S/Z and Ringtone

Critical analysis and I have been dancing around one another. And so, as Jess suggested, I got myself a copy of Roland Barthes S/Z. The French on French literature as I like to think about it. Scholarly doesn't quite cover it. I read Sarrasine, and then read Barthes essay. And while it was ponderous, it began to make sense after the first hundred pages. There are five codes and just so I can show off, I'll review my own interpretation of them:

Hermeneutic: the enigma of the story; the question and the answer

Proaeretic: the actions; the sequence of actions that bring the story along

Semes: the themes that run throughout the story

Symbology: the signs; representations that illustrate and enhance the story

Cultural: references to science, culture, place that place the story

There is some hierarchy to these codes in the sense that some are immutable and some are reversible. That, while an interesting mental exercise, didn't really speak to me. What spoke to me was the fact that all these codes weave throughout a story. And more importantly that all these codes weave throughout MY stories without me thinking about it. Or so I thought. I turned to Ringtone, a story which Jess has described aptly as cliché in its first iteration. And I did some analysis of the first third of the story using the codes. I won't belabor the details, but will insert the analysis in the bottom half of this post. But the outcome was fascinating. The repeated codes as they manifested themselves were as follows:

Proaeretic: Remembering; hoping

Semes: nature of Love; self knowledge; boredom; unrequited; incomplete

Symbology: puppy, child (youth; unknowing)

Cultural: cellphone; modern life; geography; Brands

But the most interesting discovery in this analysis was that there was NO HERMANEUTIC code. The story has no enigma, no question being asked and not answered. There is no seduction in my story about seduction. How interesting! So I have to conclude that the part of the cliché-ness of the story is because there is no question. The story tells itself outright from the very first paragraph and nothing within the story changes that, alters it, flirts with the reader, leads the reader astray. It is, in effect, not a story. Merci beaucoup, Monsier Barthes.

ANALYSIS:

I still can't believe it. (ACT-believe). All these years later, when I look at Brad, when I look at the boys climbing into manhood. I think back to that summer and wonder "what if?" (ACT think back; remember) (REF: Chronology: years later. What if you answered differently, would my life have swirled off in a new direction? (ACT wonder). The torrents of divorced living, uncomprehending looks from the children. (SEM: Divorce). The drop and run at our own front doors? All of it would have been so full of sharp objects.

I wish you had. (SEM: regret)

I'm not sure I loved you. Not sure to this moment in time that what I felt for you was love or love for myself. (SEM: self) All I know is that you consumed me, like a drug like a disease. And I loved that. (SEM: nature of love )

And everything else that year was noise. Just background. There was only you and me (SEM: intimacy SEM: self and other).

How did it start? Sometimes when I think back, which I do from time to time.(ACT: think back;remembering)) When things here become unbearable. When the sameness and predictability sweeps in like a tide and threatens to carry me to the brink. When I find myself watching television to fill the time. (SEM: loneliness; lost) Often it's a struggle to remember the details. But other times I can feel the sun and my sweat as if I'm still standing on that beach and meeting you for the first time. (ACT: remembering)

Those damn dogs. (SYM: dogs; loyalty) Licorice was the one that almost knocked me over. And you, on that cell phone, that gadget that you loved so much and would become my lifeline. I had escaped the social torment of the office party, everyone at the bar drinking themselves into their next embarrassing act (REF: culture: office party). I had slipped out to walk my precious beach and enjoy the solitude that fall brings the Maine coast (REF: geography SEM: solitude: being with self; self). And then you, looking like a five year old, a ridiculously tall one,(SYM: child, not fully formed) pulled by the dogs in a cartoon-like action sequence. (REF: culture: cartoons) Licorice jumped up on me and his paws, still too big for his puppy frame, planted a huge wet sand paw mark on my new pressed white linen shorts. (SYM: puppy, adolescent, new) SYM: Dogs, loyalty SYM: soiled, white, purity)

You, oblivious, still cajoling whoever was on the phone. Phil, Gerry. It doesn't matter, but when I like to stretch the memory out, sink down into it, I think I can listen to the past deeply enough to discern which one (ACT: remembering). When you finally realized what was happening and your eyebrow furrowed, I saw that small scar. (ACT: furrowed; saw) I didn't know it then, but that scar crept into my mind and nagged at me,(SEM: obsession; ACT: memory) long after you had apologized profusely and called yourself an idiot, and swatted at Licorice and offered to pay for the dry cleaning bill.(ACT: apologize;called; swatted; offered to pay) I waved you off. I was pissed, but didn't want to have the hassle of coordinating with you for what would end up being twelve bucks. I just smiled my totally fake work smile and said it was all good. (ACT: anger: faking)

Of course it wasn't. I mean it was, there was nothing disastrous going on for me. That might have been the problem. If maybe, Brad slapped me every now and then. Or Benjamin had started using drugs, or Jackson was fighting at school. But none of that. My boys, despite me, were well behaved and active grade-schoolers.(SEM: boredom) (ACT: slapped;using; fighting) My husband was a competent medical equipment regional manager heading for a home office career. I had a job in a large corporation where I could come and go whenever I pleased, where colleagues rushed to fill in when a sick child took any one of us away from our responsibilities. (REF: Culture: modern family) Everything was copasetic. (SEM: boredom) And I thought I was happy, not realizing, of course, that I was bored to point of raking my eyeballs with my own nails. (SEM: boredom; self knowledge)

That's what did it. Sure, for the first few months and even years past, I told myself that it "just happened" that we were meant to meet and that Fate brought us together. (SEM: fate) Like Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in just about any movie you can name.(REF: culture: movies) I wanted so badly to believe that there was such a thing as destiny, that a relationship could exist that didn't involve laundry or dinner plates or electric bills.(SEM: romantic love) But later, when I told myself the truth, I had to admit it. I hunted you down, and made you into the person who would bring me back to life. (ACT: hunted)

Clearly, I didn't plan Starbucks.(REF: culture: Brand) So maybe destiny had a hand in that. (SEM: fate) And even now, when I've assumed responsibility for my actions, I think I was actually annoyed when you gave me that "haven't I seen you before?" bullshit. And then you offered me money again, for the shorts. Pulling out a twenty and trying to get me to take it. Asshole.(ACT: offering money; SYM: money;transaction) But that scar was dancing above your eyebrow, and those graying curls caught me a little. And you were checking me out, and you can't say you weren't because I caught that eye drift that guys do when they are looking but not looking. There was a little spark, somewhere between irritation and excitement.(SEM: attraction) Unnerved I gave you my first name, and you said you were Ira.(

There is something I never told you. In all that time we spent together, all the calls and texting, the walks and coffee meets.(ACT: call, text, walk, meet) I never told you that I went back to the spot. Before we knew each other, before we really knew each other. After Starbucks and before the baseball game. (REF: culture; baseball) I went back to the beach. Brad and the boys went to Boston, some playoff game or something.(REF: culture; baseball REF: Geography: Boston) I stayed behind. I thought maybe I'd call Leah and see if she wanted to hit the outlets. But instead I made cucumber sandwiches; damn I love those things, and filled up my thermos with vodka lemonade.(REF: culture: picnic) I put on the bikini I'd bought in Mexico with Brad, because I'd been working out hard that summer and was feeling that despite my age and two pregnancies my body was still worth showing off a little.(SEM: attraction; body as beauty REF: clothing; beach) Then I promptly dropped my huge mother-on-the-beach cover-up over my head. It never came off. (REF: clothing; cover up, SYM: unrequited desire)

I drove up to Wells. I could have walked down the road to our family beach, but I told myself I needed a change.(REF: geography: Maine) Still denying what anyone standing next to me could have observed. That I was thinking about meeting you.(SEM: self knowledge) I sat on the beach and read and drank. At Starbucks, holding your double espresso, you told me that you walked that beach every day--with the dogs--for Vitamin D. (REF: brand, science: D as healthy) Well either you lied or I arrived too late because that day, Ira, you didn't show. (SEM: unrequited desire) Despite the fact that I had nine solid hours on that beach with my book, I never got past the first chapter. (SYM: book; knowledge SEM: incomplete) Every person that walked by looked like you. Even the women. And as the sun was setting, and my book was cast aside, and the vodka was gone, I had to admit to myself that I had been waiting for you.(SEM: self knowledge) I cried all the way home. Not because of you, exactly, I didn't know you at all. But because I had been so hopeful. I was so ashamed of that hope I couldn't even tell you about it later.(ACT: hoping; shame SEM: boredom; incompleteness)

After that, I lost my mind for a while. I began to see you everywhere.(ACT: lost; see SEM: obsession) At Hannaford's you would disappear around a corner, and then come back as some grumbling old man carrying a bag of prunes. I exhausted myself one morning run by sprinting until I caught up with a tall runner out Ridge Road. It was the boys swim instructor from the YMCA. He was seventeen at the time, and bore no resemblance. But the thought that I would meet up with you? (SEM: hope) That was worth it.

Brad must have sensed something was up. He suggested a spa weekend with Leah. Then a vacation. Then a therapist. "You just don't seem like yourself. You don't seem happy." The extent of how far Brad would ever go emotionally(SEM: incomplete) And I could see in the boys' eyes when I was snapping at them because the interminable and constant chaos of their room annoyed me, that I was acting differently. I stopped running, I stopped cleaning, I even stopped grocery shopping. After three straight weeks of take out dinners, even I knew something had to change.(ACT: stopping; not bringing to completion; running; cleaning; shopping; acting different)

Never Marry a Mexican: Keeping it Fresh

I chose to look deeply at this story as at its core it is the same story as my Ringtone. And Jess' feedback regarding how to make the story not a cliché, how to tell it in a new and interesting way is what I am wrangling with. Cisneros is also telling the the old old tale of a woman scorned. How does Cisneros keep it fresh? There is, of course, the human voyeuristic delight in being inside a sordid tale. If the author builds us a character that we can place our faith or affection in, then we will hunt through the story for vengeance or justice. Cisneros does not deliver a protagonist that easily loved, and yet the reader feels empathy for Clemencia.

First, she uses the backdrop of race and class to drive the storyline. Clemencia is the child of two parents of different prejudices. Her mother who felt her citizenship made her better than her spouse.

"Never marry a Mexican, my ma said once and always. She said this because of my father. She said this though she was Mexican too. But she was born here in the U.S. and he was born there, and it's not the same, you know." (p.109) Her father immigrated from a middle class Mexican family for reasons other than hardship. His family found her mother to be less than because she was so poor. Both considered the other to be inferior.

"But what could be more ridiculous than a Mexican girl who couldn't even speak Spanish, who didn't know enough to set a separate plate for each course at dinner, nor how to fold cloth napkins, nor how to set the silverware." (p.110) Cisneros puts a fine point on this by explaining that if her mother had been white and poor her father would have been marrying up.

Additionally, Drew her white lover, gives her the nickname of Cortés's slave and mistress, Mallinali. So the juxtaposition of white and brown, rich and poor, powerful and dispossessed serves a dual role. It sets the background for the story and it develops the reader's understanding of Clemencia. She talks a big game, but she's really a coward when it comes to asserting herself with Drew. And so when he scorns her by saying he'd never marry her, Cisneros brings the phrase "never marry a Mexican" (Clemencia's words not Drew's) right back into the fore, the reader understands that the protagonist is not just at the wrong end of an affair but the victim of her ancestry and it's cultural judgments.

Cisneros builds the contrast with Clemencia's descriptions of Drew's wife and the boy's mother. The boy has his mother's features and "skin like roses in December". Megan has "drawing room English", and looks like a "red headed Barbie doll". She is a white wealthy woman. And Cisneros could have made that the reason that Drew, also a painter, chooses Megan. But instead, Drew's explanation, "A young girl like me. Hadn't I understood…responsibilities. Besides he could never marry me." (p.116) Despite Clemencia's declarations of love and power over Drew, she is secondary, she is not worthy of marriage.

"So no, I've never married and never will. Not because I couldn't, but because I'm too romantic for marriage. Marriage has failed me, you could say. Not a man exists who hasn't disappointed me, whom I could trust to love the way I've loved." (p. 110) Me thinks she doth protest too much. Clearly marriage with Drew has evaded her.

Cisneros heightens plot by having Clemencia exact her revenge. "I sleep with this boy, their son. To make the boy love me the way I love his father." (p118) This positioning of a goes around, come around twist develops the reader's relationship with the character through both repulsion (the boy is in high school) and pity. A grown woman sleeping with a child to make him love her makes Clemencia a sordid and pathetic character. She is indeed capable of anything, but incapable of having a love relationship.

The other way that Cisneros keeps it fresh is through her time shifts and change of addressees. There are three audiences in this story; the reader who gets narrative description to explain the situation Clemencia is in, Drew and the boy. This serves to create a somewhat fragmented storyline that Cisneros manages very effectively. And the style choice heightens the fragmented mind of the protagonist as well. The reader is as in between the three waves of story as is Clemencia. Everyone is trying to find their place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Light and Dark in Transactions in a Foreign Currency by Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg said in an 2009 interview, "You might not realize what something is doing in one of the stories, but there isn't anything in them—in my opinion, of course—that isn't doing something; I don't just chuck in idle stuff for the fun of it. And if you miss detail, it will be at a cost to your understanding or enjoyment of a story. Things are placed at angles, and unless you're receptive to the way a given story is coming toward you, to the way you're moving through the story, you're going to miss a lot, and then you'll be confused, frustrated, and angry."

One of the many Eisenberg does in Transactions in a Foreign Currency is to use the imagery of light and dark throughout to develop a strong sense of characterization and provide the contrast in clarity and ambiguity that is central to the story.

"The airport was shaded and still in the pause before dawn, and the scattering of people there seemed to have lived for days in flight's distended light or dark; for them this stop was no more situated in space than a dream is." (p.130)

Eisenberg's protagonist is like a light wave. She is unnamed, both an universal and closely personal character. She travels constantly to be warmed in the reflected light off a solid object, Ivan. "Ivan was one of those men, and just standing next to him I felt as if I were standing in the sun." (p.131) She has no substance or mass as she is entirely defined by her environment. Eisenberg has the protagonist dress in Micheline's (Ivan's ex-lover) left behind clothing, because "None of the things that I'd brought with me seemed right." (p.141) Eisenberg emphasizes the protagonist's fluidity, her lack of self, through the observation "everything felt roomy enough, even though she looked so small." (141) She conforms to her environment, even in body size. Once dressed, the protagonist does not see a woman of substance, she observes that "The woman who stood in the mirror was well assembled, but the face, above the heavy, dark, clothing, was indistinct in the brilliant sunlight. I made up my eyes heavily, and then my mouth with a red lipstick that was sitting on Ivan's bureau, and checked back with the mirror. Much better." (p.141) Eisenberg chooses the dramatic color red, to be found not owned. The clothes, dark, heavy substantial are borrowed.

Eisenberg uses light imagery to describe Ivan and demonstrate the contrast between the two main characters. In addition to being someone who make the protagonist feel like she's standing in the sun, he "brings the morning gold with him" and "smelled as if he'd been sleeping in a sunny field" (p.133). And later that equates to clarity as Ivan has no confusion about his their relationship. He is unwilling to "falsify my feelings". (p.137) Ivan is solid and unchanging throughout the story while the protagonist is in a constant state of ambiguity, waiting to be formed. Any confusion about their relationship is completely on her part, as she realizes when talking to Eugene, Ivan's friend who stops in while Ivan is away.

"'Ivan just can't decide seem to decide what he wants.'

'No?' Eugene looked away tactfully, and I laughed out loud in surprise.

'That's true,' I said. 'I guess he decided a long time ago.'" (p.149)

Eugene is also described in light imagery. He raises questions about the protagonist's actual self. "Where're you from?" he asks and immediately Micheline's clothes become "terribly uncomfortable" (145) He expresses concern for her clearly unhealthy state (she hasn't eaten for days) and then she exerts energy around changing.

"'No, no. It's just these clothes,' I said, plucking at them. 'I've got to get out of these clothes.' He was beautiful, I saw. He sparkled with beauty; it streamed from him in glistening sheets, as if he were emerging from a lake of it." (p.150)

Here Eisenberg both forecasts and underscores Eugene as a messenger of lucidity. And the protagonist moves, travels, like a wave from the darkness of Micheline's clothing to the light of Eugene. It is he that brings the concreteness of her position into the light. However, in the wake of that night together, "The sun had bleached out Eugene's luminous beauty. With his pallor and coarse black hair, he looked like a phantom that one registers periphally on the streets." Eisenberg describes him as both black and white, no longer a beacon.

Finally, as the story closes with the protagonist having clarified her own situation. Eisenberg recycles light through the last few paragraphs building the story trajectory to its implied resolution. "How I wished I could contain the golden, wounding hope of him. But it had begun to diverge from me—oh, who knew how long before—and I could feel myself already forming: empty, light." (p. 153) Eisenberg depicts the protagonist as still being without substance, and juxtaposes the sensation of lightness (which the reader interprets as good) against the image of visual light she has used throughout. The image is intensified by her view of the city, "the darkening sight separated from me now by a sheet of glass I could almost reach out to shatter." (p. 153)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Authorial Intrusion and Reliability

When the author intrudes into the narrative and jolts you out of the carefully constructed place, you have a problem. Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction elegantly and thoroughly describes all the ways in which an author is legitimately present in his work, but points out that there are transgressions of authorial presence that cause problems and should be purged.

The various kinds of purge—whether of unrealistic author's voice, of impure human emotions, or of the moral judgments which help to produce them—can be understood only in the context of what cannot be purged; some kind of interest that will grasp and sustain the reader throughout the work." (p.164) Booth argues that there are three lines along which the reader follows the author: curiosity about the facts, completion of pattern or form, and human attachment. Anthony Marra's Chechnya will serve as a good example where human attachment (the overriding connection for author/reader) was not enough to keep the story intact.

Chechnya, as the title indicates, is set in a war torn country. Marra uses primarily the point of view of Sonja, who has returned from the west, to relate the events. On first reading of this story, the human desire to see the protagonist "succeed" (in this case survive), takes over and allowed me as a reader to just soak up the complete and utter horror of the story. Distance from the actual events, and the tragedy of the situation are framed by the title (conjuring up news reports, and a western familiarity with the general sadness associated with that area of the world) masked problems with the story. Initially, a reader is at just the right distance from the story to be emotionally involved.  A closer reading reveals a number of way in which Marra intrudes on the text.

Absence (of information) does not make the reader fonder

Sonja has medical training and is working in a hospital. Marra doesn't tell us exactly what that training is until late in the story. He allows the reader to infer, decipher what her role in the hospital is but never just clearly states it. Everything in Chechnya is fluid; people acting in self preservation will commit all kinds of acts of perversity and kindness alike. Throughout the story the reader is asked to question everything. In order for Sonja to be the protagonist Marra sets her out to be, questions about her legitimacy are unnecessary and distracting.

"'A man is waiting here to see you,' a nurse says." (p. 216) The sentence is not "another nurse". Thus the reader knows that Sonja is not a nurse. Later, through her eyes we see the hospital corridor "a handful of patients, no doctors." (p.217) Marra does not use the terms "no other doctors". A seemingly irrelevant detail that intrudes into continued reading without asking "Is she a doctor or not?" The questions of whether women in Chechnya are commonly doctors, creates a question about her role. Two pages later, she is at her medical school in London City College, did she finish? Is she acting as a doctor or is she one? The answer isn't important, clearly. The fact that is important is that the reader is interrupted by the absence of the information. One has to deduce there is a reason for the withholding; that intentionally not telling the reader is important.

"Natasha slept for sixteen hours a day, after returning from Italy. Sonja worried about her and didn't need a medical degree to know something was wrong." (p.221)

Here Marra continues his absence of absolute, but also uses what may be judged to be a common English language expression. He could have written, "didn't need her medical degree" which would have both answered my question questions about role and distanced him from the western colloquial expression. Sonja tells Akhmed "I went to medical school in London. I stayed for six years." (p.226) Again, reader inference will conclude she has a degree. But it's not explicit until the passage below:

"Was Sonja no better? She dismissed the question as soon as she asked it. There was no question. She returned from London, leaving a second-year residency, a Scottish fiancé, and a land unbroken by war. She left all that to return to her sister. And why? She dismissed the question. Because blood is thicker than water, and guilt is thickest of all." (p.227) Aha, she's a doctor, but I'm already two pages from the end of the story. It also feels like this is a somewhat clumsy reveal by Marra. This is the compact few sentences that uncover exactly what sacrifice Sonja made to come back to Chechnya that the story built us up to this as a critical juncture. But the impact of it has been hampered by his coyness in the earlier story. This strikes me as a common mistake, not wanting to "tell" the reader everything in order to create the author/reader connection of curiosity, not realizing that the context is more important. The reader will feel the weight of Sonja's return to this misery with the facts in hand about her status prior to this moment, perhaps more so.

What does it mean?

Booth argues that the author needs to make sure the reader understands the value system or context to satisfy "the reader's need to know where, in the world of values, he stands –that is, to know where the author wants him to stand."(p. 161) Chechnya is a story about ambiguity, confusion, desperation. So there are many legitimate unanswered questions regarding what is actually happening. However, Marra extends that to Akhmed in a manner that leaves the reader distanced from the question.

"For a moment she thinks he is a religious man, then remembers that most men have grown their beards out." (p.217) This seems like it might be important that he is/is not a religious man. But why? Later Sonja "wonders if Akhmed is religious after all" (p.217), after using the word "fucking" in front of him. Is Akhmed a religious man? And what does that signify in Chechnya? In the story setting all meaning is completely subjective. Marra doesn't help the reader to interpret this question. Sonja wonders about it, but we are given no insight into her character about what she thinks about that. The readers value structure doesn't necessarily make him/her want or not want him to be religious. What would Akhmed being religious mean and what actions would a religious man take actions that are different? We don't know and Marra doesn't tell us. The only action Akhmed does take that seems mildly religious is to pray when the men (either soldiers or rebels it doesn't matter) come for him.

"He prays for his wife, that Allah may welcome her in paradise. He prays for Havaa, that she might live to have a natural death. But when the men start beating him, when they throw him into the back of the waiting truck, Akhmed prays only for himself." (p.232)

This seems a reasonable response from anyone who is about to be disappeared, who will probably be tortured and then killed. What is the reader to take from this then? The result is merely a feeling of missing something.

Where authors dare to tread

Emotional distance to the wreckage that is life in Chechnya is the universal despair that even a reader who doesn't know war associates with those who experience it. Horror, shock, sadness. So by his setting Marra has leveraged those emotions. These are heightened by Natasha, Sonja's sister, who has been trafficked as a heroine induced prostitute in her attempt to escape the city. But this emotional closeness doesn't mean that culturally or experience-wise the reader is at the right distance to this world. Marra intentionally plays upon this by interjecting commonplace rituals of life into a setting infused with insanity.

The war has been going on for ten years in this story. When Akhmed's dying wife asks him where he has been he says, "Just checking the mail. He says in explanation of his absence."(p.220) The point that is being made, he's been gone all day, is that she is out of it. There has no doubt been no mail for years. The phrase is hangover from a civilized world.

"There has always been a war. That shouldn't get in the way of daily exercise." (p. 221) Sonja is serious when she says this, and the irony of the statement is intentional. She doesn't worry about getting cancer. We know this explicitly. Her sister has been raped and sold and raped again, and Sonja's response to this is "daily exercise. The comment being completey out of alignment with the situation. Marra has revealed himself here as author because we know that Sonja's comment is completely irrational, and he doesn't have her reflect on that. So this is him telling the reader directly.

"Their lips were blue from drinking windshield wiper fluid." (p. 222) Marra delivers this (through Natasha) without commentary. In contrast, on the following page he takes the time to direct us to the fact that "Tobacco was considered a luxury." (p.223) I would argue here that he has under-distanced the story. That tobacco is a luxury in a war zone is self-evident, especially in this story since Sonja was rewarded with cigarettes by a war lord for delivering his wife's baby. So there is no need to shore up tobacco as a luxury yet leave the reader to rationalize for him/herself that people are sitting around drinking a poisonous liquid.

"We're in the wilderness, "Ramzan says, patting the trunk with his gloved hand. "A wilderness without Moses, without prophets or angels to guide us." (p.231) Distance here was too far. A reader with no knowledge of the Koran would wonder if Moses was integral to it. It is reasonable to think that Marra intentionally uses Moses, common prophet in both Christian and Islamic religions to demonstrate that the difference is negligent. Again, his presence being firmly felt outside of his characters. It raised questions that the common reader may have asked, may have researched, and these questions could have been avoided had Marra reached across the divide brought the reader into the religious context completely.