Cynthia Ozick, "The Shawl"—Short Story Month 2016-Day 12

Cynthia Ozick is a short-story writer in the tradition of Bernard Malamud, for her typical story, an almost magical blend of lyricism and realism, creates a world that is both mythically distant and socially immediate at the same time.

The magic of the story "The Shawl" is largely due to its point of view which, although it remains with Rosa the mother and reflects her feelings, also exhibits the detached poetry of the nameless narrator.  For example, Rosa's dried-up breast, from which the infant Magda cannot suck milk, is described as a "dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole"; the infant's budding tooth is imaged as "an elfin tombstone of white marble."  The perspective of this grotesque poetry reflects the extremity of horror of the Holocaust itself.  When we see the knees of Stella (Rosa's teenage niece) as "tumors of sticks," we see the Holocaust as though no ordinary imagery is adequate to capture it, no ordinary voice capable of describing it.

To try to reflect the horrors of the Jewish persecution under Hitler in terms of sheer numbers is to create such a numbing effect that it becomes abstractly unreal.  Consequently, Ozick captures the horror by focusing on a single limited event, an event which is insignificant in the overall scope of things, but which captures the horror in its quintessential reality.  

It is not the mere death of the infant that is so horrifying in "The Shawl," for the story makes it clear that the child was sick and bound to die soon anyway, as indeed millions did die; nor is it the Jewishness of the infant that makes it so pathetic, for the story suggests that the child is the result of Rosa's rape by a Nazi soldier and indeed is like "one of them."  

However, as soon as the reader even thinks such things--that the child was doomed anyway or that the child was Aryan--as a way to palliate the horror, he or she is caught in the moral madness of the Holocaust itself, guilty of the same rationale that made the Holocaust possible. Indeed, this is part of the brilliance of Ozick's story.  It is what makes the story morally powerful, not simply shockingly horrible.

The shawl, which provides a womb-like protection for the infant, is magic; buried within it, the child is mistaken for Rosa's breasts.  Moreover, when Rosa's milk dries up, the magical shawl nourishes the infant for three days and three nights; as the child sucks on its corner, it provides "milk of linen."  The shawl also is the central object of the story's horrifying climax.  When Rosa sees Magda crawling across the central yard of the camp without her comforting shawl and hears her cry out the first sound she has made since the drying up of Rosa's milk, the terrified mother is faced with a crucial decision--to run for the child, even though she knows that her crying will continue without the shawl, or to run for the shawl and take the risk of the child being found first. 

When she goes for the shawl, which Stella has taken from the child to wrap around her own thin bones, the scene that follows is straight out of a nightmare--Rosa running with the shawl held high like a talisman, the infant being borne away from the mother over the head of a Nazi guard toward the fence, which hums with its electrical voices.  

As Magda goes swimming through the air, she looks like a butterfly: "And the moment Magda's feathered round head and her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arms splashed against the fence, the steel voices went mad in their growling. . . ."  Rosa can do nothing, for whatever she does will mean her own death, so she stuffs the shawl into her mouth and "drank Magda's shawl until it dried."

"The Shawl" leaves the reader stunned and breathless with its dumbfounding horror.  Like the infant Magda herself, the story is practically mute, explaining nothing, simply presenting the event in its magical and mysterious horror.  

Tomorrow: William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

Ann Beattie," Janus"—Short Story Month 2016-Day 11

Because of their delicate nature, the conflicts Ann Beattie is often concerned with cannot be expressed directly and discursively, but rather must be embodied in a seemingly trivial object or an apparently irrelevant other person.  This technique, originated by Anton Chekhov near the turn of the century, mastered by James Joyce twenty years later, and practiced expertly by such recent so-called minimalist writers as Raymond Carver, is central in the development of the modern short story as a form. The emphasis is not on  communicating feeling by internal monologue, for the practitioners of this technique assume that some emotions go beyond the ability of mere reflection to capture them, but rather by focusing on concrete situations and details that, even as they seem ordinary and merely "realistic," resonate with subtle symbolic significance.

"Janus" is a story about an object that has emotional significance,  but it does not seem to really become a story until the end--when we learn what that emotional significance really is.  At the beginning, the bowl seems to be a practical object--something to help the protagonist sell houses.  But gradually we begin to realize that it has more significance than that, for the protagonist is obsessed with the object.  Moreover, as we read, we may begin to wonder about the significance of the title, for, knowing that Janus is the God of two faces, we are alerted to watch for examples of opposing forces in the story.  Perhaps the most basic way the bowl is two-faced is the way that any symbolic or significant object is two-faced; it is both practical and spiritual at the same time, both merely an object and a meaningful object at once.

In Beattie's story, the bowl is like a child in some way, the child of her and her lover who bought it for her.  Every time she sets it in a house, the house becomes the house that she and her lover never had.  When it is at her own home, it does not really belong there.  It sits on her coffee table "meant to be empty."  However, while the bowl stands for her lost relationship, it only does so in an idealistic or poetic sense.  The first sentence--"The bowl was perfect"--makes this clear, for it is perfect in the abstract or Platonic sense.  However, the bowl is, at the same time, still a real estate agent's trick to prospective buyers that a house is unique and special.  The irony of course is that its very unreality is what makes the house seem so real.

It is a paradox of a bowl--both subtle and noticeable at once.  Like all art works, particularly like Keats' Grecian urn, although it is a static object, it suggests motion, for even as it is "still" as Keats "still unravished bride," it seems to be "still" going on.  It has no other function than to be an empty vessel of whatever one imposes upon it. The bowl's basic characteristic is like that of the husband's assessment of her--that she has a fine aesthetic sense and can also function in the real world.  However, a basic difference between her and her husband revolves around their reactions to such art-objects: ironies attract her, but he does not like things many-sided and unclear.

Only in the last three paragraphs do we learn the emotional background of the bowl, just as we only get the source of the balloon in the last paragraphs of Barthelme's story of that name. "Why be two-faced?" her lover asked her.  And telling her she cannot have it both ways, he leaves her.  Such dichotomies are what give the story its meaning, for as she looks at the bowl still and safe on the table, it embodies the world of experience that the art object always tries to embody:  both "deep and smoothly empty."

Tomorrow: Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl"

Eudora Welty, "A Memory"—Short Story Month 2016-Day 10

In her best-selling autobiographical book, One Writer's Beginning, Welty comes close to getting at the secret of the artist when she discusses the difference between events as they happen in our lives and events as they take on significance to us.  Whereas the first is chronological, the second need not be at all, for events as they take on meaning follow what Welty calls a "thread of revelation." 

Learning to perceive the world as the stuff of story is what most influenced Welty in her childhood.  In describing an event when she found two polished buffalo nickels in a box in her mother's drawer, only to find out they were nickels taken from the eyes of her mother's first child who died as a baby, she says that the future story writer in her must have stored that episode away--not as a event but rather as an emblem.  For although she had been pestering her mother to answer the primal question, "where do babies come from," she had received another secret, not how babies are born but how they die.   Welty says this suggests that one secret is apt to be revealed in the place of one hard to tell, and that the revealed one is often more appalling than the one sought for.  All of her stories, she says, are discoveries in meaning, and she cites "A Memory" as an example.

Writing, says Welty, is a way of discovering connections, for experiences that are too indefinite by themselves. Writing develops a respect for the unknown in human life, says Welty, and a sense of where to look for connections, how to follow the threads to a clear line, for nothing is ever lost to memory; the strands are all there; one seeks for the clear line. The memory is a living thing, Welty concludes, and all that is remembered joins and thus unites the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.

"A Memory" recalls a point when the artist began to look at reality through the frame of art, for since she started painting lessons, she has made small frames of her fingers to look out at everything.  Reality for the future artist must be in keeping with the frames she establishes or else she feels terrified by a vision of wildness and disorder.  Her perspective on the world is aesthetic and thus religious, for she is constantly hovering on the brink of seeing what is not quite there in actuality.  Her sense of exaltation stems from the sense that every observation "almost" reveals to her a secret of life and that even the smallest gesture of a stranger is a communication or a presentiment.

The memory counterposes her dream of her first love and the bathers she observes at the water's edge.  As in Joyce's "Araby," the dichotomy here is between the beauty of the dream and the vulgarity of the reality.  Whereas the only physicality she associates with her loved one is the sight of the blood dripping from his nose, the people on the beach seem nothing but the physical, the extremity of which is the image of the woman pulling down the front of her bathing suit to dump out the sand, at which the narrator feels a peak of horror that the breasts themselves had turned to sand. 

Welty says in One Writer's Beginning that the tableau discovered through the young girls' framing hands is unwelcome realism, and she has difficulty accomodating this view with the dream of love inside her, which, amorphous and tender, will have to remain her own secret imagining.   The experience of the young girl marks the point at which the dreamer stops to look and becomes the artist.  "After that, dreaming or awake, she will be drawn in."

Tomorrow: Ann Beattie, "Janus"

Kate Chopin, "Désirée's Baby"--Short Story Month, 2016-Day 9

This was Chopin's most successful story during her lifetime and remains her most famous story, receiving renewed attention since the advent of feminist criticism. However, many critics feel they must apologize for or justify the story's trick ending, for it suggests Chopin's most important literary forefather, Guy de Maupassant.  Emily Toth claims that Chopin goes beyond the Maupassant convention; Peggy Skaggs says that the ending is more complex and more revelatory of Chopin's view of life than it may at first seem; and Cynthia Griffin Wolff is only willing to compare Chopin's vision to Maupassant's by  claiming that both focus on the "inescapable fact that even our most vital moments must be experienced on the boundary--always threatening to slip away from us into something else, into some dark, undefined contingency." (Toth, Emily.  "Kate Chopin and Literary Convention:  `Désirée's Baby'."  Southern Studies 20 (1981): 201-08; Skaggs, Peggy.  Kate Chopin.  Boston:  Twayne, 1985; Wolff., Cynthia Griffin.  "The Fiction of Limits:  `Desiree's Baby'."  Kate Chopin:  Modern Critical Views.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  New York: Chelsea House, 1987.)

The story begins with the introduction of Désirée with a baby, which motivates a return to the past and the reader's introduction to Désirée herself as a baby and thus the central mystery of her origin.  There is really no reason for Désirée to be a foundling in this story except to provide the mystery of her parentage and thus to throw a shadow over her own child's ancestry.  The motif of "shadow" introduces the story's most significant pattern.  Désirée is not only found in the "shadow" of a big stone pillar, but eighteen years later while lying asleep in that same shadow--as if she has never moved--she is seen by Armand (the prince in this abortive fairy tale) who falls in love with her, "as if struck by a pistol shot."

The importance of paternal names is introduced very early, for Armand does not care that Désirée is nameless (The name her foster mother has given her suggests that simply she was desired), for this means he can all the more easily impose his own family name--one of the oldest and proudest in Mississippi--on her when they marry.  And indeed Désirée says Armand is particularly proud that the child is a boy who will bear his name.  Armand's home shows little of the softness of a woman, suggesting instead the strictness of a male monastic life, with the roof coming down steep and black like a cowl and with big solemn oaks whose branches shadow the house like a pall.  The "shadow" metaphor is further emphasized by Désirée's growing suspicion that there is some air of mystery about the house and by her efforts to "penetrate the threatening mist" about her.

Like "Cask of Amontillado" and "The Cop and the Anthem,"  Chopin's story is structured to illustrate a point or lay bare a hidden truth, rather than to "realistically" present events motivated by "as-if" real characters.  "Désirée's Baby" may seem more important or serious than the stories of Poe and O. Henry because of its socially significant themes of racism and sexism, but its narrative structure may be no more complex. 

Tomorrow: Eudora Welty, "A Memory"

Frank O'Connor, "Judas"—Short Story Month 2016-Day 8: A Mother's Day Story

 One of O'Connor's best-known books is his study of the short-story genre, The Lonely Voice, in which he argues that, as opposed to the novel, the short story takes as its primary subject the experiences of what he calls a "submerged population group," such as the peasants of Turgenev and Chekhov and the small-town folk of Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce.  For O'Connor, the short story does not deal with human experience within the context of a fully-organized social world, but rather within the broader and more universal context of Pascal's "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me." 

Although most critics agree that O'Connor never perfected the short story to the degree that his countryman James Joyce did, on the other hand, his profound understanding of the secret of the short story's inherent difference from the novel, as well as his ability to capture what he called "The Irish middle-class Catholic way of life" in delightful little comic vignettes, has assured him a permanent place in the history of 20th-century Irish Literature.

Although the speaker in this story is obviously older than the young boy in Joyce's "Araby," the conflict of the two stories is basically the same--the tension between a romanticized view of a young woman and a more realistic view.  However, the focus of the two stories is different.  Joyce leads the boy to a realization about himself, whereas O'Connor leads his protagonist to a realization about the girl. 

The tone of the two stories is also different.  Whereas the voice in Joyce's story is serious, the voice of O'Connor's young man is comically self-deprecating.  The language of the first-person narrator in this story might be compared with the language in Updike's "A&P" and Bambara's "The Lesson," for the voice of the speakers carries all three of these stories, and the issue in all three is how the language creates a tension between sympathy and judgment in the reader.

However, the title of O'Connor's story, as well as the final section when the protagonist returns home, suggests that the central theme of the young man's attitude toward Kitty has something to do with his mother.  One's first reaction may be that the Judas of the story is the boy himself, for he has betrayed his mother in some way.  The conventional reference to the crowing of the cocks after his sleepless night also suggests this. Yet, neither the action nor the imagery of the story indicates that the protagonist is the Judas betrayer.

The real Judas in the story is the mother; for although the story is about the young man's anguish of betraying his mother with another woman, it is even more about why the boy is made to feel this way.  The problem is that the mother, by instilling in the son an image of her own goodness and purity, betrays him into believing that all women except the "bad women" he reads about in books, are like his image of his mother. Thus, he feels guilty for the thoughts he has about "good girl" Kitty Doherty, thinking that she is "pure indeed," while he has a mind of a cesspit"; while she is "angelic," he is a volcano of brutality and lust.

When Jerry finally confronts Kitty and hears her talk in "cold blood about 'spooning' with fellows all over the house, the revelation is like: "another door' opening on the outside world.  And indeed lt is the outside world; it's the real world of women, not the false world he has been betrayed into believing because of the inevitable influence of the mother.  He felt "like a man who'd lived all his life in a dungeon getting into the sunlight for the first time. . . ." 

Thus resurrected from his guilt he goes home singing, "as if a stone had been lifted from my heart." But the mother's image has not been completely banished. He faces the silent reproach of her waiting in darkness, worrying about him.  His cruel retort to her whimpering question is an expression of his anger at being betrayed now that he feels that he is a stranger to her.

Jerry, then, is not so much Judas as he is the ironic suffering Christ deceived by the mother (who here takes on the image of the archetypal pure mother Mary) into thinking that all women are pure. Of course, he is not released from this identification yet, nor perhaps will he ever be. As he lies awake, every time he thinks of Kitty's face waiting to kiss him, it is the mother's face that comes up to him.

The final image in the story completes the terms of the ironic Mary-Christ parallel. When Jerry goes to the mother's room and sees her sitting in bed under the Sacred Heart Lamp he bursts out crying and she spreads her arms to hold him in the classic tableau of the Pieta'.  "All she could do was to try and comfort me for the way I'd hurt her, to make up to me for the nature she'd given me."

Tomorrow: Kate Chopin's "Desiree's Baby"

Joyce, "Araby"—Short Story Month 2016, Day 7

Like Chekhov, James Joyce rejects highly plotted stories in favor of seemingly static episodes and "slices" of reality.  Also like Chekhov, he depends on unity of feeling to create a sense of storyness, and he creates significance out of the trivial by judicious selection and ordering of detail.         

Joyce's most famous contribution to the development of short fiction is of course his concept of epiphany, which his protagonist Stephen Hero, in the novel of that name, describes as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself."  It is the task of the person of letters, Joyce says, to record these revelations, because they are the "most delicate and evanescent of moments."      

Joyce's technique, a method that critic Allen Tate calls "dissociated metaphor," is to transform the casual into the causal by repetition of seemingly trivial details until they are recognized as part of a significant pattern.  His most famous story to use this technique is "The Dead," in which three fourths of the story seems to consist of mere realistic detail until the final lyrical one-fourth reveals the significance of the repetition of meaningful details that have lead up to the final section.  "Araby" is a story that end with decisions or revelations that seem unprepared for, that is, until the reader reflects back on the story and perceives the patterned nature of what at first seem only casual detail.

What Joyce achieves in "Araby" derives from Chekhov's experiments with creating symbols out of objects by their very role or context, not by their preexisting meaning.  The primary counterpoint throughout the story consists of those images which suggest ordinary reality and those that suggest unknown romance. The result is a kind of realism that is symbolic at the same time.   "Araby" is effective because it embodies the spiritual romanticism of the boy in the realistic objects of his world.  Like the young girl in Chekhov's "After the Theatre," the boy needs to find something to objectfy his romanticism; this is the point of his trip to the bizaar.

Mangan's sister is identified by "her powerful absence," a suggestive phrase, for all the boy's actions are predicated on her not being there; her reality depends on him although he thinks that his reality depends on her.  This is a story about the ultimate romantic projection, for the boy sees the girl as a religious object, a romantic embodiment of desire.  Her name is like a "summons" to all his "foolish blood," yet it is such a sacred name that he cannot utter it.  Her image accompanies him "even in places the most hostile to romance"; thus, when he has the opportunity to visit Araby, a place he fancies the most sympathetic to romance, what he seeks is a sacred object capable of objectifying all his unutterable desires. 

The trivial conversation that he overhears causes his realization precisely because of its flirtatious nature, for what the boy discovers is that there is nothing so sacred that it cannot be made to be profane.  To see his most holy desire for Mangan's sister diminished to mere physical desire is to see a parody of himself; it is to hear his unspeakable desire spoken and thus reduced.  The result is the realization not only that he is driven and derided by vanity, but that all is vanity; there is no way for the most sacred desires that human beings store up in their ghostly hearts to be actualized and still retain their spiritual magic.

Tomorrow: Frank O'Connor's "Judas"

O. Henry, The Cop and the Anthem—Short Story Month 2016-Day 6

 At the turn of the century the name O. Henry was synonymous with the short story as a form.  And for many readers still, the notion of what a short story is derives from the kind of trick or twist ending associated with such O. Henry stories as "The Gift of the Magi," that sentimental story about the poor young couple--he who sold his watch to buy combs for her long hair and she who sold her hair to a wig-maker to buy a chain for his gold watch.  Not many O. Henry stories deal with serious issues in a serious way; they are either sentimental or else they are comically ironic.  "The Cop and the Anthem" is of the latter kind, but just because it does not carry a heavy theme or a serious idea does not mean that it will not repay a close study. 

"The Cop and the Anthem" illustrates the importance of point of view and ironic structure.  The first thing a reader might notice about this story is the language, riddled as it is with high-sounding esoteric words.  What kind of person says "cognizant of the fact that" rather than "knew," or "eleemosynary" rather than "charitable."  The technique O. Henry uses here is to give the storyteller language typical of the central character, Soapy, the bum, as a way of mildly ironically mocking him.  The language makes Soapy sound important, and indeed the irony of his character and situation is that although he is a bum, he acts as if he is of a high social status. 

Indeed the character of Soapy is as important to this story as its ironic structure, in which every action that he takes creates a reaction opposite to the one he wishes.  The basic irony of the story is that as long as Soapy is "free," that is, loose in the city, he is not free at all, because of the coming winter.  However, if he were in prison, he would indeed be "free" to enjoy life without fear.  However, Soapy does not want something for nothing; he is willing to pay for his room and board by going to some effort to commit an act that, according to the law, will get him in jail.  He knows that what society calls charity is not charity at all, but that he will have to "pay" for philanthropy by being preached at and lectured to.

The additional problem, of course, is that although Soapy breaks the law, he does not act like a criminal.  Moreover, although Soapy tries to be a "crook" there are real crooks out there, such as the umbrella thief, who thwart him, for he finds he cannot really steal from one who has already stolen.  Finally, there are those, such as the streetwalker, who although they might not look as if they were outside the law, are indeed criminals; one cannot violate the legal rights of one who is outside the law. 

Thus, Soapy seems "doomed to liberty."  Of course, a story with an ironic, mocking tone such as this one, in which a bum who talks like a gentleman tries to get himself thrown into jail but continually fails, can only end one way.  The ultimate irony of course is that Soapy, who does not want something for nothing and who goes to a great deal to get thrown into jail, finally does get thrown into jail for doing precisely nothing.

Two different film versions of "The Cop and the Anthem" provide an interesting contrast in treatment that reveals how much the comic in this story depends on the character of Soapy and the structure of the plot.  One version appears in a full-length 1952 film entitled O. Henry's Full House.  Charles Laughton plays Soapy and David Wayne plays the role of a companion invented to provide Soapy the opportunity for dialogue that is essential for film, but not needed in the story, for Laughton as Soapy talks like the narrator of O.Henry's story.  (Marilyn Monroe has a brief part in this film as the streetwalker Soapy tries to pick up.) 

The second version is a more recent one starring Robert Morse as Soapy.  The Laughton portrayal seems appropriate to the kind of character that appears in the original story, complete with spats, bowler hat, and fancy language.  In the more recent version Morse hams things up considerably; everything is exaggerated to the point that the comedy is dependent more on individual slapstick scenes than on the tight organization of the plot in the original story and the Laughton version.  Morse's Soapy is not as elegant or dignified as Laughton's.  Whereas Laughton's Soapy is quite knowledgeable about the quality of the food, the wine, and the cigar, Morse's Soapy is obviously not aware of these nuances.  Thus, one version of the story depends on the comic effect of incongruity of character and ironic reversal of events, whereas the second version depends more on slapstick, keystone cops chases and silent movie piano music in the background. 

Tomorrow: Joyce, "Araby"