PEN/O. Henry 2012: Dagoberto Gilb and Wendell Berry: Conscious and Unconscious Intention

Dagoberto Gilb, “Uncle Rock”

In his comments on his story “Uncle Rock,” Dagoberto Gilb says that his fiction always comes from something observed or experienced that then “gets loaded onto and chipped away at and artistically distorted” by his “various obsessions.” He says that “Uncle Rock” is based on an experience when he went to a baseball game at Dodger Stadium with his mother and a date and got autographs from a busload of NY Yankees, as well as a note soliciting his mother something like the one Erick gets in the story.  He says he made Erick verging on mute, for “Mexican Americans are both not heard and trained to feel.”  With that he said, “the story’s on.” 

Although I enjoy reading the author comments in the PEN/O. Henry collection, I am not sure an author is always the best person to explain the intention or the meaning of his or her story. An author may indeed recall the origin of the story, but when he or she writes the story, other forces take over. The conventions of storytelling, for example, force the story into well-travelled paths, in which certain actions take on symbolic or universal significance whether the author intends this or not. When you ask an author the origin of the story or what really happened that instigated the story, the author may be able to tell you, but this may have little to do with the story itself.  When you ask an author what a story means, he or she may be able to tell you that he or she had certain intentions, but these also may have little to do with the story.

            If Gilb says that he makes the boy’s silence a metaphor for the plight of the Mexican American who is not allowed to have a voice, who am I to disagree with him?  Well, as a reader, I think I have a right to let the story speak for itself.  It may be that a reader is a better interpreter of a story than the author, for authorial skills and critical skills are quite different—as any MFA student will be happy to tell you.

Gilb emphasizes several times in “Uncle Rock” that the reason Erick does not often speak has nothing to do with the fact his English is not good, but nothing in the story suggests that the boy’s silence is due to a cultural muteness imposed on Mexican Americans.  The details of the story suggest that the boy, who is eleven, does not speak when the men are around, not because his race silences him, but because the mother’s secret power over the men silences him.  He probably knows what the men want from his mother, but because she is his mother, he cannot articulate it—cannot allow himself to imagine it. If the boy’s reluctance to speak were a metaphor for cultural silencing, as Gilb suggests, the silence would only occur when the boy is around white society. The boy knows he cannot talk around the men; he just does not know why.

  The boy believes in magic, hoping that God’s magic will bring good to him and his mother without the help of wealthy men. When he and his mother and Uncle Roque go to the ball game, the green of the field is a “magic light.”  When he catches the ball, it is like magic, with no bobble, and he feels every set of eyes and every voice in the stadium. It is like magic when someone in the bus tells him that he will get everyone to sign the ball.  But Erick’s magic is undercut by the mysterious magic of his mother when he reads the note, in which a ballplayer asks his mother to come to the hotel for a drink.

The boy’s decision to keep the ball and to throw away the note is his own heroic act of rescuing his mother and protecting his “uncle Rock,” whom he has transformed into a member of the family, whom he knows respects his mother, and with whom he knows his mother does not keep company only for what money can bring them. 

Gilb may indeed believe that he made the boy silent because the white culture has made the Mexican American silent, but nothing in the story itself suggests this, while everything in the story suggests that the boy’s silence is because of the taboo nature of what the boy feels about his mother’s secret sexuality and the lust of the men who pursue her.

Wendell Berry, “Nothing Living Lives Alone.”

            There are stories, however, in which we can accept the stated intentions of the author, that is, when the story itself is so explicit about the ideas it embodies that it seems more like an essay than a story. Wendell Berry wisely admits that “Nothing Living Lives Alone” imposes “some strain on the term story,” for it is part of a longer work, he says, in which he tries to “deal directly and explicitly” with what he sees as the “paramount change” in his time and place from the “creaturely” to the “mechanical.” The story announces what it intends to illustrate in the first sentence: “Andy Catlett was a child of two worlds”—which Berry describes as the “town-world” and the “home place.”

            Although there is some narrative in this prose piece, it is primarily an essay in which Berry is very explicit about the values of the creaturely life of the farm and an idyllic past.  I like the piece, but being an old Kentucky boy myself, I also recall and treasure the values that Berry waxes eloquently about here.  I also like the piece because Berry’s prose is, like the farm work he values, carefully crafted, artistically controlled, and thus beautiful in its purity. 

There is, of course, a bucolic romanticism about this world in which farmers are praised as artists of perfection--doing what they do precisely with pride and skill.  The story affirms the familiar theme of Kentucky writers that the soil has been ruined by modern technology and the need for fuel—“the loss of topsoil, the toxicity of air and water, the destruction by mining of whole mountains, the destruction of land and water ecosystems.”

            If you read this piece as a romanticized recollection and a paean to a idealized world, then you can enjoy it for the prose and the peace it evokes, even though you may know that behind the beautiful perfection of the tobacco fields lies the horrible truth of the deaths that tobacco has cause and that behind the freedom the boy feels lies the drudgery of farm life.  But you cannot question the “meaning” of this piece, for Berry is very explicit about what he means here, as well he should in an essay. The success of an essay depends on how well the author achieves his or her intention; the success of a story depends more on narrative exceeding mere intention or didactic purpose.

            The story does end with a narrative coda, beginning “One warm spring Saturday afternoon” when the boy goes fishing and sees a young grey squirrel.  “The thought of catching and having something so beautiful, so small, so cunningly made, possessed him entirely. He wanted it as much as he had ever wanted anything in his life.”  What follows is a little chase for the creaturely in which the squirrel evades Andy’s grasp just as he reaches it.  The image of Andy in the trees reaching out for a squirrel that leaps away from him limb to limb is a relatively simply metaphor:  “Andy and the squirrel must have been at about the same stage of their respective lives: undoubting, ignorant, fearless, curious, happy in the secret attitudes of the treetops and the little branches, neither at all intimated by the blank blue sky above the highest branches, the outer boundary of both their lives.” The story ends with Andy’s return home to find that his grandmother has done the work he was supposed to do; his evasion of his responsibilities to try to capture ineffable beauty results in a sense of joy and guilt at once.

            As is typical of this kind of story of the young man at home in the natural world, Andy will not forget this afternoon for the rest of his life:  “What would stay with him would not be his frustration, his failure to catch the squirrel, but the beauty of it and his aerial life while he tried to catch it among the small supple branches that sprang with his weight as if almost but not quite he might have leapt from one to another like the squirrel, almost but not quite flying.”   It is only later that he wonders how, if he had caught the squirrel, he could have got down out of the tree with only one hand and knows he would have had to turn the creature loose.  As Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, and all the Romantics, well knew, you might be able momentarily to catch the creaturely, but you can never take it back to reality with you.

The Passion of the Personal: Dagoberto Gilb’s “please, thank you”

As I continue to work on a sort of “how-to” book about strategies for reading the short story, I have, of course, been thinking about my 40 years experience teaching the form at the university level. In those four decades, I taught introductory general education short story classes for students in various majors who mainly took the course because they had to have a humanities class to earn a degree. Thinking that poetry was too hard and novels too long, they often chose the short story; after all, they knew what a story was and “short” sounded pretty damned good. I also taught upper division American Short Story classes for English majors to provide some knowledge of the history of the development of the form. Finally, I taught graduate level courses in short story theory, which I developed as special studies elective courses (since no graduate program thought short stories were important enough for advanced study).

My pedagogical goals in these three levels differed somewhat, but my primary passion in all three levels was to fully engage students in the human experience and knowledge captured and created by the short story as a literary form. I was always convinced that the short story captured experience and created knowledge differently than the novel did. Although I felt it necessary to focus more on theoretical issues and literary criticism in the upper division and graduate level courses, I did not believe in “dumbing down” to the undergraduates. I felt I could not teach nonmajors how to read stories at all unless I made them aware of the tactics professional critics used to read short narrative.

So I ask myself: Is there a difference between teaching folks how to read short stories for occasional enjoyment and teaching folks how to read short stories critically? I have always been suspicious of the schism in the university between the high-flown language of theory taught on the graduate level and the “appreciation” language used on the lower division level. It seems to me that if so-called “theory” is of any value, it should be of value to our understanding of literature on all levels, not just on the level of professors who often seem to speak only to a small, select group of their peers.

I always thought that the most important role I could play in the literature classroom—regardless of whether the class was made up of graduate students in literature or freshman students in every field from business to engineering—was that of the passionate human being irresistibly engaged in the complexity of how a short story explores what it means to be human. However, since literature is not life, but rather a language-structured examination of life, I always felt sure that to understand the complexity of what is human in a story one should understand how an author uses language to create what is human in a story.

I was thinking about this relationship between my personal involvement in the human complexity of a story and my critical knowledge of how language works in short stories to explore a universal theme recently when I was reading Dagoberto Gilb’s new collection of stories, Before the End, After the Beginning. I admit up front that I have never been an admirer of Gilb’s stories; I have never been able to identify with his persona: what might be described--to use the appellation in the new story “The Last Time I Saw Junior”--as “one scary Mexican” or at least, one “swaggering” Mexican,” as reviewer Carolyn Kellogg described Gilb at a writing program conference in 2008

Gilb’s first collection of stories, The Magic of Blood (1994) focused on young Mexican immigrants who are, as one reviewer described them, “one paycheck away from disaster.” Most reviewers emphasized that Gilb was himself a construction worker, making the most of the news value of a laboring man writing stories. Jean Thompson reviewed his second collection Woodcuts of Women (2001) for The New York Times, and Carolyn See reviewed it for The Washington Post—Thompson calling it occasionally overwritten and uneven and See taking multiple swipes at how the stories oversimplify the role of women as being “vessels of sin, put on Earth to drive men to perdition.”

I guess what has always put me off Gilb’s stories is their emphasis on what constitutes “manliness” and the difficulty of maintaining one’s manliness when one is dirt poor. It is even more difficult to assert a traditional image of manliness when one has been partially paralyzed by a stroke, which Gilb suffered in 2009. Now, Gilb admits, as the persona of the opening story in Before the End, After the Beginning, “please, thank you,” says, “I am not wanting to scream and fight as much…punish the keyboard the way I used to.” Still, Gilb seems to continue to define his persona by qualities of physical manliness, wryly telling an interviewer recently, “Now I’m not convinced that an 8-year-old couldn’t take me out.”

This notion of manliness as being able to “take someone out” or “stand one’s ground,” as some Florida lawmakers have infamously defined it recently, has always seemed to me bullying--acting tough, especially as if such behavior were somehow a justifiable result of being poor. I grew up in a series of shacks in Eastern Kentucky, son of a truck-driver and a farmer’s daughter with an 8^th grade education. I could smoke and curse with the best of them, but I was just a soft kid who liked to read rather than play football, as my father wanted. Guys that pushed and punched me on the playground were, according to the values of that time and place, being “manly,” and if I walked away, I was being a “sissy.”

Now that Dagoberto Gilb has been sadly stricken by a stroke, I am more than a little conflicted to find that I like his new stories in Before the End, After the Beginning more than I did his earlier tough-guy stories in Magic Blood and Woodcuts for Women. Does this mean I am glad to see the swaggering machismo male brought low? I don’t think so. I think it means that I find the new stories more reflective of the universal vulnerability of being a human being rather than the socially imposed posturing of being a macho male.

If I were teaching the first story in the collection, “please, thank you,” which seems to be a rather straightforward account of a man who has had a stroke and struggles to communicate, I would begin by talking to my students about my own personal knowledge of that deadening paralysis. I would tell them about my childhood involvement with my grandfather--a tough hardworking man of 85, who on the day he had a stroke got up at 5 in the morning as usual and spent half a day hoeing corn down on his riverbank fields. Paralyzed on his left side and confined to bed for several years, he was dependent on my mother and me for his every need. I sat with him day after day, reading stories and drinking Pepsi, slept by him in a rollaway bed, held the bedpan under his groin so he could pee, fed him poached eggs and wiped the yoke from his chin. And damn, damn, damn, unmanned by his helplessness, he hated it. Every day was a struggle, while lying flat on his back, to try to maintain some sense of dignity--to recover the man that he once was.

Last June, I received an early morning call from the wife of my next-door neighbor, who said simply, “Joe had a stroke last night.” Joe has lived next door to me for over twenty years. He is Polish, spent his childhood in a camp during World War II, immigrated to Chicago with his family after the war, joined the US Navy, studied engineering and worked as an engineer until slide rules gave way to computers, which he refused to accept. He is a strong, but extremely gentle man. He tells coarse Pollack jokes, and puts out peanuts for the squirrels and seed for the birds in his backyard. He is fiercely unsentimental, yet an incurable softie when it comes to helping others. He and I have worked together on numerous remodeling projects over the years, and when I had heart surgery, he walked our dog every day until I was back on my feet. Now he is in what we used to call a “nursing home,” occupied mainly by slack-jawed, empty-eyed old men and women. At 74, his left arm and leg useless, he spends most of his time in bed and has to have his diaper changed periodically. When I visited him yesterday, he whispered to me, “When you going to spring me from this place?”

If I were teaching Dagoberto Gilb’s story “please, thank you,” I would first try to get my students to identify with the man in the story who has been forced to face his own vulnerability and mortality and thus to redefine what he had earlier thought “manliness” to be. Only after they are able to identify with the experience of the persona/narrator of the story will they be qualified to make a judgment on the means by which Gilb creates that experience. Sympathy and identification precedes analysis and judgment; that was always my guiding principle in the classroom. Before you call Bartleby either shiftless or mad, you must understand what he sees when he stares at that wall outside the Wall Street office window where he works.

Whereas other writers have tried to create a similitude of a stroke victim’s experience by describing his struggles, Gilb creates a story from within as the persona works to try to recover from the effects of the stroke. For example, the story’s lack of capital letters, quotation marks, apostrophes, etc. is not a stylistic trick, but rather a reflection of Gilb’s difficulty using the shift key while typing with one hand.

“I used to be strong,” the narrator Mr. Sanchez says in the story. “just the other day! just the other day, a couple of weeks ago, now, now these people come into my room, my room is more my bed, a modern bed that moves up and down with a control.”

Gilb’s story helps me understand the meaning of a “stroke,” as if, indeed, by a sudden mysterious assault one is stricken. I try to participate in that sense of helplessness—as Sanchez says, “I can’t believe I cant pull my stupid leg up.” My friend Joe fell out of his wheelchair the other day trying to get himself back in bed alone. He could not understand why he could not do it. He thinks that if they will let him use the parallel bars, he can learn to walk, although he simply cannot lift his left leg. The theme of Gilb’s story is the mystery of paralysis, for it means helplessness--the loss of what once was or what might have been.

In the opening story of James Joyce’s collection Dubliners, the young narrator looks up at the window where his stroke-stricken priest/teacher lies paralyzed: “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word Simony in the Catechism.” And indeed, paralysis is the theme that Joyce says dominates Dubliners. He once famously wrote, “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me to be the centre of paralysis

In a bit of literary coincidence that I cannot resist, I recently got an email from the James Joyce Centre in Dublin announcing that the Dublin City Library’s “One City One Book” campaign this year was to encourage everyone to “read, discuss, and celebrate” Joyce’s Dubliners during the month of April, 2012.

To play my own small part in this celebration, I intend to write four blog posts during April, exploring the notion of paralysis in the stories in Dubliners, examining to the best of my ability what makes them the powerfully influential short stories they are, and discussing my personal engagement with the stories as a group of American students and I walked the streets of Dublin a few years ago, trying to understand how Joyce transformed ordinary people and place into extraordinary prose.