Seminar Discussion Week #4

Here's the record of this week's abbreviated discussion. At the end, I've included some reaction thoughts on my own.

Drew: Did anyone else think the boy at The Hot Spot was going to violate Lucynell.
Everyone: No.
Potter: What’s up with the peppermint stick?
Childs: Yeah, I thought that, too. A “foot long 2” thick” stick? C’mon.
Petras: What about the hitchhiker getting in the truck? Anyone creepy there?

Nahlik (the drifter): Yesterday, we talked about Shiftlet as a negative force, but I saw him as a positive force, especially in relation to the mom?
Wehner: I agree with Nahlik—“in a few days” he begins to transform the place.
Dell’Orco: I disagree. He steals the car, the money; he abandons the girl.
N. Schmidt: (I missed this comment, sorry).
Lux: I see both sides, but I see the positive side more. He leads the daughter out of her nest, gives her some autonomy and puts her in the presence of someone who see her full humanity/glory. It’s no accident that her first word is “birrrd”—she’s finally taking flight.

Lots of general bickering and debating.

Drew: Isn’t the mother gaining some freedom at the same time? Now she isn’t tied to raising a child with a disability for her whole life.
Hannan: I disagree, Mr. Dziedzic. She does a lot of chores, carries her weight.
Nahlik: Mrs. Lucynell is very self-centered—this whole scenario is just about what she can get from the situation.
Cross: So she’s a lot like the grandmother in “Good Man.”
W. Schmitt: (?)

Kainz calls Sasha out! Shbam!

Sasha: uhhh….

Kainz: what did you write about?
Sasha: manipulating.
Kainz: tell us about that.

Sasha: The mother in “Life you Save” thinks she’s manipulating him to marry his daughter at the same time that he’s using him to get the car.

Berger: There aren’t that many indications that she wants to get rid of Lucynell.

Callon: Can someone explain why Berger might be incorrect?

Petras:
Haegerty: The way she haggles with him over 17.50 suggests she’s trying to sell her out

(Judas: 30 pieces of silver? ???)

Quinlan: Doesn’t she want the best for her daughter—somebody for her to communicate with?
Boehm: Notice that she lies about her age as a way to make her more attractive.
Hannan: What about when she says, “I wouldn’t give her up for anything on earth?”
Childs: Reverse psychology?

This is a good time for someone to warm up presenting a new topic/thread. Hogrebe? Bothmann? Hovey? Schneider?

Mr. Paradise—shifting over to the River

Nick Schmidt: I don’t see Paradise as the evil one. If anything, the preacher is the one responsible for planting such literal/dangerous ideas of salvation in the boy’s head.
Lux: Nick is wrong. Remember the pigs? Those are where the demons go when they leave the man’s body. And he looks like a pig to Harry from his underwater perspective at the end.
Potter: There’s really not enough for me to say he’s a bad person.

What about the cancer is has above his ear?

Quinlan: We seem to be putting people into two groups, but there seems to be three groups. I would put Mrs. Connin in the group of the good people. He takes him to a place that’s good for him—his first experience of anything transcendent in his otherwise secular world that treats “Jesus” as a curse word. Mr. Paradise is a cynical man who has fallen away because Christianity hasn’t given him what he wants.

Nick Schmidt: Is it good to baptize a kid without his family’s consent?
Hagaerty: Even the names seem to undercut Quinlan’s theory. How could “Con” be good and “paradise” be bad?
Lux: Every single detail connected to Paradise contradicts your punk comment, Hag.
Heated debate.
Potter takes out a stick and beats Petras. (not sure what they’re talking about)
Scheider: It’s just ironic that his name is Paradise, because he’s ugly—physically and morally.

Callon’s Final thoughts: This was a great discussion. It’s been awhile since I’ve been able just to sit back and listen to students work through the territory in a somewhat ordered, natural way for 5-10 minutes. Nice.

Many of you were looking hard to find the “good” characters—the models or norms in these. That very notion of a “good” character is very problematic in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, which focus primarily on people who suffer from some insurmountable handicap. Often they aren’t even real people but distortions somewhat like the exaggerated characters in a cartoon like The Simpsons.

Instead of trying to divide O’Connor’s characters into “good” or “bad” people, I would suggest beginning by separating them into static/stationary characters and kinetic/mobile figures in search of something. The folks in this first category—the Ashfields in “The River,” Mrs. Lucynell Crater, Bailey-- are fairly flat characters who tend to be stuck in a particular place or frame of mind. And then there’s the more dynamic figures like Shiftlet, the drifter, or the young boy, Harry/Bevel Ashfield in search of something they can’t name. They are groping their way toward something good, something transcendent. They are hungry for more than what their environment offers, yet they’re not able to satisfy that hunger either. As we head into next week, we’ll be questioning a number of thing: what is satisfying/unsatisfying about the brand of Christianity alive in these stories; what are these characters looking for; what substitutes do many of them accept; what do these handicaps—poor sight, missing limbs, cancer—symbolize; are they any truly transcendent, fulfilling alternatives available to these people?

Hemingway Seminar, Week Two

Lux: Fishing. The body of the water is like the Freudian psyche. All these references to fish is a way for Hemingway to show him struggling with the dark thoughts/fears/struggles that he has stored inside him.

Connection to Bass in Indian Camp—the big fish in Big 2 Hearted is a return to the monster(s) beneath the surface. Some live in deep water (big stuff), some are under the surface and easier to catch/handle/filet, etc.

Schneider: “he felt all the old feeling. He was happy.”
--reeling in Big fish is like restoring his connection to a healthy state of mind; losing it is losing the place he’s trying to get back to . That’s why he feels sick and has to sit down.

Potter: Regarding “Now I Lay Me,” no mention of actual fish as in Big 2 Hearted—only of rivers and streams and bait. There, it’s the idea of fishing that confronts him. He’s trying to regain the manliness stripped away from him by the war.

Nahlik: Even in his attempt to escape the problems of his life by heading out to nature in Big 2 Heart, the problems still find him in the form of the burnt landscape, the fish that leaves him feels nauseated, ??

Quinlan: Big 2 Hearted River is a comic ending to the series of stories. The burnt town of Seney is a hopeful sign; the ashes of the town and of the landscape will fertilize a new growth, a second growth; nature will return (“it can’t all be burnt”). This is like Nick; will all his scars and burned out mind, he can return to a state of happiness. When he says, “there are plenty of days to fish the swamp,” he’s acknowledging a willingness to continue to face that which he has ignored as a child/young man. He just will take them in good time.

How old is he here? At what point in his life is he at river?

Hogrebe: Like “End of Something,” his environment—the setting or landscape in which he moves—is a metaphor for his interior landscape, his psyche. As he’s about to sleep there’s a mosquito that comes—another disturbance to bring pain and violence, to feed off of him. Here he burns it. And then has the ability to sleep, something he couldn’t do in the war (“Now I Lay Me”). He’s finding peace amidst the burned out world.

The longest story about “nothing.”
Who else thought comic ending? (question goes nowhere)

Dziedzic: yes, it’s comic because he was obsessed with death in earlier stories (“Lay Me”) but not escapes the confines.

Childs: he still has a battle in front of him.

Schmitt: interested in the references to hot and cold in Big 2 Heart. What he thought his life would be is gone; fishing has been the only certainty, the only steadfast joy. Note his “very heavy pack” he carries. This pack represents the burdens he carries—his experience of war, loss, death. When he makes it to the river after all the toil, he walks through “cool dew.” When fishing later, when he finally gets ahold of the big one, he feels that shock of the cold water (which comes all the way up to his man parts). Later, he catches a few smaller fish. Not going to the swamp and knowing he can go later, he acknowledges that he knows this will be a long process; his recovery will be gradual.

Kainz: Ok, imagine that the characters are trout and the war is the dry hand. Which character gets picked up with the dry hand and “fungassed”

Berger: Major?
Lux: the kid with the scarf on his nose?
Del Taco: Krebs
Childs: yeah, Krebs.

Hey, this is all marvelous so far. Good job.

Did anyone write about Krebs?

Hagerty: Me. In the war, one guy brags about the girls he has had. He carries back a misunderstanding of love as something you “get” instead of something you “return.” His notion of love is broken, leaving him unable even to admit that he loves his mother. He wants a girl, but he doesn’t want any consequences, anything complex. Love, by nature, though is complex (at least two-sided).

Kainz: So what is it about war that has done this to him?

Burgraff: I compared their opinion of women to death. “He could not get along without girls . . . he had to have them.” Another fellow says “he never thought of them . . . they could not touch him.” This seems like a stretch to relate this to death, but then Krebs says of love, “eventually it will come to you.” Soldiers views of women in Hemingway’s stories mirror their view of death.

Schmidt: Insides. Two extremes. All the fish know is water, which surrounds them all the time. The fish even have water inside them. With Jack, he doesn’t have any water—can’t sweat—but he can still live (as opposed to the dead fish in water?). This fish has only what sustains it but with no depth; Jack has nothing to
It’s foolish to live ONLY with what sustains us (water), with no death. But it’s also foolish to live without worry/fear (things that don’t sustain us).

Berger: After the fight, “Jack stands up and sweat comes out all over his face.” Here, because of the boxing, the struggle to fight for a happy life for himself and his family, he can’t sweat—can’t sustain himself. Now that that contest is over, he can live normally, release himself from the things he worries about when he should be sleeping.


Kainz : let’s compare these boxers: Jack, Ole Andreson, Ad Francis

What would you say Jack’s motto might be?
Ole?
Ad?

Which is healthiest?

Seminar Discussion of Hemingway, Week One

Berger: “Can’t you give her anything to make her stop screaming?”
--he seems pretty comfortable, confident at the beginning but seems to want nothing to do with it by the end.
--Nick felt quite sure he would never die. “This shows his insecurity about death; a nice prerequisite to his attitude about death in “The Killers.” There, he values life and he feels that it needs protection—he takes a RISK to warn him. He is surprised that Ole Anderson that this man is willing to wait around and get killed. This is a good correlation to Indian Camp – he still thinks he won’t die and can’t figure out why this man feels this way.

Petras:

There’s a lot of great contrasting imagery (e.g. the darkness into which the boats travel) between life and death in the Indian Camp. Leans his head against his father, whom he trusts absolutely; doesn’t look at the birth itself)
--Lots of focus on the unknown that Nick doesn’t want to accept. He is still very naïve in his thinking at the end.
--Full views of the man’s cut throat and her open stomach—what does he see.

Burggraf:

I also looked at the part where he says he wouldn’t die. I saw religious themes here—after death comes new life. Uncle George/Bass both leave but will come back, appear briefly then disappear—lots of circles and cycles, including the sun, which will come back.
Elton John: “The Circle of Life”

Jacobs:

“Her screams are not important”—I was interested in how silence is important here—death?

Nahlik

“I mean, you can’t scream if you’re dead” just saying.

Haggerty
The first couple paragraphs of End of Something—specifically the mill, which is now shut down. There are no more trees left to cut—just ruins and wasteland. This is like Marge and Nick. She wants more than he can offer. Isn’t love fun anymore she asks? No, he says. After she leaves, he feels empty, lays on the blanket—just remains much like the “broken white limestone foundation” of the mill.


Hogrebe

In order for the lumber mill to have substance, it needs fuel, commodities—like the relationship, it has been used up. No longer a purpose for it to exist. Lumber town a metaphor for relationship.

Potter
Instead of connecting the deterioration of the relationship to the mill, I connected it to wood/logs/logging. When, for instance, she says on the boat, “there’s our old ruin, Nick,” she’s ironically pointing out their own relationship.

Also, wood connected to manliness. Axes—connection back to Indian Camp, Doc and doctor’s wife. Why is he even mentioning his ax wound? The Doc/wife story is all about driftwood and about the doctor getting humiliated over it.

Dell’Orco?
End of Something: Fishing: They go from the shallows to the serious darkness to fishing from the shore. Why would he choose rainbow trout of all fish? These implies joy, happiness, promise, pots of gold! (not without me lucky charms!)—they can’t get it. They aren’t even striking.

Kuebel
Relationship with Marge and Nick compared to relationship with Doctor and wife. Very similar: both Nick and Doc are terse in their choice of words; both looking for freedom from things that paralyze them, hold them back---the doctor’s walk away from home and then into the woods at the end is part of his attempt to escape these bonds.

In 1932, Hemingway published a non-fiction book about bullfighting called Death in the Afternoon (incidentally, this is the first time he also mentioned his "iceberg principle" of fiction writing). Here's an interesting New York Times book review from the same year, which explores Hemingway's fascination with life and death . . . and bullfighting.

Hemingway Now Writes of Bull-Fighting as an Art

By R. L. DUFFUS

DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON By Ernest Hemingway.

he emergence of Mr. Hemingway as an authority on bull-fighting should not be a surprise to any one who has read the passages in "The Sun Also Rises" which touch upon that peculiarly Latin sport. That he is an authority may be conceded, even by those who have never seen a matador, not only from Mr. Hemingway's statement that he has seen fifteen hundred bulls killed on the field of honor and his acknowledgment of indebtedness to some 2,077 "books and pamphlets in Spanish dealing with or touching on tauromania," but from the internal evidence of the book itself. One would say that Mr. Hemingway knows bull-fighting at least as well as the specialized sports writer in our own country knows baseball, football, racing or fighting. He knows it so well that on occasion only the introduction of an extremely singular old lady as the author's interlocutor, a few digressions on death, modern literature and sex life, joined with Mr. Hemingway's extremely masculine style of writing, save the reader from drowning in a flood of technicalities.

It may be asked why Mr. Hemingway should infer in American readers a sufficiently passionate interest in bull-fighting to induce them to buy and read a book of 517 pages on the subject. But this would be to put the cart before the horse--or letting the bull wave a red cloth at the matador instead of vice versa. Bull-fighting, one infers, became a hobby with Mr. Hemingway because of the light it throws on Spain, on human nature and on life and death. In a sense this book is Mr. Hemingway's book on "Virgin Spain." The reference is pertinent because, as he explains in an extremely candid bit of analysis, Mr. Hemingway does not particularly like that style of writing for which his most flattering epithet is "bedside mysticism." But the author's fundamental motive is perhaps this:

"The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death."

In another passage Mr. Hemingway points out that one of the essentials if a country is to love bull-fights is "that the people must have an interest in death." The people of Castile, he finds, have such an interest in death, "and when they can see it being given, avoided, refused and accepted in the afternoon for a nominal price of admission they pay their money and go to the bull-ring." The English and French, on the other hand, "live for life" and consequently don't especially care for bull-fights. Here Mr. Hemingway seems to be getting mystical on his own account, but at least it is not "bedside mysticism."

Bull-fighting always means death for the bull, for if he is not killed in the arena during the allotted time he is killed outside. It means death for horses--a death in which Mr. Hemingway says there is sometimes an element of the comic--if they are not protected by mattresses. It sometimes means death for the matador, it means in almost every case that he will sooner other later be grievously wounded, and if he is a good matador it means that he must go to the very brink of death every time he puts on a performance. Moreover, it means that a good matador must actually enjoy killing and that the spectators must be able to derive an emotional kick from the operation. As Mr. Hemingway puts it:

"He [the matador] must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you esthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. * * * Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes, that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. These things are done in pride and pride, of course, is a Christian sin and a pagan virtue. But it is pride which makes the bull-fight and true enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador."

The "true enjoyment" of the fan or "aficionado" is in the bravery or "nobility" of the bull and in the skill and bravery of the matador. At least these are the points upon which Mr. Hemingway dwells. The "aficionado" does not want to see a good matador killed, though he may be indifferent to the wounding of a bad matador, or even try to damage him a little by hurling bottles and other hard objects at him as he leaves the ring. But it is hard to believe that those to whom death is of profound interest may not sometimes hope that if a matador is to be killed by a bull they may be there to see it. And Mr. Hemingway does make it clear that the nearer the matador comes to the horns at the supreme moment the better liked his performance is. The bull ring is not the place for skill without risk. As a confirmed bull-fight fan Mr. Hemingway is disgusted with a matador who kills by a trick stroke "bulls that he is supposed to expose his body to in killing with the sword." If the finishing thrust is properly put in, the matador must always be in such a position that if a gust of wind comes at the wrong time or if the bull suddenly raises his head the man will be gored. If no part of the spectators feels any morbid expectation at such crises a Spanish assemblage is different from other gatherings.

But bull-fighting, though as Mr. Hemingway says, "a decadent art in every way," is an art, indeed, "if it were permanent it could be one of the major arts." It does not seem absurd to Mr. Hemingway to compare it with sculpture and painting, or to set Joselito and Belmonte side by side with Velasquez and Goya, Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Shakespeare and Marlow. Even such refined elements as the line of the matador's body at the critical instant or the "composition" of bull and man enter into the intelligent "aficionado's" enjoyment. Bull-fighting is thus presented as an art heightened by the presence of death and, if the spectator can project himself into the matador's place, in the terror of death. For even the best matadors have their moments of fear--even their days and seasons of fear.

The book is thus not only a careful, even a meticulous explanation of the way bull- fighting is done, but is also a picturing of the spirit in which it is done and seen. One must add to this observation, however, that the book goes far beyond these relatively simple phases in being representative of an important literary movement as typified in Mr. Hemingway. It would be impossible to discuss it with complete adequacy without also discussing both Mr. Hemingway and his movement; that is to say, without asking, not only whether this book is good Hemingway but whether Mr. Hemingway himself is good.

It may be said flatly that the famous Hemingway style is neither so clear nor so forceful in most passages of "Death in the Afternoon" as it is in his novels and short stories. In this book Mr. Hemingway is guilty of the grievous sin of writing sentences which have to be read two or three times before the meaning is clear. He enters, indeed, into a stylistic phase which corresponds, for his method, to the later stages of Henry James. The fact that a sentence is usually good Anglo-Saxon, with anything but a shrinking from calling a spade a spade, does not make it a clear sentence if one cannot easily distinguish the subordinate verbs from the principal one. And when Mr. Hemingway throws into one chapter, in a kind of reminiscent emotional jag, all the things about Spain and bygone youth that he could not get into the rest of the book, the reader feels like a chameleon on a patch work quilt. This is not art in the sense in which the final pages of "A Farewell to Arms" were art--it is fireworks.

On certain passages which in former days would have been called vulgar or even obscene it if difficult to pass judgment. One does not know whether they are wholly sincere or whether, on the other hand, Mr. Hemingway is trying to startle the little handful of literates who are still capable of being startled. As to the root philosophy that only death and procreation, and subjects related to them, are "simple" and "fundamental," no one reviewer can contribute much to that problem. On the whole it may be said that Mr. Hemingway's reactions to most subjects, whether proscribed ones or not, are at least vigorous and healthy. He is no more vulgar than life and shows as much good taste as death.

The book will certainly find its place on the shelves of Hemingway addicts. One's guess is that it will be less successful than the novels in making new Hemingway addicts. Action and conversation, as the author himself suggests, are his best weapons. To the degree that he dilutes them with philosophy and exposition he weakens himself.

Hemingway's Iceberg Principle

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." -- From Death in the Afternoon

As you think about your inquiry topic for this week, keep this principle in mind. It's interesting to me that the principle works on at least two distinct levels: 1) as a method of writing fictional prose--of discerning through the drafting and revision process the absolutely vital words, details, information and cutting all the rest as an ultimate act of respect for an intelligent reader; and 2) a critical tool for analyzing and interpreting the stories, which so often offer us a small detail or action as a substitute for a greater whole. For example, think of the ruins that open both "End of Something" and "Big Two-Hearted River"--both subtle, visible reminders of deeper scars within Nick's psychological landscape, his psyche. Once you wrap your head around these concepts, a story like "Big Two-Hearted River" ceases to be a story about nothing and becomes as alive as Nick seems to feel in returning once again to the restorative natural landscape of his youth.

Think of the initiations in your life to date. Not the usual, the expected, the cake-and-ice-cream variety. Think of the ones that caught you off guard--those moments in which life revealed itself to you in all its befuddling, blistering complexity, leaving you feeling exposed in the presence of something beyond your ability to describe it, to give it a name.

In this Nick Adams sequence, a major thread in In Our Time (1925), Hemingway places his evolving, developing protaganist in a series of circumstances that challenge him to embrace some difficult truth about his own humanity or about the world around him. Sometimes Nick resorts childishly, naively to romantic illusions about the world as he would have it look; in other moments Nick takes steps forwards into life's murky swamps.

Pay very close attention to the signs on the surface of these iceberg-stories. Notice the lack of a detached narrator here, a voice that shapes our opinion of a character or even goes so far as to spell out "the moral of the story." The radical innovation of Hemingway's prose is the amount of trust he places in the barest of details to lead us much deeper into Nick's psyche (which, as we will see, is itself a symbol for our collective human psyche, for he is "Adams"--the original man, the everyman, the American man).

As you read these stories, spend time noting and thinking about details that might lead us from the visible to the invisible portion of the iceberg. What exactly is that bass that jumps out of the warm, rippling water just as Nick fantasizes about his own immortality in "Indian Camp"? What does that gate through which Dick Boulton and friends enter and leave represent in "Doctor"? What do the two rods featured at the end of "End of Something" represent? And what of the orchard and the Wagner apple that begin "Three-Day Blow"?

These are just sample questions to get you started. These stories are loaded with small details that lead in some way to the heart of the story and to the life lessons and mysteries Nick encounters on his journey to adulthood.

Welcome to The Short Story

I'm also hoping to use the blog as a place to store leftovers from our discussions each day. I invite you as often as you'd like to add your own comments to the blog entries. Just keep it clean.