in the form of a circle. The novel begins and ends on All Soul's Day, which takes place in the first week of November; it is the Roman Catholic day of commemoration of the dead. This is significant for Codi because in her life the dead cast a long shadow; the scars left by the early loss of her mother and her miscarriage at the age of fifteen prevent her from living fully in the present. Deceptions engineered by her father about their family origins have had a similarly deleterious effect on Codi's life. In this novel, there are skeletons from the past that need to be confronted and exorcised.
For Codi, however, the very act of remembering the past is fraught with ambiguity. Memory is a minefield. Looking back, the mind distorts, forgets, invents, plays tricks. Codi remembers things that according to others she could not have witnessed, and yet she does not remember other events that are recalled clearly by her sister and by other townsfolk. As she says, "Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin." Nonetheless, Codi is compelled to delve into the past to find out whether recalling and understanding it can relieve the acute aimlessness and rootlessness that afflict her. Otherwise, she fears she will never possess a solid sense of her own identity.
Indeed, as Codi describes herself during the course of the novel, it is almost as if she is with the dead herself. Like a specter, she lacks definition and substance. She comments that she cannot remember half of what happened to her before the age of fifteen. She knows little about her origins, other than that her family came from Illinois (and even that piece of information later proves to be only a half-truth). "I guess I'm nothing," she says to Loyd, "The Nothing Tribe." This is in contrast to the surety with which Loyd knows his own background. Similarly, Codi laments in a letter to Hallie, "My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction somebody points me in." The word mechanical is significant; Codi's life lacks conscious, organic connection to its roots in family and community, and to nature itself.
It is clear from the extreme language Codi uses to describe herself that she is in mental disarray; there is an emptiness at her core that leaves her perhaps only one traumatic event away from complete disintegration. Subconsciously, she knows and fears this. She has a recurring nightmare in which she suddenly goes blind, and she realizes midway through the novel that this dream is not about losing her vision but about losing "the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all."
This fear of nonexistence, of being nothing and existing nowhere, is what drives Codi to recover her memories of the past, hoping they will help her establish just who she is. With this in mind, she questions the women of the town who knew her when she was a child, and there are one or two moments of cathartic release when she is almost overwhelmed by memories as they come flooding back.
But to find the vital ingredient that will in part end her alienation from the society in which she was born and raised, Codi must penetrate the distortions that have been erected by her father, Doc Homer. As urgently as Codi needs to delve into the past, Doc Homer has over the years felt compelled to cover it up.
Doc Homer is a curious character. One of his hobbies is photography, but he does not record things simply as they are. He takes a photograph of one thing and then tinkers with it to make it look like something else—clouds are made to look like animals, for example, or a clump of five cacti comes to resemble a human hand. When Codi first visits him, he is working on an elaborate procedure to make a photograph of two old men sitting on a stone wall look like a stone wall with two extra rocks balanced on top. Later, it transpires that this is Doc Homer's way of preserving his memories. He takes a memory from the past and tries to revive it by concocting a "photograph" of something else that reminds him of it. For example, he photographs a shadow of a cactus because it reminds him of an extremely unusual aerial view of a river in a desert he saw many years ago in wartime. So he tries to construct out of the photograph an illusion that will resemble and call up in his mind that particular river.
Codi does not know what the point of this activity is although she acknowledges there is "a great deal of art" involved in the process. It is ironic that Doc Homer tries so hard in this unorthodox fashion to preserve certain images from the past, whilst so earnestly trying to obscure another, more pertinent fact: he is descended from the Nolinas family, which had such a bad reputation in the town. Perhaps, like all of us, Doc Homer wants to preserve the acceptable memories and screen out the unacceptable ones, but it is curious that both approaches involve a falsification. Doc Homer's photographs look like one thing but are in fact something else. It is clear that they are a metaphor for the idea that the personal histories that humans construct for themselves are more related to their own psychic needs than to anything that may have actually happened in their lives.
The novel implies that this may not of itself be a bad thing. In fact, a similar realization forms a vital part of Codi's final act of self-acceptance. She has always been puzzled by the fact that she remembers the moment when her mother, at the time of her death, was taken away by helicopter. The incident took place when Codi was only three, and others tell her that she was not there, so she could not possibly remember it. However, when Viola takes her to the field at the crest of the canyon where the incident happened, Codi remembers it vividly. Viola tells her it does not matter whether she was actually there or not: "No, if you remember something, then it's true ... In the long run, that's what you've got."
This understanding gives Codi comfort and release. Her memory is vindicated and doubt is removed. This is the final incident in the novel, and it takes place, like the first chapter, on All Soul's Day. The wheel has turned full circle. Instead of the fate of her mother being a source of pain to her, Codi now remembers the helicopter, with her mother in it, rising "like a soul," a phrase which suggests ascension to heaven, a religious notion that Codi, who tends to believe that death is final, has not for a moment entertained before.
This, however, is only part of the truth that Codi discovers during the course of the novel. She also learns that to be complete humans must not only understand their personal heritage, they must also align themselves and their communities with the laws, structures, and processes that operate in the natural world. The elusive secret of peace of mind lies in the mysterious congruence between the human and the natural worlds.
This point is made clear when Codi, accompanied by Loyd, examines the ancient dwellings at the Santa Rosalia Pueblo. She observes that although they are the products of human hands, they can barely be distinguished from nature itself:
The walls were shaped to fit the curved hole in the cliff, and the building blocks were cut from the same red rock that served as their foundation. I thought of what Loyd had told me about Pueblo architecture, whose object was to build a structure the earth could embrace. This looked more than embraced. It reminded me of cliff-swallow nests, or mud-dauber nests, or crystal gardens sprung from their own matrix: the perfect constructions of nature.
On an earlier visit to another Pueblo sacred place, Codi makes a similar observation as she looks at the stones that make up the building: "There was something familiar about the way they fit together ... They looked just like cells under a microscope." She remarks that the dwelling does not even look as if it was built: "It looks like something alive that just grew there." Yet within this completely natural-looking structure, an entire human culture flourished.
What these images symbolize is a harmony between human civilization and nature that is the secret of the fuller, more expansive life that often eludes the individual self, preoccupied as it is with trying to alleviate the pain lodged in the vault of memory. It is significant that the patterns discernible in these natural buildings share the same structures as the cellular structure of the human physiology, something that runs far deeper than the transitory content of the individual mind.
There is more than a hint of this search for a harmony with nature that would relieve the human experience of pain in Doc Homer's odd hobby. It is as if in his photographs he is trying to merge the human with the natural—the men, for example, become indistinguishable from the stone wall—or to point out that there are forms in nature that are orderly and have the power to give the soul rest. Memories that may be disturbing can be quieted by being absorbed into images of nature's serene permanence.
When Codi finally understands the threefold secret of living—her own family origins and memories; her place in the community of Grace; and the human as a reflection of the natural—she can at last discover who she really is. And she does not have far to look. She points out early in the novel that her full name, Cosima, means order in the cosmos. Most of her life she has regarded this as a joke since she knows how little it resembles the life she has been leading. But by the end, when she is in a committed relationship with Loyd, pregnant with his baby, productive in her community, and knowing how to live in the embrace of nature, she is truly Cosima, a part of the great harmonious whole, taking simple pleasure in being alive.
Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Animal Dreams, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles and reviews about contemporary American fiction.
©2000-2009 Enotes.com Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Writers Workshop Website
Go to http://contempwriters.forumotion.net/index.htm
Please register as a user and feel free to post your stories and poems for comment.
Please register as a user and feel free to post your stories and poems for comment.
Week of 3/16-3/18 Finish Stories
Quiz---Animal Dreams,FINISH READING FOR MONDAY!!!!!!
Class periods will be used for finishing In the Lake of the Woods stories...
END OF MARKING PERIOD
Class periods will be used for finishing In the Lake of the Woods stories...
END OF MARKING PERIOD
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Week of 3/9-3/13 Animal Dreams, Stories
Continue to work on short stories.
Read to page 165 Animal Dreams for Monday.
Workshop Zoe Johnson's story.
Read to page 165 Animal Dreams for Monday.
Workshop Zoe Johnson's story.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Quotes from Animal Dreams
Quotations from Animal Dreams
by Barbara Kingsolver, 1990
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (SOUND FAMILIAR!!!!!)
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Codi: "So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can't think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives."
Loyd: "Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves? ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Codi: "Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?
Loyd: "No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams, referring to cliff dwellings
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Loyd: "It has to do with keeping things in balance. It's like the spirits have made a deal with us. We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."
Codi: "Like a note you'd send somebody after you'd stayed in their house?"
Loyd: "Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.'"
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
The truth needs so little rehearsal. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
by Barbara Kingsolver, 1990
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (SOUND FAMILIAR!!!!!)
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Codi: "So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can't think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives."
Loyd: "Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves? ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Codi: "Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?
Loyd: "No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams, referring to cliff dwellings
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Loyd: "It has to do with keeping things in balance. It's like the spirits have made a deal with us. We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."
Codi: "Like a note you'd send somebody after you'd stayed in their house?"
Loyd: "Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.'"
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
The truth needs so little rehearsal. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Critical Praise for Animal Dreams
When first published in 1990, Animal Dreams received a highly positive response from reviewers. Many admired the subtle, interlocking complexities of plot and theme, the vividly described southwestern setting, the satisfying development of character, and Kingsolver's compassion and humor. Lisa See, in Publishers Weekly, said that Kingsolver had "taken all of her previous themes—Native Americans, U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, environmental issues, parental relationships, women's taking charge of their own lives—tossed them into a literary pot and created a perfectly constructed novel."
Paul Gray, in Time, described the novel as "an entertaining distillation of eco-feminist materials." Although he regarded Codi as too "preachy" at times, he also commented that "There is enough fun in this novel, though, to balance its rather hectoring tone."
High praise came from Carolyn Cooke in the Nation:
Animal Dreams ... is dense and vivid, and makes ever tighter circles around the question of what it means to be alive, how to live rightly and sweetly even as we feel the confining boundaries of the skin, the closing walls of past and present, with memory like a badly wired lamp, spitting sparks and shorting out.
Cooke especially admired the portrait of Doc Homer, in which "Kingsolver brilliantly delineates the quality of a dissolving but wholly practical mind." Although Cooke suggested that the paradisal symbolism of Grace was "heavy-handed," she added that Kingsolver "redeems herself with her clear and original voice, her smart, plucky women, her eye for the nuances of personality and the depth of her social and moral concerns. Kingsolver can help you learn how to live."
For Jane Smiley, in the New York Times Book Review, Kingsolver "demonstrates a special gift for the vivid evocation of landscape and of her characters' state of mind." Smiley did comment, however, that Kingsolver was only partially successful in shaping all the issues she covered into a "larger vision." In choosing to concentrate on exploring Codi's despair, rather than the more dramatic plots, such as Hallie's adventures in Nicaragua and the campaign against the Black Mountain mining company,
Ms. Kingsolver . . . frequently undermines the suspense and the weight of her book. First-person narration can be tricky, and Ms. Kingsolver falls into its trap: Codi comes across too often as a whiner, observant of others but invariably more concerned with her own state of mind.
Rosellen Brown in the Massachusetts Review admired the narrative voice of Codi ("amused and amusing, capable of intricate and engaging detail") and declared that Animal Dreams was "a rich book, generous in its perceptions and judgments," although she faulted Kingsolver's "tendency to idealize her characters," noticeable especially in Loyd Peregrina and other Native American or Hispanic characters. No such caveats were offered by the reviewer for the Antioch Review, who wrote that "Kingsolver has a wonderful way of blending historical facts and myths (Indian lore) with present-day concerns and insights into how children react to the world around them."
Animal Dreams won a PEN fiction prize and the Edward Abbey Ecofiction Award in 1991. Since then, it has been the subject of two articles in scholarly journals that explore Kingsolver's sense of place and community and her environmental themes. And in 1999, Mary Jean DeMarr explored the themes and characters of the novel, and gave it a brief feminist reading, in her book, Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion.
In its range of concerns, from the need to engage in political issues and to protect the environment, to the healing value of family and community, Animal Dreams is typical of the themes that are important to Kingsolver as a writer. The novel continues to win new readers and critical respect, as Kingsolver's reputation as one of America's most significant contemporary writers continues to grow.
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Paul Gray, in Time, described the novel as "an entertaining distillation of eco-feminist materials." Although he regarded Codi as too "preachy" at times, he also commented that "There is enough fun in this novel, though, to balance its rather hectoring tone."
High praise came from Carolyn Cooke in the Nation:
Animal Dreams ... is dense and vivid, and makes ever tighter circles around the question of what it means to be alive, how to live rightly and sweetly even as we feel the confining boundaries of the skin, the closing walls of past and present, with memory like a badly wired lamp, spitting sparks and shorting out.
Cooke especially admired the portrait of Doc Homer, in which "Kingsolver brilliantly delineates the quality of a dissolving but wholly practical mind." Although Cooke suggested that the paradisal symbolism of Grace was "heavy-handed," she added that Kingsolver "redeems herself with her clear and original voice, her smart, plucky women, her eye for the nuances of personality and the depth of her social and moral concerns. Kingsolver can help you learn how to live."
For Jane Smiley, in the New York Times Book Review, Kingsolver "demonstrates a special gift for the vivid evocation of landscape and of her characters' state of mind." Smiley did comment, however, that Kingsolver was only partially successful in shaping all the issues she covered into a "larger vision." In choosing to concentrate on exploring Codi's despair, rather than the more dramatic plots, such as Hallie's adventures in Nicaragua and the campaign against the Black Mountain mining company,
Ms. Kingsolver . . . frequently undermines the suspense and the weight of her book. First-person narration can be tricky, and Ms. Kingsolver falls into its trap: Codi comes across too often as a whiner, observant of others but invariably more concerned with her own state of mind.
Rosellen Brown in the Massachusetts Review admired the narrative voice of Codi ("amused and amusing, capable of intricate and engaging detail") and declared that Animal Dreams was "a rich book, generous in its perceptions and judgments," although she faulted Kingsolver's "tendency to idealize her characters," noticeable especially in Loyd Peregrina and other Native American or Hispanic characters. No such caveats were offered by the reviewer for the Antioch Review, who wrote that "Kingsolver has a wonderful way of blending historical facts and myths (Indian lore) with present-day concerns and insights into how children react to the world around them."
Animal Dreams won a PEN fiction prize and the Edward Abbey Ecofiction Award in 1991. Since then, it has been the subject of two articles in scholarly journals that explore Kingsolver's sense of place and community and her environmental themes. And in 1999, Mary Jean DeMarr explored the themes and characters of the novel, and gave it a brief feminist reading, in her book, Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion.
In its range of concerns, from the need to engage in political issues and to protect the environment, to the healing value of family and community, Animal Dreams is typical of the themes that are important to Kingsolver as a writer. The novel continues to win new readers and critical respect, as Kingsolver's reputation as one of America's most significant contemporary writers continues to grow.
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Animal Dreams Week of 3/2
For Wednesday, please read to Ch. 5
continue to work on your Lake of the woods story.
Workshop Keonia's short story!!!!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Tuesday 2/24 Lake of the Woods quiz
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.
View powerpoints.
Work on essay (Question 8 or 9) or short story. Essay due on Thursday.
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)
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
End of marking period 1/20-1/23
1. Submit SOKOL entries (also Gannon, Lelia Tupper)
2. Work on personal narrative (2-3 pages) in the style of David Sedaris. Select a humorous incident from your own life. Inject observations about life, interesting digressions and thoughts. Do not be afraid to enhance the story/anecdote with "the craft of writing"--hyperbole (exaggeration), witty commentary, clever quips, sarcasm, etc.
3. Continue reading David Sedaris to get a sense of the style. We will discuss on Friday.
4. ESSAYS WILL BE DUE FRIDAY!!!!!
5. No midterm
2. Work on personal narrative (2-3 pages) in the style of David Sedaris. Select a humorous incident from your own life. Inject observations about life, interesting digressions and thoughts. Do not be afraid to enhance the story/anecdote with "the craft of writing"--hyperbole (exaggeration), witty commentary, clever quips, sarcasm, etc.
3. Continue reading David Sedaris to get a sense of the style. We will discuss on Friday.
4. ESSAYS WILL BE DUE FRIDAY!!!!!
5. No midterm
Monday, January 12, 2009
Monday, Jan. 12 Me Talk Pretty
1. Pick up books from library
2. Read through page 38 (first 3 essays for Thursday)
3. Your review of A Prayer for the Dying is DUE
4. Your 2nd person short story is DUE
5. Your Sokol entries (1/23), Gannon (2/6), and Lelia Tupper/Alfred university (1/31)
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Week of 1/6 and 1/8 Prayer for the Dying/2nd person story
1/6-- Read Elizabeth's short story and discuss.
Work on contest entries and finish 2nd person short story. Test on Prayer for the Dying.
1/8--Prayer for the Dying test/ take home essay.
Work on contest entries and finish 2nd person short story. Test on Prayer for the Dying.
1/8--Prayer for the Dying test/ take home essay.
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