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Cathedral By Raymond Carter

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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Mays, Kelly J., editor. Title: The Norton introduction to lit er a ture / [edited by] Kelly J. Mays, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Description: Shorter thirteenth edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Com pany, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018004891 | ISBN 9780393664928 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Lit er a ture— Collections. Classification: LCC PN6014 .N67 2018 | DDC 808.8— dc23

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Cover design: Pete Garceau

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Brief Table of Contents

Preface for Instructors xxviii Introduction 1

PART ONE Fiction 1 Fiction: Reading, Responding, Writing 16

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT 75

2 Plot 75

3 Narration and Point of View 169

4 Character 210

5 Setting 282

6 Symbol and Figurative Language 380

7 Theme 429

EXPLORING CONTEXTS 512

8 The Author’s Work as Context: Flannery O’Connor 512

9 Cultural and Historical Contexts: Women in Turn- of- the- Century Amer i ca 564

10 Critical Contexts: Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” 607

READING MORE FICTION 643

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v i BRIeF TABLe oF CoNTeNTS

PART TWO Poetry 11 Poetry: Reading, Responding, Writing 730

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT 769

12 Speaker: Whose Voice Do We Hear? 769

13 Situation and Setting: What Happens? Where? When? 795

14 Theme and Tone 830

15 Language: Word Choice and Order 854

16 Visual Imagery and Figures of Speech 866

17 Symbol 884

18 The Sounds of Poetry 899

19 Internal Structure 930

20 External Form 951

EXPLORING CONTEXTS 984

21 The Author’s Work as Context: Adrienne Rich 986

22 The Author’s Work as Context: William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience 1055

23 Cultural and Historical Contexts: The Harlem Re nais sance 1065

24 Critical Contexts: Sylvia Plath’s “ Daddy” 1102

READING MORE POETRY 1131

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BRIeF TABLe oF CoNTeNTS v ii

PART THREE Drama 25 Drama: Reading, Responding, Writing 1194

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT 1221

26 Ele ments of Drama 1221

EXPLORING CONTEXTS 1332

27 The Author’s Work as Context: William Shakespeare 1332

28 Cultural and Historical Contexts: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun 1496

29 Critical Contexts: Sophocles’s Antigone 1600

READING MORE DRAMA 1665

PART FOUR Writing about Lit er a ture 30 Basic Moves: Paraphrase, Summary, Description 1914

31 The Lit er a ture Essay 1918

32 The Writing Pro cess 1938

33 The Lit er a ture Research Essay 1951

34 Quotation, Citation, and Documentation 1962

35 Sample Research Essay 1992

Critical Approaches A1

Permissions Acknowl edgments A27

Index of Authors A45

Index of Titles and First Lines A52

Glossary/Index of Literary Terms A61

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Contents

Preface for Instructors xxviii Introduction 1

What Is Lit er a ture? 1

What Does Lit er a ture Do? 3

John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer 4 What Are the Genres of Lit er a ture? 4

Why Read Lit er a ture? 6

Why Study Lit er a ture? 9

Hai- Dang Phan, My Father’s “Norton Introduction to Lit er a ture,” Third Edition (1981) 10

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Hai- Dang Phan 12

John Crowe Ransom, Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter 13

PART ONE Fiction 1 Fiction: Reading, Responding, Writing 16

anonymous, The Elephant in the Village of the Blind 17 Reading and Responding to Fiction 20 linda brewer, 20/20 20

SAMPLE WRITING: Annotation and Notes on “20/20” 21

Reading and Responding to Graphic Fiction 23 jules feiffer, Superman 23 Writing about Fiction 27 raymond carver, Cathedral 28

SAMPLE WRITING: Reading Notes on “Cathedral” 39

SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on “Cathedral” 42

SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on “Cathedral” 45

Telling Stories: An Album 49 grace paley, A Conversation with My Father 50

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Grace Paley 54

anton chekhov, Gooseberries 55 tim o’brien, The Lives of the Dead 63

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x CoNTeNTS

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT 75

2 Plot 75 Plot versus Action, Sequence, and Subplot 75 Pace 76 Conflicts 76 gary trudeau, Doonesbury 77 jacob and wilhelm grimm, The Shroud 77 The Five Parts of Plot 78 Common Plot Types 82 ralph ellison, King of the Bingo Game 83 james baldwin, Sonny’s Blues 91 joyce carol oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You

Been? 114 AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Joyce Carol Oates 126

viet thanh Nguyen, I’d Love You to Want Me 127 SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on “King of the Bingo Game” 141

Initiation Stories: An Album 144 toni cade bambara, The Lesson 146

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Toni Cade Bambara 152

alice munro, Boys and Girls 152 john updike, A & P 163

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: John Updike 168

3 Narration and Point of View 169 Types of Narration 170 Tense 171 Narrator versus Implied Author 171 edgar allan poe, The Cask of Amontillado 173 george saunders, Puppy 179

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: George Saunders 186

virginia woolf, The Mark on the Wall 186 adam johnson, In ter est ing Facts 192

4 Character 210 Heroes and Villains versus Protagonists and Antagonists 211 Major versus Minor Characters 212 Flat versus Round and Static versus Dynamic Characters 212 Stock Characters and Archetypes 213 Reading Character in Fiction and Life 213 william faulkner, Barn Burning 217 toni morrison, Recitatif 230

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CoNTeNTS xi

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Toni Morrison 244

david foster wallace, Good People 245 alissa nutting, Model’s Assistant 250

Monsters: An Album 259 margaret atwood, Lusus Naturae 260 karen russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves 265 jorge luis borges, The House of Asterion 277

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Jorge Luis Borges 280

5 Setting 282 Temporal and Physical, General and Par tic u lar Setting 282 Functions of Setting 282 Vague and Vivid Settings 283 italo calvino, from Invisible Cities 284 margaret mitchell, from Gone with the Wind 284 Traditional Expectations of Time and Place 285 alice randall, from The Wind Done Gone 286 james joyce, Araby 288 amy tan, A Pair of Tickets 293 judith ortiz cofer, Volar 306 annie proulx, Job History 308

SAMPLE WRITING: Annotation and Close Reading on “Araby” 314

The Future: An Album 317 william gibson, The Gernsback Continuum 318

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: William Gibson 327

ray bradbury, The Veldt 328 AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Ray Bradbury 339

octavia E. butler, Bloodchild 340 AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Octavia E. Butler 354

jennifer egan, Black Box 355 AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Jennifer Egan 378

6 Symbol and Figurative Language 380 Literary Symbolism 381 Figures of Speech 382 Interpreting Symbolism and Figurative Language 383 nathaniel hawthorne, The Birth- Mark 385 a. s. byatt, The Thing in the Forest 397 edwidge danticat, A Wall of Fire Rising 412

SAMPLE WRITING: Comparative Essay on “The Birth- Mark” and

“The Thing in the Forest” 425

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7 Theme 429 aesop, The Two Crabs 429 Theme(s): Singular or Plural? 430 Be Specific: Theme as Idea versus Topic or Subject 430 Don’t Be Too Specific: Theme as General Idea 431 Theme versus Moral 431 stephen crane, The Open Boat 433 gabriel garcÍa mÁrquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings:

A Tale for Children 451 yasunari kawabata, The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket 456 junot dÍaz, Wildwood 459

Cross- Cultural Encounters: An Album 477 bharati mukherjee, The Management of Grief 478

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Bharati Mukherjee 491

jhumpa lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies 491 AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Jhumpa Lahiri 507

david sedaris, Jesus Shaves 508

EXPLORING CONTEXTS 512

8 The Author’s Work as Context: Flannery O’Connor 512 Biographical Approaches to Lit er a ture 513 Implied Author or Narrator 514 Style and Tone 515 Three Stories by Flannery O’Connor 516 A Good Man Is Hard to Find 516 Good Country People 527 Every thing That Rises Must Converge 540 Passages from Flannery O’Connor’s Essays and Letters 550 Critical Excerpts 554 mary gordon, from Flannery’s Kiss 554 ann e. reuman, from Revolting Fictions: Flannery O’Connor’s

Letter to Her Mother 557 eileen pollack, from Flannery O’Connor and the

New Criticism 560

9 Cultural and Historical Contexts: Women in Turn- of- the- Century Amer i ca 564 Women at the Turn of the Century: An Overview 565 Women Writers in a Changing World 567 kate chopin, The Story of an Hour 568 charlotte perkins gilman, The Yellow Wall paper 571

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CoNTeNTS xiii

susan glaspell, A Jury of Her Peers 582 Contextual Excerpts 599 charlotte perkins gilman, from Similar Cases 599 from Women and Economics 600 barbara boyd, from Heart and Home Talks: Politics and Milk 601 mrs. arthur lyttelton, from Women and Their Work 601 rheta childe dorr, from What Eight Million Women Want 602 The New York Times, from Mrs. Delong Acquitted 603 The Washington Post, from The Chances of Divorce 603 charlotte perkins gilman, from Why I Wrote “The Yellow

Wall - paper” 604 The Washington Post, The Rest Cure 604 The Washington Post, from Egotism of the Rest Cure 604

10 Critical Contexts: Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” 607 tim o’brien, The Things They Carried 609 Critical Excerpts 622 steven kaplan, from The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried 622 lorrie n. smith, from “The Things Men Do”: The Gendered Subtext

in Tim O’Brien’s Esquire Stories 627 susan farrell, from Tim O’Brien and Gender: A Defense of

The Things They Carried 637

READING MORE FICTION 643 louise erdrich, Love Medicine 643 william faulkner, A Rose for Emily 658 ernest hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants 665 franz kafka, A Hunger Artist 669 jamaica kincaid, Girl 675 bobbie ann mason, Shiloh 677 guy de maupassant, The Jewelry 687 herman melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street 693 eudora welty, Why I Live at the P.O. 719

PART TWO Poetry 11 Poetry: Reading, Responding, Writing 730

Defining Poetry 731 lydia davis, Head, Heart 732

AUTHORS ON THEIR CR AF T: Billy Collins 733

Poetic Subgenres and Kinds 734

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edwin arlington robinson, Richard Cory 735 robert frost, “Out, Out—” 736 thomas hardy, The Ruined Maid 737 william words worth, I wandered lonely as a cloud 738 frank o’hara, Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!] 739 phillis wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to Amer i ca 741 emily dickinson, The Sky is low— the Clouds are mean 742 billy collins, Divorce 742 bruce springsteen, Nebraska 743 robert hayden, A Letter from Phillis Wheatley 744 Responding to Poetry 746 aphra behn, On Her Loving Two Equally 746 Writing about Poetry 753

SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on “On Her Loving Two Equally” 755

SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on “On Her Loving Two Equally” 757

The Art of (Reading) Poetry: An Album 761 howard nemerov, Because You Asked about the Line between Prose

and Poetry 761 archibald macleish, Ars Poetica 762 czeslaw milosz, Ars Poetica? 763

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Czeslaw Milosz 764

elizabeth alexander, Ars Poetica #100: I Believe 764 marianne moore, Poetry 765 julia alvarez, “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen”? 766 billy collins, Introduction to Poetry 767

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT 769

12 Speaker: Whose Voice Do We Hear? 769 Narrative Poems and Their Speakers 769 etheridge knight, Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital

for the Criminal Insane 769 Speakers in the Dramatic Monologue 771 a. e. stallings, Hades Welcomes His Bride 771 The Lyric and Its Speaker 773 margaret atwood, Death of a Young Son by Drowning 773

AUTHORS ON THEIR CR AF T: Billy Collins and Sharon Olds 775

william words worth, She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways 776 dorothy parker, A Certain Lady 776 Poems for Further Study 777 walt whitman, I celebrate myself, and sing myself 777

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CoNTeNTS xv

langston hughes, Ballad of the Landlord 778 e. e. cummings, next to of course god amer i ca i 779 gwendolyn brooks, We Real Cool 779

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Gwendolyn Brooks 780

lucille clifton, cream of wheat 781 Exploring Gender: An Album 783 richard lovelace, Song: To Lucasta, Going to the Wars 784 mary, lady chudleigh, To the Ladies 784 wilfred owen, Disabled 785 elizabeth bishop, Exchanging Hats 786 david wagoner, My Father’s Garden 787 judith ortiz cofer, The Changeling 788 marie howe, Practicing 789

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Marie Howe 790

bob hicok, O my pa- pa 791 terrance hayes, Mr. T— 792 stacey waite, The Kind of Man I Am at the DMV 793

13 Situation and Setting: What Happens? Where? When? 795 Situation 796 rita dove, Daystar 796 denise duhamel, Humanity 101 797 tracy k. smith, Sci- Fi 798 Setting 799 matthew arnold, Dover Beach 799 One Poem, Multiple Situations and Settings 801 li- young lee, Persimmons 801 One Situation and Setting, Multiple Poems 803 christopher marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love 803 sir walter raleigh, The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd 804 The Occasional Poem 805 martÍn espada, Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass 806

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Martín Espada 807

The Carpe Diem Poem 807 john donne, The Flea 807 andrew marvell, To His Coy Mistress 808 The Aubade 809 john donne, The Sun Rising 810 james richardson, Late Aubade 811 Poems for Further Study 811 terrance hayes, Carp Poem 811 natasha trethewey, Pilgrimage 812

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xv i CoNTeNTS

mahmoud darwish, Identity Card 814 yehuda amichai, On Yom Kippur in 1967 . . . 816 yusef komunyakaa, Tu Do Street 817

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Yusef Komunyakaa 818

Homelands: An Album 821 maya angelou, Africa 821

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Maya Angelou 822

derek walcott, A Far Cry from Africa 822 AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Derek Walcott 824

judith ortiz cofer, The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica 825 cathy song, Heaven 826 agha shahid ali, Postcard from Kashmir 827 adrienne su, Escape from the Old Country 828

14 Theme and Tone 830 Tone 830 w. d. snodgrass, Leaving the Motel 831 Theme 832 maxine kumin, Woodchucks 832 adrienne rich, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers 833

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Adrienne Rich 834

Theme and Conflict 834 adrienne su, On Writing 835

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Adrienne Su 836

Poems for Further Study 836 paul laurence dunbar, Sympathy 836 w. h. auden, Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone 837 kay ryan, Repulsive Theory 838 maya angelou, Still I Rise 838

SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on Auden’s “Stop all the clocks,

cut off the telephone” 841

Family: An Album 845 simon j. ortiz, My Father’s Song 845 robert hayden, Those Winter Sundays 846 ellen bryant voigt, My Mother 846 martín espada, Of the Threads That Connect the Stars 848 emily grosholz, Eden 848 philip larkin, This Be the Verse 849

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Philip Larkin 850

jimmy santiago baca, Green Chile 850

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CoNTeNTS xv ii

paul martínez pompa, The Abuelita Poem 851 charlie smith, The Business 852 andrew hudgins, Begotten 853

15 Language: Word Choice and Order 854 Precision and Ambiguity 854 sarah cleghorn, The golf links lie so near the mill 854 martha collins, Lies 855 Denotation and Connotation 855 walter de la mare, Slim Cunning Hands 856 theodore roethke, My Papa’s Waltz 857 Word Order and Placement 857 sharon olds, Sex without Love 859

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Sharon Olds 860

Poems for Further Study 860 william blake, London 860 gerard manley hopkins, Pied Beauty 861 william carlos williams, The Red Wheelbarrow 861 This Is Just to Say 862

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: William Carlos Williams 862

kay ryan, Blandeur 863 martha collins, white paper #24 864 a. e. stallings, Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda 865

16 Visual Imagery and Figures of Speech 866 david bottoms, Hubert Blankenship 867 claude mckay, The Harlem Dancer 868 lynn powell, Kind of Blue 868 Simile and Analogy 869 todd boss, My Love for You Is So Embarrassingly 869 Meta phor 870 william shakespeare, That time of year thou mayst in me

behold 870 linda pastan, Marks 871 Personification 871 emily dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death— 872 Metonymy and Synecdoche 872 william words worth, London, 1802 873 tracy k. smith, Ash 874 emma bolden, House Is an Enigma 874 Allusion 875 amit majmudar, Dothead 875 patricia lockwood, What Is the Zoo for What 876

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xv iii CoNTeNTS

Poems for Further Study 878 william shakespeare, Shall I compare thee to

a summer’s day? 878 anonymous, The Twenty- Third Psalm 878 john donne, Batter my heart, three- personed God 879 randall jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner 879 joy harjo, The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor

Window 880 john brehm, Sea of Faith 882

17 Symbol 884 The In ven ted Symbol 884 james dickey, The Leap 885 The Traditional Symbol 887 edmund waller, Song 887 dorothy parker, One Perfect Rose 888 The Symbolic Poem 889 william blake, The Sick Rose 889 Poems for Further Study 890 john keats, Ode to a Nightingale 890 robert frost, The Road Not Taken 892 howard nemerov, The Vacuum 893 adrienne rich, Diving into the Wreck 894 roo borson, After a Death 896 brian turner, Jundee Ameriki 896

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Brian Turner 897

sharon olds, Bruise Ghazal 898

18 The Sounds of Poetry 899 Rhyme 899 Other Sound Devices 901 alexander pope, from The Rape of the Lock 902 Sound Poems 903 helen chasin, The Word Plum 903 alexander pope, Sound and Sense 903 Poetic Meter 905 samuel taylor coleridge, Metrical Feet 907 anonymous, There was a young girl from St. Paul 910 alfred, lord tennyson, from The Charge of the Light Brigade 910 jane taylor, The Star 911 anne bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband 911 jessie pope, The Call 912

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CoNTeNTS xix

wilfred owen, Dulce et Decorum Est 913 Poems for Further Study 914 william shakespeare, Like as the waves make towards

the pebbled shore 914 gerard manley hopkins, The Windhover 914 amit majmudar, Ode to a Drone 915 walt whitman, A Noiseless Patient Spider 915 kevin young, Ode to Pork 916

Word and Music: An Album 919 thomas campion, When to Her Lute Corinna Sings 920 anonymous, Sir Patrick Spens 920 dudley randall, Ballad of Birmingham 922 augustus montague toplady, A Prayer, Living and Dying 923 robert hayden, Homage to the Empress of the Blues 924 bob dylan, The Times They Are A- Changin’ 924 linda pastan, Listening to Bob Dylan, 2005 925 mos def, Hip Hop 926 jose b. gonzalez, Elvis in the Inner City 928

19 Internal Structure 930 Dividing Poems into “Parts” 930 pat mora, Sonrisas 930 Internal versus External or Formal “Parts” 932 galway kinnell, Blackberry Eating 932 Lyr ics as Internal Dramas 932 seamus heaney, Punishment 933 samuel taylor coleridge, Frost at Midnight 935 sharon olds, The Victims 937 Making Arguments about Structure 938 Poems without “Parts” 938 walt whitman, I Hear Amer i ca Singing 938 Poems for Further Study 939 william shakespeare, Th’ expense of spirit in a

waste of shame 939 percy bysshe shelley, Ode to the West Wind 940 philip larkin, Church Going 942

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Philip Larkin 944

katie ford, Still- Life 945 kevin young, Greening 945

SAMPLE WRITING: Essay in Pro gress on “Church Going” 947

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xx CoNTeNTS

20 External Form 951 Stanzas 951 Traditional Stanza Forms 951 robert frost, Acquainted with the Night 952 richard wilbur, Terza Rima 952 Traditional Verse Forms 953 Fixed Forms or Form- Based Subgenres 954 Traditional Forms: Poems for Further Study 955 dylan thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night 955 natasha trethewey, Myth 956 elizabeth bishop, Sestina 957 a. e. stallings, Sestina: Like 958 The Way a Poem Looks 959 e. e. cummings, l(a 959 Buffalo Bill’s 960 Concrete Poetry 960 george herbert, Easter Wings 961 may swenson, Women 962

The Sonnet: An Album 965 francesco petrarch, Upon the breeze she spread her

golden hair 966 henry constable, My lady’s presence makes the roses red 966 william shakespeare, My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun 967 Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 967 Let me not to the marriage of true minds 968 john milton, When I consider how my light is spent 968 william words worth, Nuns Fret Not 969 The world is too much with us 969 elizabeth barrett browning, How Do I Love Thee? 970 christina rossetti, In an Artist’s Studio 970 edna st. vincent millay, What lips my lips have kissed,

and where, and why 971 Women have loved before as I love now 971 I, being born a woman and distressed 972 I will put Chaos into fourteen lines 972 gwendolyn brooks, First Fight. Then Fiddle. 973 gwen harwood, In the Park 973 june jordan, Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Miracle Wheatley 974 billy collins, Sonnet 974 harryette mullen, Dim Lady 975

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CoNTeNTS xxi

Haiku: An Album 977 Traditional Japa nese Haiku 977 chiyojo, Whether astringent 977 bashō, A village without bells— 978 This road— 978 buson, Coolness— 978 Listening to the moon 978 One Haiku, Four Translations 978 lafcadio hearn, Old pond— 978 clara a. walsh, An old- time pond 978 earl miner, The still old pond 979 allen ginsberg, The old pond 979 Con temporary English- Language Haiku 979 ezra pound, In a Station of the Metro 979 allen ginsberg, Looking over my shoulder 979 richard wright, In the falling snow 979 etheridge knight, Eastern guard tower 980 The falling snow flakes 980 Making jazz swing in 980

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Etheridge Knight 980

mark jarman, Haiku 981 sonia sanchez, from 9 Haiku (for Freedom’s Sisters) 981 sue standing, Diamond Haiku 981 linda pastan, In the Har- Poen Tea Garden 982 Twaiku 983

EXPLORING CONTEXTS 984

21 The Author’s Work as Context: Adrienne Rich 986 The Poetry of Adrienne Rich 987 Poems by Adrienne Rich 990 At a Bach Concert 990 Storm Warnings 990 Living in Sin 991 Snapshots of a Daughter- in- Law 991

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Adrienne Rich 995

Planetarium 996 For the Rec ord 997 My mouth hovers across your breasts 998 History 998 Transparencies 999

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To night No Poetry Will Serve 1000 Passages from Rich’s Essays 1001 From When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re- Vision 1001 From A Communal Poetry 1002 From Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts 1003 From Poetry and the Forgotten Future 1006 A Poem for Adrienne Rich Joy HARJO, By the Way 1010

SAMPLE WRITING: Comparative Essay on Sonnets by Shakespeare

and Millay 1015

Emily Dickinson: An Album 1021 Poems by Emily Dickinson 1022 Wild Nights— Wild Nights! 1022 “Hope” is the thing with feathers— 1023 After great pain, a formal feeling comes— 1023 I heard a Fly buzz— when I died 1024 My Life had stood— a Loaded Gun— 1024 I stepped from Plank to Plank 1025 Tell all the truth but tell it slant— 1025 Poems about Emily Dickinson 1026 wendy cope, Emily Dickinson 1026 hart crane, To Emily Dickinson 1026 billy collins, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes 1027

W. B. Yeats: An Album 1031 Poems by W. B. Yeats 1033 The Lake Isle of Innisfree 1033

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: W. B. Yeats 1034

All Things Can Tempt Me 1034 Easter 1916 1035 The Second Coming 1037 Leda and the Swan 1038 Sailing to Byzantium 1038 A Poem about W. B. Yeats 1040 w. h. auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats 1040

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: W. H. Auden 1042

Pat Mora: An Album 1047 Elena 1048 Gentle Communion 1049

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CoNTeNTS xxiii

Mothers and Daughters 1049 La Migra 1050 Ode to Adobe 1051

22 The Author’s Work as Context: William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience 1055 Color Insert: Facsimile Pages from Songs of Innocence and of Experience William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience Songs of Innocence 1057 Introduction 1057 The Ecchoing Green 1057 Holy Thursday 1058 The Lamb 1058 The Chimney Sweeper 1059 Songs of Experience 1059 Introduction 1059 The Tyger 1060 The Garden of Love 1061 The Chimney Sweeper 1061 Holy Thursday 1061

23 Cultural and Historical Contexts: The Harlem Renaissance 1065 Poems of the Harlem Re nais sance 1070 arna bontemps, A Black Man Talks of Reaping 1070 countee cullen, Yet Do I Marvel 1071 Saturday’s Child 1071 From the Dark Tower 1072 angelina grimkÉ, The Black Fin ger 1072 Tenebris 1073 langston hughes, Harlem 1073 The Weary Blues 1073 The Negro Speaks of Rivers 1074 I, Too 1075 helene johnson, Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem 1076 claude mckay, Harlem Shadows 1076 If We Must Die 1077 The Tropics in New York 1077 Amer i ca 1077 The White House 1078 Contextual Excerpts 1078 james weldon johnson, from the preface to The Book of American

Negro Poetry 1078

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xx iv CoNTeNTS

alain locke, from The New Negro 1080 rudolph fisher, from The Caucasian Storms Harlem 1084 w. e. b. du bois, from Two Novels 1088 zora neale hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me 1089 langston hughes, from The Big Sea 1092

SAMPLE WRITING: Research Essay on “I, Too” 1097

24 Critical Contexts: Sylvia Plath’s “ Daddy” 1102 sylvia plath, Daddy 1103 Critical Excerpts 1107 george steiner, from Dying Is an Art 1107 a. alvarez, from Sylvia Plath 1110 irving howe, from The Plath Cele bration: A Partial Dissent 1111 judith kroll, from Rituals of Exorcism: “Daddy” 1113 mary lynn broe, from Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath 1114 margaret homans, from A Feminine Tradition 1116 pamela j. annas, from A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of

Sylvia Plath 1117 steven gould axelrod, from Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the

Cure of Words 1119 lisa narbeshuber, from The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of

Sylvia Plath’s Poetry 1125

READING MORE POETRY 1131 w. h. auden, Musée des Beaux Arts 1131 robert browning, My Last Duchess 1132 kelly cherry, Alzheimer’s 1133 samuel taylor coleridge, Kubla Khan 1134 e. e. cummings, in Just- 1135 john donne, Death, be not proud 1136 The Good- Morrow 1137 Song 1137 A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning 1138 paul laurence dunbar, We Wear the Mask 1139 t. s. eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1139 robert frost, Fire and Ice 1143 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve ning 1143 seamus heaney, Digging 1144 gerard manley hopkins, God’s Grandeur 1145 Spring and Fall 1145 ben jonson, On My First Son 1146

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john keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn 1146 To Autumn 1148 yusef komunyakaa, Facing It 1149

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Yusef Komunyakaa 1150

linda pastan, To a Daughter Leaving Home 1151 marge piercy, Barbie Doll 1151 sylvia plath, Lady Lazarus 1152 Morning Song 1154 edgar allan poe, The Raven 1155 ezra pound, The River- Merchant’s Wife: A Letter 1157 christina rossetti, Goblin Market 1158 wallace stevens, Anecdote of the Jar 1171 The Emperor of Ice- Cream 1172 alfred, lord tennyson, Ulysses 1172 walt whitman, Facing West from California’s Shores 1174 richard wilbur, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World 1174 Biographical Sketches: Poets 1176

PART THREE Drama 25 Drama: Reading, Responding, Writing 1194

Reading Drama 1194 Thinking Theatrically 1196 susan glaspell, Trifles 1197 Responding to Drama 1208

SAMPLE WRITING: Annotation of Trifles 1208

SAMPLE WRITING: Reading Notes on Trifles 1211

Writing about Drama 1214 SAMPLE WRITING: Response Paper on Trifles 1216

SAMPLE WRITING: Essay on Trifles 1218

UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT 1221

26 Ele ments of Drama 1221 Character 1221 Plot and Structure 1223 Stages, Sets, and Setting 1225 Tone, Language, and Symbol 1228 Theme 1229 august wilson, Fences 1230

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: August Wilson 1282

quiara alegría hudes, Water by the Spoonful 1283

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xxv i Contents

EXPLORING CONTEXTS 1332

27 The Author’s Work as Context: William Shakespeare 1332 The Life of Shakespeare: A Biographical Mystery 1332 Exploring Shakespeare’s Work: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

and Hamlet 1334 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1338 Hamlet 1396

28 Cultural and Historical Contexts: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun 1496 The Historical Significance of A Raisin in the Sun 1497 The Great Migration 1498 Life in the “Black Metropolis” 1499 The Civil Rights Movement 1503 African Americans and Africa 1504 The “Americanness” of A Raisin in the Sun 1505 lorraine hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun 1506

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Lorraine Hansberry 1570

Contextual Excerpts 1573 richard wright, from Twelve Million Black Voices . . . 1573 robert gruenberg, from Chicago Fiddles While Trumbull

Park Burns 1577 gertrude samuels, from Even More Crucial Than in the

South 1579 wilma dykeman and james stokely, from New Southerner:

The Middle- Class Negro 1582 martin luther king, jr., from Letter from Birmingham Jail 1584 robert c. weaver, from “The Negro as an American”: The Yearning

for Human Dignity 1586 earl e. thorpe, from Africa in the Thought of Negro

Americans 1590 phaon goldman, from The Significance of African Freedom for the

Negro American 1592 bruce norris, from Clybourne Park 1594

29 Critical Contexts: Sophocles’s Antigone 1600 Sophocles, Antigone 1602 Critical Excerpts 1635 richard c. jebb, from the introduction to The Antigone of

Sophocles 1635 maurice bowra, from Sophoclean Tragedy 1636 bernard knox, from the introduction to Antigone (1982) 1638

selection is not included for permissions reasons.

selection is not included for permissions reasons.

CoNTeNTS xxv ii

martha C. nussbaum, from Sophocles’ Antigone: Conflict, Vision, and Simplification 1645

philip holt, from Polis and Tragedy in the Antigone 1650 SAMPLE WRITING: Research Essay on Antigone 1660

READING MORE DRAMA 1665 anton chekhov, The Cherry Orchard 1665 henrik ibsen, A Doll House 1703 Jane martin, from Talking With . . . 1753 sophocles, Oedipus the King 1758 oscar wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest 1798 tennessee williams, A Streetcar Named Desire 1843

PART FOUR Writing about Lit er a ture 30 Basic Moves: Paraphrase, Summary, and Description 1914

31 The Lit er a ture Essay 1918

32 The Writing Process 1938

33 The Lit er a ture Research Essay 1951

34 Quotation, Citation, and Documentation 1962

35 Sample Research Essay 1992 sarah roberts, “ ‘Only a Girl’? Gendered Initiation in Alice Munro’s

‘Boys and Girls’ ” 1992

Critical Approaches A1

Permissions Acknowl edgments A27

Index of Authors A45

Index of Titles and First Lines A52

Glossary/Index of Literary Terms A61

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Preface for Instructors

L ike its pre de ces sors, this Thirteenth edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature offers in a single volume a complete course in reading literature and writing about it. A teaching anthology focused on the actual tasks, challenges, and questions typically faced by students and instructors, The Norton Introduction to Literature offers practical advice to help students transform their first impressions of literary works into fruitful discussions and meaningful critical essays, and it helps students and instructors together tackle the complex questions at the heart of literary study.

The Norton Introduction to Literature has been revised with an eye to providing a book that is as flexible and as useful as possible—adaptable to many different teaching styles and individual preferences—and that also conveys the excitement at the heart of literature itself.

NEW TO THE THIRTEENTH EDITION

Thirty- three new se lections

This lucky Thirteenth edition of The Norton Introduction to Lit er a ture features nine new stories, over twenty new poems, and one new play. These include new se lections from popu lar and canonical writers including Ray Bradbury, octavia Butler, Annie Proulx, oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf (in Fiction and Drama), Maya Angelou, emily Dickinson, Joy Harjo, and Claude McKay (in Poetry). We invite you to feast on Christina Rossetti’s delicious Goblin Market and a refreshed collection of Robert Frost poems complete with the oft- taught “out, out—” and “Fire and Ice.” But you will also find here work by exciting new authors such as Alissa Nutting, A. e. Stallings, and Pulitzer Prize winners Adam Johnson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Tracy K. Smith. Prompting the re introduction of John Crowe Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” which it appears alongside, Hai- Dang Phan’s moving “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Lit er a ture,’ Third edition (1981)” reminds us just how much new works and new voices renew and reanimate, rather than replace, classic ones.

A new science- fiction album

one of the more popu lar features of recent editions of The Norton Introduction to Lit er a ture are the albums that invite students to consider and compare works linked by author, subgenre, subject matter, or setting, and so on. You will find fifteen such albums in the Thirteenth edition, including an entirely new one featuring science fiction by octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, and Jennifer egan.

Improved writing pedagogy

Recent editions of The Norton Introduction to Lit er a ture greatly expanded and improved the resources for student writers, including thorough introductions to each

xxviii

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genre, broadened online materials, and new student writing. The Thirteenth edition offers an enlarged and revamped chapter on “Quotation, Citation, and Documenta- tion.” In keeping with the latest (8th edition) MLA guidelines, it explains the ele ments that comprise the works- cited entry and the princi ples by which any entry is assem- bled rather than presenting a dizzying menu of entry types for student writers to pore through and copy. Here, as throughout “Writing about Lit er a ture,” we demonstrate with brief examples, often drawn from the work of student or professional writers. A new student essay on Ralph ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game” brings the total of complete writing samples to nineteen, including notes, response papers, essays ana- lyzing one work or comparing several, and research essays exploring critical and/or historical contexts. As always, by including more and more lengthy extracts from pub- lished literary criticism than any other textbook of its kind, The Norton Introduction to Lit er a ture offers student writers both a trove of sources to draw on in articulating their own responses to par tic u lar works and models of the sorts of questions, strate- gies, and “moves” that power effective reading and writing about lit er a ture.

A new design and expanded photo program

A con temporary new design invites greater enjoyment and even greater use of the book’s many special features. The photo program has been enriched and expanded with new author photos throughout as well as contextual illustrations, such as the frontispiece for the first edition of Goblin Market by the poet’s brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an advertising poster for Buffalo Bill alongside the poem by e. e. Cum- mings, a movie still from The Black Panther to accompany the new Futures album, and many more.

Enhanced and updated Shakespeare

To make Shakespeare more accessible and enjoyable, every page of Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream features new in-line glossing of challenging words or allusions. The versions of both plays are adopted from the acclaimed new third edi- tion of The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt. In addition, students encountering Shakespeare for the first time will appreciate the rich links, videos, and recordings available within the ebook.

New combined glossary and index

A new combined Glossary and Index makes it easier for students to review key liter- ary terms and find examples within the book.

Unmatched support for students, with new close reading workshops

New to our popu lar LitWeb site are twenty- five Close Reading Workshops. Providing step- by- step guidance in literary analy sis and interpretation drawing on works in the anthology, many of which are enhanced with audio, these interactive workshops help students learn how to observe, contextualize, analyze, and create an argument based on a close reading of text. The workshops are easily assignable with class reports that allow you to see how students’ close reading skills improve over the course of the semester.

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Unmatched support for instructors

The new Interactive Instructor’s Guide by Jason Snart features hundreds of teach- ing resources in one searchable, sortable site to help you enrich your classes and save course- prep time, including:

- Teaching notes, discussion questions, suggestions for writing, and in- class activities for every work in the anthology

- Hundreds of downloadable images for in- class pre sen ta tion - The Writing about Lit er a ture video series - Lecture Power Points for the most- taught works in the anthology

HALLMARK FEATURES OF THE NORTON INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE

Although this Thirteenth edition contains much that is new or refashioned, the essential features of the text have remained consistent over many editions:

Diverse selections with broad appeal

Because readings are the central component of any literature class, my most important task has been to select a rich array of appealing and challenging literary works. Among the 61 stories, 300 poems, and 12 plays in The Norton Introduction to Literature, readers will find selections by well- established and emerging voices alike, representing a broad range of times, places, cultural perspectives, and styles. The readings are excitingly diverse in terms of subject and style as well as author- ship and national origin. In selecting and presenting literary texts, my top priorities continue to be quality as well as pedagogical relevance and usefulness. I have inte- grated the new with the old and the experimental with the canonical, believing that contrast and variety help students recognize and respond to the unique fea- tures of any literary work. In this way, I aim to help students and instructors alike approach the unfamiliar by way of the familiar (and vice versa).

Helpful and unobtrusive editorial matter

As always, the instructional material before and after each selection avoids dictat- ing any par tic u lar interpretation or response, instead highlighting essential terms and concepts in order to make the literature that follows more accessible to student readers. Questions and writing suggestions help readers apply general concepts to specific readings in order to develop, articulate, refine, and defend their own responses. As in all Norton anthologies, I have annotated the works with a light hand, seeking to be informative but not interpretive.

An introduction to the study of literature

To introduce students to fiction, poetry, and drama is to open up a complex field of study with a long history. The Introduction addresses many of the questions that students may have about the nature of literature as well as the practice of literary criticism. By exploring some of the most compelling reasons for reading and writ- ing about literature, much of the mystery about matters of method is cleared away,

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PReFACe FoR INSTRUCToRS xxxi

and I provide motivated students with a sense of the issues and opportunities that lie ahead as they study literature. As in earlier editions, I encourage student engage- ment with individual authors and their perspectives in “Authors on Their Work” features as well as single- author chapters and albums.

Thoughtful guidance for writing about literature

The Thirteenth edition integrates opportunities for student writing at each step of the course, highlighting the mastery of skills for students at every level. “Reading, Responding, Writing” chapters at the beginning of each genre unit offer students concrete advice about how to transform careful reading into productive and insight- ful writing. Sample questions for each work or about each element (e.g., “Questions about Character”) provide exercises for answering these questions or for applying new concepts to par tic u lar works, and examples of student writing demonstrate how a student’s notes on a story or poem may be developed into a response paper or an or ga nized critical argument. New examples of student writing bring the total number to nineteen.

The constructive, step- by- step approach to the writing pro cess is thoroughly demonstrated in the “Writing about Literature” section. As in the chapters intro- ducing concepts and literary selections, the first steps presented in the writing sec- tion are simple and straightforward, outlining the basic formal elements common to essays—thesis, structure, and so on. Following these steps encourages students to approach the essay both as a distinctive genre with its own elements and as an accessible form of writing with a clear purpose. From here, I walk students through the writing pro cess: how to choose a topic, gather evidence, and develop an argu- ment; the methods of writing a research essay; and the mechanics of effective quotation and responsible citation and documentation. Also featured is a sample research essay that has been annotated to call attention to important features of good student writing.

even more resources for student writers are available at the free student web- site, LitWeb, described below.

A comprehensive approach to the contexts of literature

The Thirteenth edition not only offers expanded resources for interpreting and writing about literature but also extends the perspectives from which students can view par tic u lar authors and works. one of the greatest strengths of The Norton Introduction to Literature has been its exploration of the relation between literary texts and a variety of contexts. “Author’s Work as Context,” “Cultural and Historical Contexts,” and “Critical Contexts” chapters serve as mini- casebooks containing a wealth of material for in- depth, context- focused reading and writing assignments.

The “Critical Approaches” section provides an overview of contemporary criti- cal theory and its terminology and is useful as an introduction, a refresher, or a preparation for further exploration.

A sensible and teachable or ga ni za tion

The accessible format of The Norton Introduction to Literature, which has worked so well for teachers and students for many editions, remains the same. each genre is approached in three logical steps. Fiction, for example, is introduced by the chapter

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“Fiction: Reading, Responding, Writing,” which treats the purpose and nature of fic- tion, the reading experience, and the steps one takes to begin writing about fiction. This feature is followed by the six- chapter section called “Understanding the Text,” which concentrates on the genre’s key elements. Appearing throughout are albums that build on the chapters they follow, inviting students to compare stories narrated by protagonists whom others deem monsters, featuring initiation plots or futuristic settings, and so on. The third section, “exploring Contexts” suggests ways to embrace a work of literature by considering various literary, temporal, and cultural contexts. “Reading More Fiction,” the final component in the Fiction section, is a reservoir of additional readings for in de pen dent study or a different approach. The Poetry and Drama sections, in turn, follow exactly the same or gan i za tional format as Fiction.

The book’s arrangement allows movement from narrower to broader frameworks, from simpler to more complex questions and issues, and mirrors the way people read— wanting to learn more as they experience more. At the same time, I have worked hard to ensure that no section, chapter, or album depends on any other, allowing individual teachers to pick and choose which to assign and in what order.

Deep repre sen ta tion of select authors

The Norton Introduction to Lit er a ture offers a range of opportunities for in- depth study of noted authors. “Author’s Work” chapters and albums—on Flannery o’Connor, Adrienne Rich, William Blake, emily Dickinson, Pat Mora, W. B. Yeats, and William Shakespeare— encourage students to make substantive connections among works from dif fer ent phases of a writer’s career, guiding them to ask both what binds such works together into a distinctive oeuvre and how a writer’s approach and outlook evolves in and over time. But throughout the volume, students will encounter, too, at least two works each by a diverse array of other authors including William Faulkner, Tim o’Brien, Joy Harjo, Judith ortiz Cofer, Tracy K. Smith, and the fifty- three other poets whose biographies appear at the end of the Poetry section. “Critical Contexts” chapters on “The Things They Carried” (and The Things They Carried), on “ Daddy,” and on Antigone encourage students to delve deeper into specific works by Tim o’Brien, Sylvia Plath, and Sophocles by considering the rich and varied commentary, even controversy, those authors’ works have inspired. “Cultural and Historical Context” chapters— featuring stories by Susan Glaspell, Charlotte Per- kins Gilman, and Kate Chopin; poetry and prose of the Harlem Re nais sance; and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun— remind students that authors and their works also both emerge out of and shape the contours and controversies of par tic u lar moments and milieus, even as they speak to ours.

AC KNOW LEDG MENTS

In working on this book, I have been guided by teachers and students in my own and other en glish departments who have used this textbook and responded with comments and suggestions. Thanks to such capable help, I am hopeful that this book will continue to offer a solid and stimulating introduction to the experience of literature.

This project continually reminds me why I follow the vocation of teaching litera- ture, which after all is a communal rather than a solitary calling. Since its incep- tion, The Norton Introduction to Literature has been very much a collaborative effort.

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PReFACe FoR INSTRUCToRS xxxiii

I am grateful for the opportunity to carry on the work begun by the late Carl Bain and Jerome Beaty, whose student I will always be. And I am equally indebted to my wonderful former co-editors Paul Hunter and Alison Booth. Their wisdom and intel- ligence have had a profound effect on me, and their stamp will endure on this and all future editions of this book. I am thankful to Alison especially for the erudition, savvy, grace, and humor she brought to our partnership. Their intelligence, erudition, grace, and humor have had a profound effect on me, and their stamp will endure on this and all future editions of this book.

So, too, will that of Spencer Richardson- Jones, my Norton editorial partner on the last two (eleventh and twelfth) editions. For the wisdom and wit he brought to that partnership, for the all- new life he breathed into this book, and for his laser- like atten- tion to— and indefatigable championship of—it, I am forever grateful. The book’s new in- house editor, Sarah Touborg, has proved a worthy successor under much less than ideal circumstances. And I am thankful—as I think all users of the Thirteenth edi- tion will be— for the new perspective and insight she has brought to this proj ect. With admirable skill and great energy, assistant editor Madeline Rombes managed myriad manuscript details. I am grateful to proj ect editor Christine D’Antonio and copy- editor Rebecca Caine, photo editor Ted Szczepanski and researcher Julie Tesser, production man ag ers Ashley Horna and Stephen Sajdak, and media editor Carly Frasier Doria who brought together the innovative array of web resources and other pedagogical tools. Huge, heartfelt thanks, too, to Kimberly Bowers, the very best, brightest, and most tireless of marketing man ag ers.

In putting together the Thirteenth edition, I have accrued debts to many friends and colleagues including Frederic Svoboda, of the University of Michigan– Flint; his student, Megan Groeneveld; and other users of the Twelfth edition who generously reached out to point out its errors, as well as successes. Special thanks to the tal- ented Francis Moi Moi, for permission to use his essay on “King of the Bingo Game”; to Darren Lone-Fight, for introducing me to the work of Indigenous Futurist Steven Paul Judd; to Jane Hafen, Molly o’Donnell, emily Setina, and Anne Stevens, for sage advice on literary se lections and much else; to my sister, Nelda Mays, and to my UNLV students, whose open- mindedness, strong- mindedness, perseverance, and pas- sion inspire me every day; and, as always, to Hugh Jackson, my in- house editor in the most literal of senses.

The Norton Introduction to Literature continues to thrive because so many teachers and students generously take the time to provide valuable feedback and sugges- tions. Thank you to all who have done so. This book is equally your making.

At the beginning of planning for the Twelfth edition, my editors at Norton solic- ited the guidance of hundreds of instructors via in- depth reviews and a Web- hosted survey. The response was impressive, bordering on overwhelming; it was also im mensely helpful. Thank you to those who provided extensive written commentary: Julianne Altenbernd (Cypress College), Troy Appling (Florida Gateway College), Christina Bisirri (Seminole State College), Jill Channing (Mitchell Community College), Thomas Chester (Ivy Tech), Marcelle Cohen (Valencia College), Patricia Glanville (State College of Florida), Julie Gibson (Greenville Tech), Christina Grant (St. Charles Community College), Lauren Hahn (City Colleges of Chicago), Zachary Hyde (Valencia College), Brenda Jernigan (Methodist University), Mary Anne Keefer (Lord Fairfax Community College), Shari Koopman (Valencia Col- lege), Jessica Rabin (Anne Arundel Community College), Angela Rasmussen (Spokane Community College), Britnee Shandor (Lanier Technical College), Heidi

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Sheridan (ocean County College), Jeff Tix (Wharton Jr. College), Bente Videbaek (Stony Brook University), Patrice Willaims (Northwest Florida State College), and Connie Youngblood (Blinn College).

Thanks also to everyone who responded to the survey online for the Thir- teenth edition:

Beth Anish (Community College of Rhode Island), eric Ash (Wayland Baptist University), Matthew Ayres (County College of Morris), Suzanne Barnett (Francis Marion University), Stuart Bartow (SUNY Adirondack), Jon Brooks (Northwest Flor- ida State College), Akilah Brown (Santa Fe College), Rachel Brunner (Sauk Valley Community College), Lisa Buchanan (Northeast State Community College), David Clark (Suffolk County Community College), Jim Compton (Muscatine Community College), Susan Dauer (Valencia College), Alexandra DeLuise (University of New Haven), Amber Durfield (Citrus College), Michelle Fernandes (Paramus High School), Africa Fine (Palm Beach State College), Christine Fisher (Trinity Valley Community College), Jeffrey Foster (University of New Haven), James Glickman (Community College of Rhode Island), Kathy Harrison (Alief In de pen dent School District, Kerr High School), Joan Hartman (William Paterson University), Spring Hyde (Lincoln College), Tina Iraca (Dutchess Community College), Jack Kelnhofer (ocean County College), ellen Knodt (Pennsylvania State University–Penn State Abington), Liz Langemak (La Salle University), Rachel Luckenbill (Southeastern University), Sarah Maitland (Bryant University), Cassandra Makela (Concordia University), Brtini Mastria (ocean County College), Marion McAvey (Becker Col- lege), Lizzie McCormick (Suffolk County Community College), Deborah Nester (Northwest Florida State College), Amy oneal- Self (Wor- Wic Community College), Keith o’Neill (Dutchess Community College), Natala orobello (Florida South- Western State College), Michele oster (Suffolk County Community College), Matthew Parry (Bishop england High School), Barri Piner (University of North Carolina Wilmington), Joshua Rafael Rodriguez (east Los Angeles College), Kathy Romack (University of West Florida), Shelbey Rosengarten (St. Petersburg College), Jennifer Royal (Santa Rosa Ju nior College), John Sauls (east Arkansas Community College), Richard Sears (oklahoma State University– Stillwater), Bonnie Spears (Chaffey College), Camilla Stastny (SouthLake Christian Acad emy), Jason Stuff (Alfred State College), Donna Jane Terry (St. Johns River State College), Filiz Turhan (Suffolk County Community College), Roger Vaccaro (St. Johns River State College), Tammy Verkamp (Arkansas Tech University–ozark), Bente Videbaek (Stony Brook University), Stephanie Webster (Ivy Tech Community College), and Kelli Wilkes (Columbus Technical College).

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1

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Introduction

In the opening chapters of Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854), the aptly named Thomas Gradgrind warns the teachers and pupils at his “model” school to avoid using their imaginations. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life,” exclaims Mr. Gradgrind. To press his point, Mr. Gradgrind asks “girl number twenty,” Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus performer, to define a horse. When she cannot, Gradgrind turns to Bitzer, a pale, spiritless boy who “looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.” A “model” student of this “model” school, Bitzer gives exactly the kind of definition to satisfy Mr. Gradgrind:

Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty- four grinders, four eye- teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs.

Anyone who has any sense of what a horse is rebels against Bitzer’s lifeless pic- ture of that animal and against the “Gradgrind” view of reality. As these first scenes of Hard Times lead us to expect, in the course of the novel the fact- grinding Mr. Gradgrind learns that human beings cannot live on facts alone; that it is dangerous to stunt the faculties of imagination and feeling; that, in the words of one of the novel’s more lovable characters, “People must be amused.” Through the downfall of an exaggerated enemy of the imagination, Dickens reminds us why we like and even need to read literature.

What Is Literature?

But what is literature? Before you opened this book, you probably could guess that it would contain the sorts of stories, poems, and plays you have encountered in En glish classes or in the literature section of a library or bookstore. But why are some written works called literature whereas others are not? And who gets to decide? The American Heritage Dictionary of the En glish Language offers a num- ber of definitions for the word literature, one of which is “imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value.” In this book, we adopt a version of that definition by focusing on fictional stories, poems, and plays— the three major kinds (or genres)1 of “imaginative or creative writing” that form the heart of litera- ture as it has been taught in schools and universities for over a century. Many of the works we have chosen to include are already ones “of recognized artistic value” and thus belong to what scholars call the canon, a select, if much- debated and ever- evolving, list of the most highly and widely esteemed works. Though quite a few of the literary texts we include are too new to have earned that status, they, too, have already drawn praise, and some have even generated controversy.

Certainly it helps to bear in mind what others have thought of a literary work. Yet one of this book’s primary goals is to get you to think for yourself, as well as

1. Throughout this book, terms included in the glossary appear in bold font.

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2 InTroDuCTIon

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communicate with others, about what “imaginative writing” and “artistic value” are or might be and thus about what counts as literature. What makes a story or poem different from an essay, a newspaper editorial, or a technical manual? For that matter, what makes a published, canonical story like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener2 both like and unlike the sorts of stories we tell each other every day? What about so- called oral literature, such as the fables and folktales that cir- culated by word of mouth for hundreds of years before they were ever written down? or published works such as comic strips and graphic novels that rely little, if at all, on the written word? or Harlequin romances, tele vi sion shows, and the stories you collaborate in making when you play a video game? Likewise, how is Shakespeare’s poem My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun both like and unlike a verse you might find in a Hallmark card or even a jingle in a mouthwash commercial?

Today, literature departments offer courses in many of these forms of expres- sion, expanding the realm of literature far beyond the limits of the dictionary definition. An essay, a song lyric, a screenplay, a supermarket romance, a novel by Toni Morrison or William Faulkner, and a poem by Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson— each may be read and interpreted in literary ways that yield insight and plea sure. What makes the literary way of reading different from pragmatic reading is, as scholar Louise rosenblatt explains, that it does not focus “on what will remain [. . .] after the reading— the information to be acquired, the logical solution to a problem, the actions to be carried out,” but rather on “what happens

2. Titles of poems, stories, and other literary se lections included in this book are formatted in small caps when those titles first appear in the body of any chapter and whenever they appear in a question or writing suggestion. other wise, all titles are formatted in accordance with MLA guidelines.

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during [. . .] reading.” The difference between pragmatic and literary reading, in other words, resembles the difference between a journey that is only about reaching a destination and one that is just as much about fully experiencing the ride.

In the pages of this book, you will find cartoons, song lyrics, folktales, and sto- ries and plays that have spawned movies. Through this inclusiveness, we do not intend to suggest that there are no distinctions among these various forms of expression or between a good story, poem, or play and a bad one; rather, we want to get you thinking, talking, and writing both about what the key differences and similarities among these forms are and what makes one work a better example of its genre than another. Sharpening your skills at these peculiarly intensive and responsive sorts of reading and interpretation is a primary purpose of this book and of most literature courses.

Another goal of inclusiveness is to remind you that literature doesn’t just belong in a textbook or a classroom, even if textbooks and classrooms are essential means for expanding your knowledge of the literary terrain and of the concepts and tech- niques essential to thoroughly enjoying and analyzing a broad range of literary forms. You may or may not be the kind of person who always takes a novel when you go to the beach or writes a poem about your experience when you get back home. You may or may not have taken literature courses before. Yet you already have a good deal of literary experience and even expertise, as well as much more to dis- cover about literature. A major aim of this book is to make you more conscious of how and to what end you might use the tools you already possess and to add many new ones to your tool belt.

What Does Literature Do?

one quality that may well differentiate stories, poems, and plays from other kinds of writing is that they help us move beyond and probe beneath abstractions by giv- ing us concrete, vivid particulars. rather than talking about things, they bring them to life for us by representing experience, and so they become an experience for us— one that engages our emotions, our imagination, and all of our senses, as well as our intellects. As the British poet Matthew Arnold put it more than a century ago, “The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus [. . .] who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakespeare [. . .] Wordsworth [. . .] Keats.”

To test Arnold’s theory, compare the American Heritage Dictionary’s rather dry definition of literature with the following poem, in which John Keats describes his first encounter with a specific literary work— George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epics by the ancient Greek poet Homer.

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JOHN KEATS On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer13

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo24 hold.

5 Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep- browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene35

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

10 When a new planet swims into his ken;46

Or like stout Cortez57 when with ea gle eyes He stared at the Pacific— and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

1816

Keats makes us see literature as a “wide expanse” by greatly developing this meta phor and complementing it with similes likening reading to the sighting of a “new planet” and the first glimpse of an undiscovered ocean. More important, he shows us what literature means and why it matters by allowing us to share with him the subjective experience of reading and the complex sensations it inspires— the dizzying exhilaration of discovery; the sense of power, accomplishment, and pride that comes of achieving something difficult; the wonder we feel in those rare moments when a much- anticipated experience turns out to be even greater than we had imagined it would be.

It isn’t the definitions of words alone that bring this experience to life for us as we read Keats’s poem, but also their sensual qualities— the way the words look, sound, and even feel in our mouths because of the par tic u lar way they are put together on the page. The sensation of excitement— of a racing heart and mind— is reproduced in us as we read the poem. For example, notice how the lines in the middle run into each other, but then Keats forces us to slow down at the poem’s end— stopped short by that dash and comma in the poem’s final lines, just as Cortez and his men are when they reach the edge of the known world and peer into the vastness that lies beyond.

What Are the Genres of Literature?

The conversation that is literature, like the conversation about literature, invites all comers, requiring neither a visa nor a special license of any kind. Yet literary

3. George Chapman’s were among the most famous re nais sance translations of Homer; he completed his Iliad in 1611, his Odyssey in 1616. Keats wrote the sonnet after being led to Chapman by a former teacher and reading the Iliad all night long. 4. Greek god of poetry and music. Fealty: literally, the loyalty owed by a vassal to his feudal lord. 5. Atmosphere. 6. range of vision; awareness. 7. Actually, Balboa; he first viewed the Pacific from Darien, in Panama.

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studies, like all disciplines, has developed its own terminology and its own sys- tems of classification. Helping you understand and effectively use both is a major purpose of this book.

Some essential literary terms are common, everyday words used in a special way in the conversation about literature. A case in point, perhaps, is the term literary criticism, as well as the closely related term literary critic. Despite the usual con- notations of the word criticism, literary criticism is called criticism not because it is negative or corrective but rather because those who write criticism ask searching, analytical, “critical” questions about the works they read. Literary criticism is both the pro cess of interpreting and commenting on literature and the result of that pro cess. If you write an essay on the play Hamlet, the poetry of John Keats, or the development of the short story in the 1990s, you engage in literary criti- cism. By writing the essay, you’ve become a literary critic.

Similarly, when we classify works of literature, we use terms that may be familiar to you but have specific meanings in a literary context. All academic disciplines have systems of classification, or taxonomies, as well as jargon. Biologists, for exam- ple, classify all organisms into a series of ever- smaller, more specific categories: kingdom, phylum or division, class, order, family, genus, and species. Classification and comparison are just as essential in the study of literature. We expect a poem to work in a certain way, for example, when we know from the outset that it is a poem and not, say, a factual news report or a short story. And— whether consciously or not— we compare it, as we read, to other poems we’ve read. If we know, further, that the poem was first published in eighteenth- century Japan, we expect it to work differently from one that appeared in the latest New Yorker. Indeed, we often choose what to read, just as we choose what movie to see, based on the “class” or “order” of book or movie we like or what we are in the mood for that day— horror or comedy, action or science fiction.

As these examples suggest, we generally tend to categorize literary works in two ways: (1) on the basis of contextual factors, especially historical and cultural context— that is, when, by whom, and where it was produced (as in nineteenth- century literature, the literature of the Harlem Re nais sance, American literature, or African American literature)— and (2) on the basis of formal textual features. For the latter type of classification, the one we focus on in this book, the key term is genre, which simply means, as the Oxford En glish Dictionary tells us, “A par tic u lar style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a par- tic u lar form, style, or purpose.”

Applied rigorously, genre refers to the largest categories around which this book is organized—fiction, poetry, and drama (as well as nonfiction prose). The word subgenre applies to smaller divisions within a genre, and the word kind to divisions within a subgenre. Subgenres of fiction include the novel, the novella, and the short story. Kinds of novels, in turn, include the bildungsroman and the epistolary novel. Similarly, important subgenres of nonfiction include the essay, as well as biography and autobiography; a memoir is a par tic u lar kind of autobiogra- phy, and so on.

However, the terms of literary criticism are not so fixed or so consistently, rig- orously used as biologists’ are. You will often see the word genre applied both much more narrowly— referring to the novel, for example, or even to a kind of novel such as the historical novel.

The way we classify a work depends on which aspects of its form or style we concentrate on, and categories may overlap. When we divide fiction, for example,

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into the subgenres novel, novella, and short story, we take the length of the works as the salient aspect. (novels are much longer than short stories.) But other fictional subgenres— detective fiction, gothic fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, and even romance— are based on the types of plots, characters, settings, and so on that are customarily featured in these works. These latter categories may include works from all the other, length- based categories. There are, after all, gothic novels (think Stephenie Meyer), as well as gothic short stories (think Edgar Allan Poe).

A few genres even cut across the boundaries dividing poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction. A prime example is satire— any literary work (whether poem, play, fic- tion, or nonfiction) “in which prevailing vices and follies are held up to ridicule” (Oxford En glish Dictionary). Examples of satire include poems such as Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1728); plays, movies, and tele vi sion shows, from Molière’s Tartuffe (1664) to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) to South Park; works of fiction like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759); and works of nonfiction such as Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729) and Ambrose Bierce’s The Dev il’s Dictionary (1906). Three other major genres that cross the borders between fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction are parody, pastoral, and romance.

Individual works can thus belong simultaneously to multiple generic categories or observe some conventions of a genre without being an example of that genre in any simple or straightforward way. The old En glish poem Beowulf is an epic and, because it’s written in verse, a poem. Yet because (like all epics) it narrates a story, it is also a work of fiction in the more general sense of that term.

Given this complexity, the system of literary genres can be puzzling, especially to the uninitiated. used well, however, classification schemes are among the most essential and effective tools we use to understand and enjoy just about everything, including literature.

Why Read Literature?

Because there has never been and never will be absolute agreement about where exactly the boundaries between one literary genre and another should be drawn or even about what counts as literature at all, it might be more useful from the outset to focus on why we look at par tic u lar forms of expression.

over the ages, people have sometimes dismissed all literature or at least certain genres as a luxury, a frivolous pastime, even a sinful indulgence. Plato famously banned poetry from his ideal republic on the grounds that it tells beautiful lies that “feed and water our passions” rather than our reason. Thousands of years later, the influential eighteenth- century phi los o pher Jeremy Bentham decried the “magic art” of literature as doing a good deal of “mischief” by “stimulating our passions” and “exciting our prejudices.” one of Bentham’s contemporaries— a minister— blamed the rise of immorality, irreligion, and even prostitution on the increasing popularity of that par tic u lar brand of literature called the novel.

Today, many Americans express their sense of literature’s insignificance by simply not reading it: According to a 2016 national Endowment for the Arts (nEA) report, only 43% of u.S. adults read at least one work of imaginative lit er a- ture in the previous year, the lowest percentage since nEA began its yearly sur- veys in 1982. Though the report also demonstrates that women are significantly more likely to read lit er a ture than men, as are college gradu ates, the drops in the literary reading rate occurred across the board, among people of all ages, races, and educational levels. Even if they very much enjoy reading on their own, many

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contemporary u.S. college students nonetheless hesitate to study or major in lit- erature for fear that their degree won’t provide them with marketable creden- tials, knowledge, or skills.

Yet millions of people continue to find both reading literature and discussing it with others to be enjoyable, meaningful, even essential activities. En glish thrives as a major at most colleges and universities, almost all of which require under- graduates majoring in other areas to take at least one course in literature. (Per- haps that’s why you are reading this book!) Schools of medicine, law, and business are today more likely to require their students to take literature courses than they were in past de cades, and they continue to welcome literature majors as appli- cants, as do many corporations. (As former Google and Twitter executive Santosh Jayaram told the Wall Street Journal in 2012, “En glish majors are exactly the people I’m looking for.”) So why do so many people read and study literature, and why do schools encourage and even require students to do so? Even if we know what literature is, what does it do for us? What is its value?

There are, of course, as many answers to such questions as there are readers. For centuries, a standard answer has been that imaginative literature provides a unique brand of “instruction and delight.” John Keats’s on First Looking into Chapman’s Homer illustrates some of the many forms such delight can take. Some kinds of imaginative writing offer us the delight of immediate escape, but imaginative writing that is more difficult to read and understand than a Harry Potter or Twilight novel offers escape of a different and potentially more instruc- tive sort, liberating us from the confines of our own time, place, and social milieu, as well as our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and looking at the world. In this way, a story, poem, or play can satisfy our desire for broader experience— including the sorts of experience we might be unable or unwilling to endure in real life. We can learn what it might be like to grow up on a Canadian fox farm or to party-hop with a model. We can travel back into the past, experiencing war from the perspective of a soldier watching his comrade die or of prisoners suffering in a nazi labor camp. We can journey into the future or into universes governed by entirely different rules than our own. Perhaps we yearn for such knowledge because we can best come to understand our own identities and outlooks by leaping over the bound- aries that separate us from other selves and worlds.

Keats’s friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that literature increases a person’s ability to make such leaps, to “imagine intensely and comprehensively” and “put himself in the place of another and of many othe[r]” people as one has to in order “to be greatly good.” Shelley meant “good” in a moral sense, reasoning that the ability both to accurately imagine and to truly feel the human consequences of our actions is the key to ethical behavior. numerous recent studies by cognitive psycholo- gists and neuroscientists endorse and expand on Shelley’s argument, demonstrating that while we read our brains respond to fictional events and characters precisely as they would to real ones. Perhaps as a result, readers— particularly of literary, as opposed to popu lar, fiction or nonfiction— perform better on tests mea sur ing their ability to infer or even predict, to understand, and to empathize with others’ thoughts and emotions. reading a poem, as opposed to a prose translation, sparks more activ- ity in more areas of the brain, including those associated with personal memory and emotion, as well as language. As a result, scientists posit, poetry triggers “reappraisal mechanisms,” making us reflect and rethink our own experiences. reading lit er a ture of vari ous genres thus, as one review of a de cade’s worth of research concludes, “enables us to better understand people, better cooperate with them.”

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Such abilities have great pragmatic and even economic, as well as personal, moral, even po liti cal value. In virtually any career you choose, you will need to interact positively and productively with both coworkers and clients, and in today’s increasingly globalized world, you will need to learn to deal effectively and empa- thetically with people vastly different from yourself. At the very least, literature written by people from various backgrounds and depicting various places, times, experiences, and feelings will give you some understanding of how others’ lives and worldviews may differ from your own— and how very much the same they may be. Such understanding is ever more in demand in an age when business success— according to many a venture cap i tal ist, marketing con sul tant, and Silicon Valley entrepreneur— often depends less on technical know- how than on both a grasp of the whys and hows of human be hav ior within and across cultures (markets), and the ability to tell compelling stories to potential funders and consumers alike.

Similarly, our rapidly changing world and economy require intellectual flexibility, adaptability, and ingenuity, making ever more essential the human knowledge, gen- eral skills, and habits of mind developed through the study of literature. Literature explores issues and questions relevant in any walk of life. Yet rather than offering us neat or comforting solutions and answers, literature enables us to experience diffi- cult situations and human conundrums in all their complexity and to look at them from various points of view. In so doing, it invites us sometimes to question con- ventional thinking and sometimes to see the wisdom of such thinking, even as it helps us imagine altogether new possibilities.

Finally, literature awakens us to the richness and complexity of language— our primary tool for engaging with, understanding, and shaping the world around us. As we read more and more, seeing how different writers use language to help us feel others’ joy, pain, love, rage, or laughter, we begin to recognize the vast range of pos- sibilities for expression. Writing and discussion in turn give us invaluable practice in discovering, expressing, and defending our own nuanced, often contradictory thoughts about both literature and life. The study of literature enhances our com- mand of language and our sensitivity to its effects and meanings in every form or medium, providing interpretation and communication skills especially crucial in our information age. By learning to appreciate and articulate what the language of a story, a poem, a play, or an essay does to us and by considering how it affects oth- ers, we also learn much about what we can do with language.

What We Do with Literature: Three Tips

1. Take a literary work on its own terms. Adjust to the work; don’t make the work adjust to you. Be prepared to hear things you do not want to hear. not all works are about your ideas, nor will they always present emotions you want to feel. But be tolerant and listen to the work first; later you can explore the ways you do or don’t agree with it.

2. Assume there is a reason for everything. Writers do make mistakes, but when a work shows some degree of verbal control it is usually safest to assume that the writer chose each word carefully; if the choice seems peculiar, you may be missing something. Try to account for everything in a work, see what kind of sense you can make of it, and figure out a coherent pattern that explains the text as it stands.

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hn hk io il sy SY ek ehWhy Study Literature?

You may already feel the power and plea sure to be gained from a sustained encounter with challenging reading. Then why not simply enjoy it in solitude, on your own time? Why take a course in literature? Literary study, like all disciplines, has devel- oped its own terminology and its own techniques. Some knowledge and under- standing of both can greatly enhance our personal appreciation of literature and our conversations with others about it. Literature also has a context and a history, and learning something about them can make all the difference in the amount and kind of plea sure and insight you derive from literature. By reading and discussing different genres of literature, as well as works from varied times and places, you may well come to appreciate and even love works that you might never have discovered or chosen to read on your own or that you might have disliked or misunderstood if you did.

Most important, writing about works of literature and discussing them with your teachers and other students will give you practice in analyzing literature in greater depth and in considering alternative views of both the works themselves and the situations and problems the works explore. A clear understanding of the aims and designs of a story, poem, or play never falls like a bolt from the blue. Instead, it emerges from a pro cess that involves trying to put into words how and why this work had such an effect on you and, just as important, responding to what others say or write about it. Literature itself is a vast, ongoing, ever- evolving conversation in which we most fully participate when we enter into actual conversation with others.

As you engage in this conversation, you will notice that interpretation is always variable, always open to discussion. A great diversity of interpretations might sug- gest that the discussion is pointless. on the contrary, that’s when the discussion gets most interesting. Because there is no single, straight, paved road to an under- standing of a literary text, you can explore a variety of blazed trails and less traveled paths. In sharing your own interpretations, tested against your peers’ responses and guided by your instructor’s or other critics’ expertise, you will hone your skills at both interpretation and communication. After the intricate and interactive pro cess of interpretation, you will find that the work has changed when you read it again. What we do with literature alters what it does to us.

• • •

To help you think further about how lit er a ture operates as a vast, never- ending, ever- expanding conversation that outlives— even as it invites and potentially works through and on— all of us, we close this chapter with two poems, Hai- Dang Phan’s My Father’s “norton Introduction to Literature,” Third Edition (1981) and Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter, by another American poet, John Crowe ransom. Phan’s 2015 poem responds in a wonderfully personal way to an array of literary texts published de cades, even centuries, before his own birth (in 1980), including ransom’s elegy and a Shakespeare play that elegy echoes. But as his title suggests, Phan responds to these texts by means of another one— the traces of his

3. Remember that literary texts exist in time and that times change. not only the meanings of words, but whole ways of looking at the universe vary in different ages. Consciousness of time works two ways: Your knowledge of history provides a context for reading the work, even as the work may mod- ify your notion of a par tic u lar age.

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own still- living father’s responses to them, as recorded many years ago on the pages of his father’s copy of an earlier edition of the very book you are now reading and, we hope, literally leaving your own distinctive marks on. What answers might these poems offer to the questions Why read lit er a ture? Why study it?

HAI- DANG PHAN My Father’s “Norton Introduction to Lit er a ture,” Third Edition (1981)

Certain words give him trou ble: cannibals, puzzles, sob, bosom, martyr, deteriorate, shake, astonishes, vexed, ode . . . These he looks up and studiously annotates in Viet nam ese. Ravish means cướp đoạt; shits is like when you have to đi ỉa; mourners are those whom we say are full of buôn râu. For “even the like precurse of feared events”8 think báo trước.

Its thin translucent pages are webbed with his marginalia, graphite ghosts of a living hand, and the notes often sound just like him: “All depend on how look at thing,” he pencils after “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity—”9

His slanted handwriting is generally small, but firm and clear. His pencil is a No. 2, his preferred Hi- Liter, arctic blue.

I can see my father trying out the tools of literary analy sis. He identifies the “turning point” of “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber”; underlines the simile in “Both the old man and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.”1

My father, as he reads, continues to notice relevant passages and to register significant reactions, but increasingly sorts out

his ideas in En glish, shaking off those Viet nam ese glosses. 1981 was the same year we vưọt biển2 and came to Amer i ca, where my father took Intro Lit (“for fun”), Comp Sci (“for job”). “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve ning,”3 he murmurs something about the “dark side of life how awful it can be” as I begin to track silence and signal to a cold source.

Reading Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” a poem about a “young girl’s death,” as my father notes, how could he not have been “vexed at her brown study / Lying so primly propped,” since he never properly observed (I realize this just now) his own daughter’s wake. Lãy làm ngạc nhiên vê is what it means to be astonished.

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8. Hamlet 1.1.121 (p. 1399); the line (spoken by Horatio) immediately precedes the second appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost. 9. Final lines (23–24) of Emily Dickinson’s “ Because I could not stop for Death—” (p. 872). 1. From Flannery o’Connor’s short story “The Artificial nigger” (1955). “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber”: short story (1936) by Ernest Hemingway. Turning point: see chapter 1. 2. Crossed the border (Viet nam ese). 3. Poem (1923) by robert Frost (p. 1143).

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HAI- DAnG PHAn My Father’s “norton Introduction to Lit er a ture” 11

Her name was Đông Xưa, Ancient Winter, but at home she’s Bebe. “ There was such speed in her little body, / And such lightness in her footfall, / It is no won der her brown study / Astonishes us all.” In the photo of her that hangs in my parents’ house she is always fourteen months old and staring into the future. In “reeducation camp”4 he had to believe she was alive

because my mother on visits “took arms against her shadow.” Did the memory of those days sweep over him like a leaf storm from the pages of a forgotten autumn? Lost in the margins, I’m reading the way I discourage my students from reading. But this is “how we deal with death,” his black pen replies. Assume there is a reason for every thing, instructs a green asterisk.5

Then between pp. 896–97, opened to Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,”6

I pick out a newspaper clipping, small as a stamp, an old listing from the 404- Employment Opps State of Minnesota, and read: For current job opportunities dial (612) 297-3180. Answered 24 hrs. When I dial, the automated female voice on the other end tells me I have reached a non- working number.

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4. Prison camp used for the indoctrination or ideological retraining of po liti cal dissidents; such camps were common in Communist- ruled postwar Vietnam (1975–86). 5. See above, “What We Do with Lit er a ture: Three Tips.” 6. Poem (1915, 1923) by Wallace Stevens.

Hai-Dang Phan’s father’s annotations in his Norton Introduction to Literature

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• What does Phan’s poem suggest about what his father gained from reading and studying lit er a ture? about how his father’s practices as a reader shaped what lit er a ture did for him? What does the speaker seem to gain from read- ing the traces of his own father’s reading experiences?

A U T H O R S O N T H E I R W O R K

HAI- DANG PHAN (b. 1980) From The Best American Poetry 2016 (2016)* [“My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Lit er a ture,’ Third Edi-

tion (1981)” i]s a found poem, artifice meets accident, sourced from the literary works and reader’s notes of my father’s textbook. I wanted to convey the uniquely tactile, sensuous, and material experience of reading and responding to a printed book, alongside the intimate thrill of handwriting. It’s a poem- quilt made of well- worn texts [. . .]. It’s a capsule biography, a portrait of my father (who served during the war as an officer in the South Viet nam ese Navy, mostly on a small patrol boat unit in the Mekong Delta); as an immigrant trying to learn the language and lit er a ture of his adopted country; as a father trying to come to terms with the loss of his first child, whom he only ever saw alive once, and while he was in reeducation camp. I feel compelled to note that it’s my mother’s grief, briefly acknowledged and secreted inside a borrowed meta phor, which haunts the margins of the poem when I return to it now. After all, she was the one who had to deal with the death of her daughter while her husband was imprisoned, her private sorrow its own prison house. It’s also a self- portrait because my life is bound up with this family trauma, and the historical trauma surrounding it. Insofar as I grapple with these legacies, as a writer I’m interested in the formal prob lems and possibilities they pose. Given the intense emotional response my father’s marginalia provoked in me and what became the concerns of the poem, I needed a distancing strategy to combat the threat of cheap senti- ment, false immediacy, and unknowing appropriation. Hence, the professorial persona and voice of the detached academic. In October 2012, when I came across my father’s Norton while visiting my parents in Wisconsin, I had just started teaching at Grinnell College and entered a period of uncertainty about the course of my writing life. It’s a reconciliation between two selves, the poet and the professor, that I, too, often see as conflictual, not to mention the age- old wars between fathers and sons, the pres ent and the past. It’s my marginalia on his marginalia, a double- annotation and translation, of what words, memories, people, and events mean as they change contexts, of the unknowable. It’s a rec- ord and reenactment of reading, between the lines, behind the words, for the lives we’ve missed, others’ and our own. (186–87)

* The Best American Poetry 2016. Edited by Edward Hirsch, Scribner Poetry, 2016. The Best American Poetry Series, edited by Dennis Lehman.

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JOHN CROWE RANSOM Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter

There was such speed in her little body, And such lightness in her footfall, It is no won der her brown study7

Astonishes us all.

Her wars were bruited8 in our high win dow. We looked among orchard trees and beyond Where she took arms against her shadow,9

Or harried unto the pond

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud Dripping their snow on the green grass, Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud, Who cried in goose, Alas,

For the tireless heart within the little Lady with rod that made them rise From their noon apple- dreams and scuttle Goose- fashion under the skies!

But now go the bells,1 and we are ready, In one house we are sternly stopped To say we are vexed at her brown study, Lying so primly propped.

1924

• What can you surmise from the poem about the speaker’s relationship to the dead girl? Why might it matter that the poem uses the first- person plu- ral (we), not the singular (I)? that it never explic itly mentions death? Why exactly are “we [. . .] vexed” and “[a]stonishe[d]” (lines 19, 4)?

5

10

15

20

7. State of intense contemplation or reverie. 8. Heard, but also suggesting “noise,” “clamor.” 9. Compare Hamlet 3.1.56–60 (p. 1438), in which Hamlet asks, “ Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suf- fer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / or to take arms against a sea of trou bles.” 1. Perhaps alluding to John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation 17 (1624): “Any Mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee” (spelling original).

JoHn CroWE rAnSoM Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter 13

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PART ONE Fiction

James Baldwin

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Stories are a part of daily life in every culture. Stories are what we tell when we return from vacation or survive an accident or illness. They help us make sense of growing up or growing old, of a hurricane or a war, of the country and world we live in. In conversations, a story may be invited by the listener (“What did you do last night?”) or initiated by the teller (“Guess what I saw when I was driving home!”). We assume such stories are true, or at least that they are meant to describe an expe- rience honestly. of course, many of the stories we encounter daily, from jokes to online games to tele vi sion sitcoms to novels and films, are intended to be fiction— that is, stories or narratives about imaginary persons and events. The difference between fact and fiction is obviously crucial. But every story, whether a news story, sworn testimony, idle gossip, or a fairy tale, is a version of events told from a par tic- u lar perspective (or several) and is inevitably incomplete. As we listen to others’ stories, we keep alert to the details, which make the stories rich and entertaining. But we also need to spend considerable time and energy making sure that we accu- rately interpret what we hear: We ask ourselves who is telling the story, why the story is being told, and whether we have all the information we need to understand it fully.

Even newspaper articles that tell true stories— the facts of what actually happened— may be open to such interpretation. Take as an example the following article, which appeared in the New York Times on January 1, 1920:

FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING1

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The report’s appearance in a reliable newspaper; its identification of date, loca- tion, and other information; and the legalistic adjectives “accused” and “alleged” suggest that it strives to be accurate and objective. And it fundamentally is. But this news story is still a story. note that certain points of view are better represented than others, and certain details are highlighted, just as in a work of fiction. The news item is based almost entirely on what Kate uhl asserts, and even the subtitle, “Woman Becomes Desperate,” plays up the “dramatic sequel to the woman’s dilemma.” We don’t know what Mervin uhl said when he allegedly accused his wife and turned her out of the house, and Bryan Pownall, the murdered man, obviously has no chance to speak in his own defense. Presumably, the article reports accu- rately the husband’s accusation of adultery and the wife’s accusation of rape, but we have no way of knowing whose accusations are true.

our everyday interpretation of the stories we hear from various sources— including other people, the Internet, tele vi sion, newspapers, and ads— has much in common with the interpretation of short stories such as those in this anthology. The pro cesses of reading, responding to, and writing about stories are already some- what familiar to you. Most readers already know, for instance, that they should pay close attention to seemingly trivial details; they should ask questions and find out more about any matters of fact that seem mysterious, odd, or unclear. Most readers are well aware that words can have several meanings and that there are alternative ways to tell a story. How would someone else have told the story? What are the story- teller’s perspective and motives? What is the context of the tale— for instance, when is it supposed to have taken place and what was the occasion of its telling? These and other questions from our experience of everyday storytelling are equally relevant in reading fiction. Similarly, we can usually tell in reading a story or hear- ing it whether it is supposed to make us laugh, shock us, or provoke some other response.

TELL ING STOR IE S: INTER PR E TATION

Everyone has a unique story to tell. In fact, many stories are about this difference or divergence among people’s interpretations of reality. Consider a well- known tale, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a Buddhist story over two thousand years old. Like other stories that have been transmitted orally, this one exists in many versions. Here’s one way of telling it:

The Elephant in the Village of the Blind

Once there was a village high in the mountains in which everyone was born blind. One day a traveler arrived from far away with many fine things to sell and many tales to tell. The villagers asked, “How did you travel so far and so high carry ing so much?” The traveler said, “On my elephant.” “What is an ele- phant?” the villagers asked, having never even heard of such an animal in their remote mountain village. “See for yourself,” the traveler replied.

The elders of the village were a little afraid of the strange- smelling crea- ture that took up so much space in the middle of the village square. They could hear it breathing and munching on hay, and feel its slow, swaying movements

FICTIon: rEADInG, rESPonDInG, WrITInG 17

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18 CH. 1 | FICTIon: rEADInG, rESPonDInG, WrITInG

disturbing the air around them. First one elder reached out and felt its flapping ear. “An elephant is soft but tough, and flexible, like a leather fan.” Another grasped its back leg. “An elephant is a rough, hairy pillar.” An old woman took hold of a tusk and gasped, “An elephant is a cool, smooth staff.” A young girl seized the tail and declared, “An elephant is a fringed rope.” A boy took hold of the trunk and announced, “An elephant is a water pipe.” Soon others were stroking its sides, which were furrowed like a dry plowed field, and others determined that its head was an overturned washing tub attached to the water pipe.

At first each villager argued with the others on the definition of the elephant, as the traveler watched in silence. Two elders were about to come to blows about a fan that could not possibly be a pillar. Meanwhile the elephant patiently enjoyed the investigations as the cries of curiosity and angry debate mixed in the afternoon sun. Soon someone suggested that a list could be made of all the parts: the elephant had four pillars, one tub, two fans, a water pipe, and two staffs, and was covered in tough, hairy leather or dried mud. Four young moth- ers, sitting on a bench and comparing impressions, realized that the elephant was in fact an enormous, gentle ox with a stretched nose. The traveler agreed, adding only that it was also a powerful draft horse and that if they bought some of his wares for a good price he would be sure to come that way again in the new year.

• • •

The different versions of such a tale, like the different descriptions of the ele- phant, alter its meaning. Changing any aspect of the story will inevitably change how it works and what it means to the listener or reader. For example, most ver- sions of this story feature not an entire village of blind people (as this version does), but a small group of blind men who claim to be wiser than their sighted neighbors. These blind men quarrel endlessly because none of them can see; none can put together all the evidence of all their senses or all the elephant’s various parts to create a whole. Such traditional versions of the story criticize people who are too proud of what they think they know; these versions imply that sighted people would know better what an elephant is. However, other versions of the tale, like the one above, are set in an imaginary “country” of the blind. This setting changes the emphasis of the story from the errors of a few blind wise men to the value and the insufficiency of any one person’s perspective. For though it’s clear that the various members of the community in this version will never agree entirely on one interpretation of (or story about) the elephant, they do not let themselves get bogged down in endless dispute. Instead they compare and combine their various stories and “readings” in order to form a more satisfying, holistic under- standing of the wonder in their midst. Similarly, listening to others’ different inter- pretations of stories, based on their different perspectives, can enhance your experience of a work of literature and your skill in responding to new works.

Just as stories vary depending on who is telling them, so their meanings vary depending on who is responding to them. In the elephant story, the villagers pay attention to what the tail or the ear feels like, and then they draw on comparisons to what they already know. But ultimately, the individual interpretations of the elephant depend on what previous experiences each villager brings to bear (of pillars, water

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pipes, oxen, and dried mud, for example), and also on where (quite literally) he or she stands in relation to the elephant. In the same way, readers participate in re- creating a story as they interpret it. When you read a story for the first time, your response will be informed by other stories you have heard and read as well as by your expecta- tions for this kind of story. To grapple with what is new in any story, start by observing one part at a time and gradually trying to understand how those parts work together to form a whole. As you make sense of each new piece of the picture, you adjust your expectations about what is yet to come. When you have read and grasped it as fully as possible, you may share your interpretation with other readers, discussing different ways of seeing the story. Finally, you might express your under- standing in writing— in a sense, telling your story about the work.

FICTIon: rEADInG, rESPonDInG, WrITInG 19

Questions about the Elements of Fiction

• Expectations: What do you expect? ° from the title? from the first sentence or paragraph? ° after the first events or interactions of characters? ° as the conflict is resolved?

• What happens in the story? (See ch. 2.) ° Do the characters or the situation change from the beginning to the end? ° Can you summarize the plot? Is it a recognizable kind or genre of story?

• How is the story narrated? (See ch. 3.) ° Is the narrator identified as a character? ° Is it narrated in the past or present tense? ° Is it narrated in the first, second, or third person? ° Do you know what every character is thinking, or only some characters,

or none? • Who are the characters? (See ch. 4.)

° Who is (or are) the protagonist(s) (hero, heroine)? ° Who is (or are) the antagonist(s) (villain, opponent, obstacle)? ° Who are the other characters? What is their role in the story? ° Do your expectations change with those of the characters, or do you

know more or less than each of the characters? • What is the setting of the story? (See ch. 5.)

° When does the story take place? ° Where does it take place? ° Does the story move from one setting to another? Does it move in one

direction only or back and forth in time and place? • What do you notice about how the story is written?

° What is the style of the prose? Are the sentences and the vocabulary simple or complex?

° Are there any images, figures of speech, or symbols? (See ch. 6.) ° What is the tone or mood? Does the reader feel sad, amused, worried,

curious? • What does the story mean? Can you express its theme or themes? (See ch. 7.)

° Answers to these big questions may be found in many instances in your answers to the previous questions. The story’s meaning or theme depends on all its features.

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R E ADING AN D R E SPON DING TO F IC TION

When imaginary events are acted out onstage or onscreen, our experience of those events is that of being a witness to them. In contrast, prose fiction, whether oral or written, is relayed to us by someone. reading it is more like hearing what hap- pened after the fact than witnessing it with our very eyes. The teller, or narrator, of fiction addresses a listener or reader, often referred to as the audience. How much or how little we know about the characters and what they say or do depends on what a narrator tells us.

You should read a story attentively, just as you would listen attentively to some- one telling a story out loud. This means limiting distractions and interruptions; you should take a break from social media and obtrusive music. Literary prose, like poetry, works with the sounds as well as meanings of words, just as film works with music and sound as well as images. Be prepared to mark up the text and to make notes.

While reading and writing, you should always have a good college- level diction- ary on hand or on screen so that you can look up any unfamiliar terms. one excellent resource is the Oxford En glish Dictionary, available in the reference section of most academic libraries or on their websites, which reveals the wide range of meanings words have had over time. Words in En glish always have a long story to tell because over the centuries so many languages have contributed to ours. It’s not uncommon for meanings to overlap or even reverse themselves.

The following short short story is a contemporary work. As in The Elephant in the Village of the Blind, this narrator gives us a minimal amount of infor- mation, merely observing the characters’ different perceptions and interpretations of things they see during a cross- country car trip. As you read the story, pay atten- tion to your expectations, drawing on your personal experience and such clues as the title; the characters’ statements and behavior; specifics of setting (time and place); and any repetitions or changes. When and how does the story begin to challenge and change your initial expectations? You can use the questions above to guide your reading of any story and help you focus on some of its important features.

LINDA BREWER 20/20

B y the time they reached Indiana, Bill realized that Ruthie, his driving com-panion, was incapable of theoretical debate. She drove okay, she went halves on gas, etc., but she refused to argue. She didn’t seem to know how. Bill was used to East Coast women who disputed everything he said, every step of the way. Ruthie stuck to simple observation, like “Look, cows.” He chalked it up to the fact that she was from rural Ohio and thrilled to death to be anywhere else.

She didn’t mind driving into the setting sun. The third eve ning out, Bill rested his eyes while she cruised along making the occasional announcement.

“Indian paintbrush. A golden ea gle.” Miles later he frowned. There was no Indian paintbrush, that he knew of,

near Chicago.

20 CH. 1 | FICTIon: rEADInG, rESPonDInG, WrITInG

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The next eve ning, driving, Ruthie said, “I never thought I’d see a Bigfoot in real life.” Bill turned and looked at the side of the road streaming innocently out behind them. Two red spots winked back— reflectors nailed to a tree stump.

“Ruthie, I’ll drive,” he said. She stopped the car and they changed places in the light of the eve ning star.

“I’m so glad I got to come with you,” Ruthie said. Her eyes were big, blue, and capable of seeing wonderful sights. A white buffalo near Fargo. A UFO above Twin Falls. A handsome genius in the person of Bill himself. This last vision came to her in Spokane and Bill decided to let it ride.

1996

• • •

SAMPLE WRITING: ANNOTATION AND NOTES ON “20/20”

now re- read the story, along with the brief notes one reader made in the margins, based on the “Questions about the Elements of Fiction” that appear on page 19. The reader then expanded these annotations into longer, more detailed notes. These notes could be or ga nized and expanded into a response paper on the story. Some of your insights might even form the basis for a longer essay on one of the elements of the story.

5

FICTIon: rEADInG, rESPonDInG, WrITInG 21

20/20

By the time they reached Indiana, Bill realized that Ruthie, his driv-

ing companion, was incapable of theoretical debate. She drove okay,

she went halves on gas, etc., but she refused to argue. She didn’t seem

to know how. Bill was used to East Coast women who disputed every-

thing he said, every step of the way. Ruthie stuck to simple observa-

tion, like “Look, cows.” He chalked it up to the fact that she was from

rural Ohio and thrilled to death to be anywhere else.

She didn’t mind driving into the setting sun. The third eve ning out,

Bill rested his eyes while she cruised along making the occasional

announcement.

“Indian paintbrush. A golden ea gle.”

Miles later he frowned. There was no Indian paintbrush, that he

knew of, near Chicago.

The next eve ning, driving, Ruthie said, “I never thought I’d see a

Bigfoot in real life.” Bill turned and looked at the side of the road

Like “20/20 hind- sight” or perfect vision? Also like the way Bill and Ruthie go 50/50 on the trip, and see things in two dif- ferent ways.

Bill’s doubts about Ruthie. Is he reli- able? Does she “refuse” or not “know how” to argue? What’s her view of him?

Bill’s keeping score; maybe Ruthie’s nicer, or has better eyesight. She notices things.

Repetition, like a folktale: 2nd sun- set drive, 3rd time she speaks. Not much dialogue in story.

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Initial Impressions Plot: begins in the middle of action, on a journey. Narration: past tense, third person. Setting: Indiana is a middling, unromantic place.

Paragraph 1 Narration and Character: Bill’s judgments of Ruthie show that he prides himself on arguing about abstract ideas; that he thinks Ruthie must be stupid; that they didn’t know each other well and aren’t suited for a long trip together. Bill is from the unfriendly East Coast; Ruthie, from easy going, dull “rural Ohio.” Style: The casual language—“okay” and “etc.”— sounds like Bill’s voice, but he’s not the narrator. The vague “etc.” hints that Bill isn’t really curious about her. The observation of cows sounds funny, childlike, even stupid. But why does he have to “chalk it up” or keep score?

Paragraph 2 Plot and Character: This is the first specific time given in the story, the “third eve ning”: Ruthie surprises the reader and Bill with more than dull “observation.”

Paragraph 4 Style, Character, Setting, and Tone: Dozing in the speeding car, Bill is too late to check out what she says. He frowns (he doesn’t argue) because the plant and the bird can’t be seen in the Midwest. Brewer uses a series of place names to indicate the route of the car. There’s humor in Ruthie’s habit of pointing out bizarre sights.

Paragraph 5 Character and Setting: Bigfoot is a legendary monster living in Western forests. Is Ruthie’s imagination getting the better of Bill’s logic? “Innocently” personifies the road, and the reflectors on the stump wink like the monster; Bill is finally looking (though in hindsight). The scenery seems to be playing a joke on him.

Paragraph 6 Plot and Character: Here the characters change places. He wants to drive (is she hallucinating?), but it’s as if she has won. The narration (which has been relying on Bill’s voice and perspective) for the first time notices a romantic detail of scenery that Ruthie doesn’t point out (the eve ning star).

streaming innocently out behind them. Two red spots winked back—

reflectors nailed to a tree stump.

“Ruthie, I’ll drive,” he said. She stopped the car and they changed

places in the light of the eve ning star.

“I’m so glad I got to come with you,” Ruthie said. Her eyes were big,

blue, and capable of seeing wonderful sights. A white buffalo near Fargo.

A UFO above Twin Falls. A handsome genius in the person of Bill him-

self. This last vision came to her in Spokane and Bill decided to let it ride.

Bill’s only speech. Turning point: Bill

sees something he doesn’t already

know.

Repetition, like a joke, in 3 things

Ruthie sees.

Story begins and ends in the middle

of things: “By the time,” “let it ride.”

22 CH. 1 | FICTIon: rEADInG, rESPonDInG, WrITInG

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R E ADING AN D R E SPON DING TO GR APHIC F IC TION

You may approach any narrative with the same kinds of questions that have been applied to 20/20. Try it on the following piece by Jules Feiffer. originally published in the Village Voice, Superman made legendary Maus creator Art Spiegelman’s 2016 list of eleven shorts whose “subject matter” or “resonance” earned them the right to be considered “one- page graphic novels.” As you read “Superman,” carefully consider the interplay between word and image and the role each plays, especially in characterization and plot. How would the strip mean differently if it depended wholly on words? on images? How, if at all, might graphic fiction change the way we ask or answer the “Questions about the Ele ments of Fiction” on page 19?

JULES FEIFFER (b. 1929)

Superman

New Yorker Jules Feiffer got his professional start at age 16, assisting revered cartoonist Will Eisner, who report- edly thought little of Feiffer’s drawing skills but came to re spect his talent as a writer with a special gift for char- acterization and dialogue. After a stint in the army during the Korean War, Feiffer landed a job (initially

unpaid) at the Village Voice, the nation’s first alternative newspaper. Here his nationally syndicated, Pulitzer Prize– winning satirical strip appeared weekly for four de cades, from 1956 to 1997, when the New York Times hired Feiffer as its first op-ed cartoonist. Also a playwright, screenwriter, children’s book author, and book illustrator, whose credits include The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), Feiffer penned the first history of comic- book superheroes in 1965. Sometimes credited with helping to invent “graphic novels” with his “novel- in- pictures” Tantrum (1979), Feiffer himself reserves the label “graphic novels” for the noir trilogy he launched at age 85, with Kill My Mother (2014) and Cousin Joseph (2016). An illustrated memoir, Backing into Forward, appeared in 2010.

Paragraph 7 Character and Theme: Bill begins to see Ruthie and what she is capable of. What they see is the journey these characters take toward falling in love, in the West where things become unreal. Style: The long “o” sounds and images in “A white buffalo near Fargo. A UFO above Twin Falls” (along with the words “Ohio,” “Chicago,” and “Spokane”) give a feeling for the wildness (notice the Indian place names). The outcome of the story is that they go far to Fargo, see double and fall in love at Twin Falls— see and imagine wonderful things in each other. They end up with perfectly matched vision.

JuLES FEIFFEr Superman 23

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1960

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KEY CONCEPTS

As you read, respond to, and write about fiction, some key terms and concepts will be useful in comparing or distinguishing different kinds of stories. Stories may be oral rather than written down, and they may be of different lengths. They may be based on true stories or completely invented. They may be written in verse rather than prose, or they may be created in media other than the printed page.

STORY AND NARR ATIVE

Generally speaking, a story is a short account of an incident or series of incidents, whether actual or invented. The word is often used to refer to an entertaining tale of imaginary people and events, but it is also used in phrases like “the story of my life”— suggesting a true account. The term narrative is especially useful as a gen- eral concept for the substance rather than the form of what is told about persons and their actions. A story or a tale is usually short, whereas a narrative may be of any length.

Narratives in Daily Life

narrative plays an important role in our lives beyond the telling of fictional stories. Consider the following:

• Today, sociologists and historians may collect personal narratives to present an account of society and everyday life in a certain time or place.

• Since the 1990s, the practice of narrative medicine has spread as an improved technique of diagnosis and treatment that takes into account the patient’s point of view.

• There is a movement to encourage mediation rather than litigation in divorce cases. A mediator may collaborate with the couple in arriving at a shared perspective on the divorce; in a sense, they try to agree on the story of their marriage and how it ended.

• Some countries have attempted to recover from the trauma of genocidal eth- nic conflict through official hearings of testimony by victims as well as defen- dants. South Africa’s Truth and reconciliation Commission is an example of this use of stories.

OR AL NARR ATIVE AND TALES

We tend to think of stories in their written form, but many of the stories that we now regard as among the world’s greatest, such as Homer’s Iliad and the old En glish epic Beowulf, were sung or recited by generations of storytellers before being written down. Just as rumors change shape as they circulate, oral stories tend to be more fluid than printed ones. Traditionally oral tales such as fairy tales or folktales may endure for a very long time yet take different forms in various countries and eras. And it’s often difficult or impossible to trace such a story back to a single “author” or creator. In a sense, then, an oral story is the creation of a

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whole community or communities, just as oral storytelling tends to be a more communal event than reading.

Certain recognizable signals set a story or tale apart from common speech and encourage us to pay a different kind of attention. Children know that a story is beginning when they hear or read “once upon a time . . . ,” and traditional oral storytellers have formal ways to set up a tale, such as Su- num- twee (“Listen to me”), as Spokane storytellers say. “And they lived happily ever after,” or simply “The End,” may similarly indicate when the story is over. Such conventions have been adapted since the invention of printing and the spread of literacy.

F IC TION AN D NON FIC TION

The word fiction comes from the Latin root fingere “to fashion or form.” The earli- est definitions concern the act of making something artificial to imitate something else. In the past two centuries, fiction has become more narrowly defined as “prose narrative about imaginary people and events,” the main meaning of the word as we use it in this anthology.

In contrast with fiction, nonfiction usually refers to factual prose narrative. Some major nonfiction genres are history, biography, and autobiography. In film, documentaries and “biopics,” or biographical feature films, similarly attempt to represent real people, places, and events. The boundary between fiction and cre- ative nonfiction is porous. So- called true crime novels such as Truman Capote’s In

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Genres of Prose Fiction by Length

A novel is a work of prose fiction of about forty thousand words or more. The form arose in the seventeenth and early eigh teenth centuries as prose romances and adventure tales began to adopt techniques of history and travel narrative as well as memoir, letters, and biography.

A novella is a work of prose fiction of about seventeen thousand to forty thousand words. The novella form was especially favored between about 1850 and 1950, largely because it can be more tightly controlled and con- centrated than a long novel, while focusing on the inner workings of a character.

A short story is broadly defined as anywhere between one thousand and twenty thousand words. one expectation of a short story is that it may be read in a single sitting. The modern short story developed in the mid- nineteenth century, in part because of the growing popularity of magazines.

A short short story, sometimes called “flash fiction” or “micro- fiction,” is generally not much longer than one thousand words and sometimes much shorter. There have always been very short fictions, including parables and fables, but the short short story is an invention of recent de cades.

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Cold Blood (1966) and novelized biographies such as Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), about the life of the novelist Henry James, use the techniques of fiction writing to narrate actual events. Graphic novels, with a format derived from comic books, have become an increasingly pop u lar medium for memoirs. (Four famous examples are Art Spiegelman’s Maus [1986, 1991], Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis [2003], Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home [2006], and Congressman John Lewis’s March [2013–16].) Some Hollywood movies and TV shows dramatize real people in every- day situations or contexts, or real events such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In contrast, historical fiction, developed by Sir Walter Scott around 1815, comprises prose narratives that present history in imaginative ways. Such works of prose fiction adhere closely to the facts of history and actual lives, just as many “true”-life stories are more or less fictionalized.

• • •

The fiction chapters in this volume present a collection of prose works— mostly short stories. Even as you read the short prose fiction in this book, bear in mind the many ways we encounter stories or narrative in everyday life, and consider the almost limitless variety of forms that fiction may take.

WR ITING ABOUT F IC TION

During your first reading of any story, you may want to read without stopping to address each of the questions on page 19. After you have read the whole piece once, re- read it carefully, using the questions as a guide. It’s always interesting to compare your initial reactions with your later ones. In fact, a paper may focus on comparing the expectations of readers (and characters) at the beginning of a story to their later conclusions. responses to fiction may come in unpredictable order, so feel free to address the questions as they arise. Looking at how the story is told and what happens to which characters may lead to observations on expectations or setting. Consideration of setting and style can help explain the personalities, actions, mood, and effect of the story, which can lead to well- informed ideas about the meaning of the whole. But any one of the questions, pursued further, can serve as the focus of more formal writing.

Following this chapter are three written responses to raymond Carver’s short story Cathedral. First, read the story and make notes on any features that you find interesting, important, or confusing. Then look at the notes and response paper by Wesley rupton and the essay by Bethany Qualls, which illustrate two different ways of writing about “Cathedral.”

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RAYMOND CARVER (1938–88)

Cathedral

Born in the logging town of Clatskanie, Oregon, to a working- class family, Raymond Carver married at nineteen and had two children by the time he was twenty- one. Despite these early responsibilities and a lifelong struggle with alcoholism, Carver published

his first story in 1961 and graduated from Humboldt State College in 1963. He pub- lished his first book, Near Klamath, a collection of poems, in 1968 and thereafter sup- ported himself with visiting lectureships at the University of California at Berkeley, Syracuse University, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, among other institutions. Described by the New York Times as “surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the twentieth century”; credited by others with “reviving what was once thought of as a dying literary form”; and compared to such literary luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, and Anton Chekhov, Carver often portrays characters whom one reviewer describes as living, much as Carver long did, “on the edge: of poverty, alco- holic self- destruction, loneliness.” The author himself labeled them the sort of “good people,” “doing the best they could,” who “filled” America. Dubbed a “minimalist” due to his spare style and low- key plots, Carver himself suffered an early death, of lung cancer, at age fifty. His major short- story collections include Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1983), and the posthu- mously published Call If You Need Me (2001).

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Con- necticut. He called my wife from his in- laws’. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five- hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the sta- tion. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Some- times they were led by seeing- eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

That summer in Seattle she had needed a job. She didn’t have any money. The man she was going to marry at the end of the summer was in officers’ train- ing school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something in the paper: help wanted—Reading to Blind Man, and a telephone number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She’d worked with this blind man all summer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing. She helped him or ga- nize his little office in the county social- service department. They’d become

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rAYMonD CArVEr Cathedral 29

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good friends, my wife and the blind man. How do I know these things? She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose— even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really impor- tant had happened to her.

When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry. I admit it’s not the first thing I reach for when I pick up something to read.

Anyway, this man who’d first enjoyed her favors, the officer- to- be, he’d been her childhood sweetheart. So okay. I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle. But they’d kept in touch, she and the blind man. She made the first contact after a year or so. She called him up one night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. They talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life. She did this. She sent the tape. On the tape, she told the blind man about her husband and about their life together in the mili- tary. She told the blind man she loved her husband but she didn’t like it where they lived and she didn’t like it that he was a part of the military- industrial thing. She told the blind man she’d written a poem and he was in it. She told him that she was writing a poem about what it was like to be an Air Force officer’s wife. The poem wasn’t finished yet. She was still writing it. The blind man made a tape. He sent her the tape. She made a tape. This went on for years. My wife’s officer was posted to one base and then another. She sent tapes from Moody AFB, McGuire, McConnell, and finally Travis, near Sacramento, where one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept los- ing in that moving- around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest and washed them down with a bottle of gin. Then she got into a hot bath and passed out.

But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up. Her officer— why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?— came home from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance. In time, she put it all on a tape and sent the tape to the blind man. Over the years, she put all kinds of stuff on tapes and sent the tapes off lickety- split. Next to writing a poem every year, I think it was her chief means of recreation. On one tape, she told the blind man she’d decided to live away from her officer for a time. On another tape, she told him about her divorce. She and I began going out, and of course she told her blind man about it. She told him every- thing, or so it seemed to me. Once she asked me if I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. This was a year ago. I was on the tape, she said. So I

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said okay, I’d listen to it. I got us drinks and we settled down in the living room. We made ready to listen. First she inserted the tape into the player and adjusted a couple of dials. Then she pushed a lever. The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loud voice. She lowered the volume. After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’t even know! And then this: “From all you’ve said about him, I can only conclude—” But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and we didn’t ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to.

Now this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house. “Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the draining

board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around.

“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” She wiped her hands with the dish towel.

“I don’t have any blind friends,” I said. “You don’t have any friends,” she said. “Period. Besides,” she said, “goddamn

it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his wife!” I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Her name

was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman. “Was his wife a Negro?” I asked. “Are you crazy?” my wife said. “Have you just flipped or something?” She

picked up a potato. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Are you drunk?”

“I’m just asking,” I said. Right then my wife filled me in with more detail than I cared to know. I

made a drink and sat at the kitchen table to listen. Pieces of the story began to fall into place.

Beulah had gone to work for the blind man the summer after my wife had stopped working for him. Pretty soon Beulah and the blind man had themselves a church wedding. It was a little wedding— who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?— just the two of them, plus the minister and the minister’s wife. But it was a church wedding just the same. It was what Beulah had wanted, he’d said. But even then Beulah must have been carry ing the cancer in her glands. After they had been inseparable for eight years— my wife’s word, inseparable— Beulah’s health went into a rapid decline. She died in a Seattle hospital room, the blind man sitting beside the bed and holding on to her hand. They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together— had sex, sure— and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding. Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind man for a little bit. And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved. A woman whose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something better. Someone who could wear makeup or not— what difference

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Raymond CaRveR Cathedral 31

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to him? She could, if she wanted, wear green eye- shadow around one eye, a straight pin in her nostril, yellow slacks and purple shoes, no matter. And then to slip off into death, the blind man’s hand on her hand, his blind eyes stream- ing tears— I’m imagining now— her last thought maybe this: that he never even knew what she looked like, and she on an express to the grave. Robert was left with a small insurance policy and half of a twenty- peso Mexican coin. The other half of the coin went into the box with her. Pathetic.

So when the time rolled around, my wife went to the depot to pick him up. With nothing to do but wait— sure, I blamed him for that— I was having a drink and watching the TV when I heard the car pull into the drive. I got up from the sofa with my drink and went to the window to have a look.

I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing. She went around to the other side of the car to where the blind man was already starting to get out. This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say. The blind man reached into the back seat and dragged out a suitcase. My wife took his arm, shut the car door, and, talking all the way, moved him down the drive and then up the steps to the front porch. I turned off the TV. I finished my drink, rinsed the glass, dried my hands. Then I went to the door.

My wife said, “I want you to meet Robert. Robert, this is my husband. I’ve told you all about him.” She was beaming. She had this blind man by his coat sleeve.

The blind man let go of his suitcase and up came his hand. I took it. He squeezed hard, held my hand, and then he let it go. “I feel like we’ve already met,” he boomed. “Likewise,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I said, “Welcome. I’ve

heard a lot about you.” We began to move then, a little group, from the porch into the living room, my wife guiding him by the arm. The blind man was carry- ing his suitcase in his other hand. My wife said things like, “To your left here, Robert. That’s right. Now watch it, there’s a chair. That’s it. Sit down right here. This is the sofa. We just bought this sofa two weeks ago.”

I started to say something about the old sofa. I’d liked that old sofa. But I didn’t say anything. Then I wanted to say something else, small- talk, about the scenic ride along the Hudson. How going to New York, you should sit on the right- hand side of the train, and coming from New York, the left- hand side.

“Did you have a good train ride?” I said. “Which side of the train did you sit on, by the way?”

“What a question, which side!” my wife said. “What’s it matter which side?” she said.

“I just asked,” I said. “Right side,” the blind man said. “I hadn’t been on a train in nearly forty years.

Not since I was a kid. With my folks. That’s been a long time. I’d nearly forgotten the sensation. I have winter in my beard now,” he said. “So I’ve been told, any- way. Do I look distinguished, my dear?” the blind man said to my wife.

“You look distinguished, Robert,” she said. “Robert,” she said. “Robert, it’s just so good to see you.”

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My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged.

I’ve never met, or personally known, anyone who was blind. This blind man was late forties, a heavy- set, balding man with stooped shoulders, as if he car- ried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, a light- brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy. He also had this full beard. But he didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wished he had a pair. At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close, there was something dif- ferent about them. Too much white in the iris, for one thing, and the pupils seemed to move around in the sockets without his knowing it or being able to stop it. Creepy. As I stared at his face, I saw the left pupil turn in toward his nose while the other made an effort to keep in one place. But it was only an effort, for that eye was on the roam without his knowing it or wanting it to be.

I said, “Let me get you a drink. What’s your plea sure? We have a little of everything. It’s one of our pastimes.”

“Bub, I’m a Scotch man myself,” he said fast enough in this big voice. “Right,” I said. Bub! “Sure you are. I knew it.” He let his fingers touch his suitcase, which was sitting alongside the sofa. He

was taking his bearings. I didn’t blame him for that. “I’ll move that up to your room,” my wife said. “No, that’s fine,” the blind man said loudly. “It can go up when I go up.” “A little water with the Scotch?” I said. “Very little,” he said. “I knew it,” I said. He said, “Just a tad. The Irish actor, Barry Fitzgerald? I’m like that fellow.

When I drink water, Fitzgerald said, I drink water. When I drink whiskey, I drink whiskey.” My wife laughed. The blind man brought his hand up under his beard. He lifted his beard slowly and let it drop.

I did the drinks, three big glasses of Scotch with a splash of water in each. Then we made ourselves comfortable and talked about Robert’s travels. First the long flight from the West Coast to Connecticut, we covered that. Then from Connecti- cut up here by train. We had another drink concerning that leg of the trip.

I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. I thought I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But this blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one. This blind man filled his ashtray and my wife emptied it.

When we sat down at the table for dinner, we had another drink. My wife heaped Robert’s plate with cube steak, scalloped potatoes, green beans. I but- tered him up two slices of bread. I said, “Here’s bread and butter for you.” I swallowed some of my drink. “Now let us pray,” I said, and the blind man low- ered his head. My wife looked at me, her mouth agape. “Pray the phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold,” I said.

We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed that table. We were into serious eating. The blind man had right away located his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched with admiration as

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he used his knife and fork on the meat. He’d cut two pieces of meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and then go all out for the scalloped potatoes, the beans next, and then he’d tear off a hunk of buttered bread and eat that. He’d follow this up with a big drink of milk. It didn’t seem to bother him to use his fingers once in a while, either.

We finished everything, including half a strawberry pie. For a few moments, we sat as if stunned. Sweat beaded on our faces. Finally, we got up from the table and left the dirty plates. We didn’t look back. We took ourselves into the living room and sank into our places again. Robert and my wife sat on the sofa. I took the big chair. We had us two or three more drinks while they talked about the major things that had come to pass for them in the past ten years. For the most part, I just listened. Now and then I joined in. I didn’t want him to think I’d left the room, and I didn’t want her to think I was feel- ing left out. They talked of things that had happened to them— to them!— these past ten years. I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s sweet lips: “And then my dear husband came into my life”— something like that. But I heard nothing of the sort. More talk of Robert. Robert had done a little of everything, it seemed, a regular blind jack- of- all- trades. But most recently he and his wife had had an Amway distributorship, from which, I gathered, they’d earned their living, such as it was. The blind man was also a ham radio operator. He talked in his loud voice about conversations he’d had with fellow operators in Guam, in the Philippines, in Alaska, and even in Tahiti. He said he’d have a lot of friends there if he ever wanted to go visit those places. From time to time, he’d turn his blind face toward me, put his hand under his beard, ask me something. How long had I been in my present position? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I going to stay with it? (What were the options?) Finally, when I thought he was beginning to run down, I got up and turned on the TV.

My wife looked at me with irritation. She was heading toward a boil. Then she looked at the blind man and said, “Robert, do you have a TV?”

The blind man said, “My dear, I have two TVs. I have a color set and a black- and- white thing, an old relic. It’s funny, but if I turn the TV on, and I’m always turning it on, I turn on the color set. It’s funny, don’t you think?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I had absolutely nothing to say to that. No opinion. So I watched the news program and tried to listen to what the announcer was saying.

“This is a color TV,” the blind man said. “Don’t ask me how, but I can tell.” “We traded up a while ago,” I said. The blind man had another taste of his drink. He lifted his beard, sniffed it,

and let it fall. He leaned forward on the sofa. He positioned his ashtray on the coffee table, then put the lighter to his cigarette. He leaned back on the sofa and crossed his legs at the ankles.

My wife covered her mouth, and then she yawned. She stretched. She said, “I think I’ll go upstairs and put on my robe. I think I’ll change into something else. Robert, you make yourself comfortable,” she said.

“I’m comfortable,” the blind man said. “I want you to feel comfortable in this house,” she said. “I am comfortable,” the blind man said.

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After she’d left the room, he and I listened to the weather report and then to the sports roundup. By that time, she’d been gone so long I didn’t know if she was going to come back. I thought she might have gone to bed. I wished she’d come back downstairs. I didn’t want to be left alone with a blind man. I asked him if he wanted another drink, and he said sure. Then I asked if he wanted to smoke some dope with me. I said I’d just rolled a number. I hadn’t, but I planned to do so in about two shakes.

“I’ll try some with you,” he said. “Damn right,” I said. “That’s the stuff.” I got our drinks and sat down on the sofa with him. Then I rolled us two fat

numbers. I lit one and passed it. I brought it to his fingers. He took it and inhaled. “Hold it as long as you can,” I said. I could tell he didn’t know the first thing. My wife came back downstairs wearing her pink robe and her pink slippers. “What do I smell?” she said. “We thought we’d have us some cannabis,” I said. My wife gave me a savage look. Then she looked at the blind man and said,

“Robert, I didn’t know you smoked.” He said, “I do now, my dear. There’s a first time for everything. But I don’t

feel anything yet.” “This stuff is pretty mellow,” I said. “This stuff is mild. It’s dope you can

reason with,” I said. “It doesn’t mess you up.” “Not much it doesn’t, bub,” he said, and laughed. My wife sat on the sofa between the blind man and me. I passed her the

number. She took it and toked and then passed it back to me. “Which way is this going?” she said. Then she said, “I shouldn’t be smoking this. I can hardly keep my eyes open as it is. That dinner did me in. I shouldn’t have eaten so much.”

“It was the strawberry pie,” the blind man said. “That’s what did it,” he said, and he laughed his big laugh. Then he shook his head.

“There’s more strawberry pie,” I said. “Do you want some more, Robert?” my wife said. “Maybe in a little while,” he said. We gave our attention to the TV. My wife yawned again. She said, “Your

bed is made up when you feel like going to bed, Robert. I know you must have had a long day. When you’re ready to go to bed, say so.” She pulled his arm. “Robert?”

He came to and said, “I’ve had a real nice time. This beats tapes, doesn’t it?” I said, “Coming at you,” and I put the number between his fingers. He

inhaled, held the smoke, and then let it go. It was like he’d been doing it since he was nine years old.

“Thanks, bub,” he said. “But I think this is all for me. I think I’m beginning to feel it,” he said. He held the burning roach out for my wife.

“Same here,” she said. “Ditto. Me, too.” She took the roach and passed it to me. “I may just sit here for a while between you two guys with my eyes closed. But don’t let me bother you, okay? Either one of you. If it bothers you, say so. Otherwise, I may just sit here with my eyes closed until you’re ready to go to bed,” she said. “Your bed’s made up, Robert, when you’re ready. It’s right next to our room at the top of the stairs. We’ll show you up when you’re ready. You wake

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Raymond CaRveR Cathedral 35

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me up now, you guys, if I fall asleep.” She said that and then she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

The news program ended. I got up and changed the channel. I sat back down on the sofa. I wished my wife hadn’t pooped out. Her head lay across the back of the sofa, her mouth open. She’d turned so that her robe had slipped away from her legs, exposing a juicy thigh. I reached to draw her robe back over her, and it was then that I glanced at the blind man. What the hell! I flipped the robe open again.

“You say when you want some strawberry pie,” I said. “I will,” he said. I said, “Are you tired? Do you want me to take you up to your bed? Are you

ready to hit the hay?” “Not yet,” he said. “No, I’ll stay up with you, bub. If that’s all right. I’ll stay up

until you’re ready to turn in. We haven’t had a chance to talk. Know what I mean? I feel like me and her monopolized the eve ning.” He lifted his beard and he let it fall. He picked up his cigarettes and his lighter.

“That’s all right,” I said. Then I said, “I’m glad for the company.” And I guess I was. Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I

could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at the same time. When I did go to sleep, I had these dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up from one of them, my heart going crazy.

Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV. Not your run- of- the- mill TV fare. I wanted to watch something else. I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned back to the first channel and apologized.

“Bub, it’s all right,” the blind man said. “It’s fine with me. What ever you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning never ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something to night. I got ears,” he said.

We didn’t say anything for a time. He was leaning forward with his head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set. Very disconcerting. Now and then his eyelids drooped and then they snapped open again. Now and then he put his fingers into his beard and tugged, like he was thinking about some- thing he was hearing on the tele vi sion.

On the screen, a group of men wearing cowls was being set upon and tor- mented by men dressed in skeleton costumes and men dressed as dev ils. The men dressed as dev ils wore dev il masks, horns, and long tails. This pageant was part of a pro cession. The En glishman who was narrating the thing said it took place in Spain once a year. I tried to explain to the blind man what was happening.

“Skeletons,” he said. “I know about skeletons,” he said, and he nodded. The TV showed this one cathedral. Then there was a long, slow look at

another one. Finally, the picture switched to the famous one in Paris, with its flying buttresses and its spires reaching up to the clouds. The camera pulled away to show the whole of the cathedral rising above the skyline.

There were times when the En glishman who was telling the thing would shut up, would simply let the camera move around over the cathedrals. Or else the camera would tour the countryside, men in fields walking behind oxen. I waited as long as I could. Then I felt I had to say something. I said, “They’re

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showing the outside of this cathedral now. Gargoyles. Little statues carved to look like monsters. Now I guess they’re in Italy. Yeah, they’re in Italy. There’s paintings on the walls of this one church.”

“Are those fresco paintings, bub?” he asked, and he sipped from his drink. I reached for my glass. But it was empty. I tried to remember what I could

remember. “You’re asking me are those frescoes?” I said. “That’s a good ques- tion. I don’t know.”

The camera moved to a cathedral outside Lisbon. The differences in the Portuguese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not that great. But they were there. Mostly the interior stuff. Then something occurred to me, and I said, “Something has occurred to me. Do you have any idea what a cathedral is? What they look like, that is? Do you follow me? If somebody says cathedral to you, do you have any notion what they’re talking about? Do you know the difference between that and a Baptist church, say?”

He let the smoke dribble from his mouth. “I know they took hundreds of workers fifty or a hundred years to build,” he said. “I just heard the man say that, of course. I know generations of the same families worked on a cathedral. I heard him say that, too. The men who began their life’s work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that wise, bub, they’re no dif- ferent from the rest of us, right?” He laughed. Then his eyelids drooped again. His head nodded. He seemed to be snoozing. Maybe he was imagining himself in Portugal. The TV was showing another cathedral now. This one was in Ger- many. The En glishman’s voice droned on. “Cathedrals,” the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. “If you want the truth, bub, that’s about all I know. What I just said. What I heard him say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’d like that. If you want to know, I really don’t have a good idea.”

I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else.

I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, “To begin with, they’re very tall.” I was looking around the room for clues. “They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak. These supports are called buttresses. They remind me of viaducts, for some reason. But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either? Sometimes the cathedrals have dev ils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords and ladies. Don’t ask me why this is,” I said.

He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to be moving back and forth.

“I’m not doing so good, am I?” I said. He stopped nodding and leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. As he lis-

tened to me, he was running his fingers through his beard. I wasn’t getting through to him, I could see that. But he waited for me to go on just the same. He nodded, like he was trying to encourage me. I tried to think what else to say. “They’re really big,” I said. “They’re massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be

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close to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone’s life. You could tell this from their cathedral- building. I’m sorry,” I said, “but it looks like that’s the best I can do for you. I’m just no good at it.”

“That’s all right, bub,” the blind man said. “Hey, listen. I hope you don’t mind my asking you. Can I ask you something? Let me ask you a simple question, yes or no. I’m just curious and there’s no offense. You’re my host. But let me ask if you are in any way religious? You don’t mind my asking?”

I shook my head. He couldn’t see that, though. A wink is the same as a nod to a blind man. “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes it’s hard. You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure, I do,” he said. “Right,” I said. The En glishman was still holding forth. My wife sighed in her sleep. She

drew a long breath and went on with her sleeping. “You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “But I can’t tell you what a cathedral looks

like. It just isn’t in me to do it. I can’t do any more than I’ve done.” The blind man sat very still, his head down, as he listened to me. I said, “The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Noth-

ing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late- night TV. That’s all they are.”

It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He brought something up. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said, “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do something. We’ll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff,” he said.

So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’s room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table. And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking about.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins in the bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into the living room and sat down with it near his legs. I moved some things, smoothed the wrinkles from the bag, spread it out on the coffee table.

The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the carpet. He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of the

paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners. “All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.” He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my

hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said.

So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy.

“Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never thought any- thing like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.”

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I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of his fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded.

“Doing fine,” the blind man said. I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I’m no artist. But

I kept drawing just the same. My wife opened up her eyes and gazed at us. She sat up on the sofa, her robe

hanging open. She said, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know.” I didn’t answer her. The blind man said, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on

it. Press hard,” he said to me. “That’s right. That’s good,” he said. “Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now. You know what I’m saying? We’re going to really have us something here in a minute. How’s the old arm?” he said. “Put some people in there now. What’s a cathedral without people?”

My wife said, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on?”

“It’s all right,” he said to her. “Close your eyes now,” the blind man said to me. I did it. I closed them just like he said. “Are they closed?” he said. “Don’t fudge.” “They’re closed,” I said. “Keep them that way,” he said. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.” So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the

paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now. Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a look. What

do you think?” But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer.

I thought it was something I ought to do. “Well?” he said. “Are you looking?” My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel

like I was inside anything. “It’s really something,” I said.

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Wesley Rupton wrote the notes below with the “Questions about the elements of Fiction” in mind (p. 19). as you read these notes, compare them to the notes you took as you read Cathedral. do Rupton’s notes reveal anything to you that you didn’t notice while reading the story? did you notice anything he did not, or do you disagree with any of his interpretations?

Notes on Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”

What do you expect?

• Title: The first words are “This blind man,” and those words keep being repeated. Why not call it “The Blind Man” or “The Blind Man’s Visit”?

• The threatening things the husband says made me expect him to attack the blind man. I thought the wife might leave her husband for the blind man, who has been nicer to her.

• When they talk about going up to bed, and the wife goes to “get comfort- able” and then falls asleep, I thought there was a hint about sex.

What happens in the story?

• Not that much. It is a story about one eve ning in which a husband and wife and their guest drink, have dinner, talk, and then watch TV.

• These people have probably drunk two bottles of hard liquor (how many drinks?) before, during, and after a meal. And then they smoke marijuana.

• In the final scene, the two men try to describe and draw cathedrals that are on the TV show. Why cathedrals?

• The husband seems to have a different attitude at the end: He likes Robert and seems excited about the experience “like nothing else in my life up to now.”

How is the story narrated?

• It’s told in first person and past tense. The husband is the narrator. We never get inside another character’s thoughts. He seems to be telling someone about the incident, first saying the blind man was coming, then filling in the background about his wife and the blind man, and then tell- ing what happens after the guest arrives.

• The narrator describes people and scenes and summarizes the past; there is dialogue.

• It doesn’t have episodes or chapters, but there are two gaps on the page, before paragraph 57 and before paragraph 88. Maybe time passes here.

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Who are the characters?

• Three main characters: husband, wife, and blind man (the blind man’s own wife has just died, and the wife divorced her first husband). I don’t think we ever know the husband’s or wife’s names. The blind man, Robert, calls him “bub,” like “buddy.” They seem to be white, middle- class Ameri- cans. The wife is lonely and looking for meaning. The blind man seems sensitive, and he cares about the poetry and tapes.

• The husband is sort of acting out, though mostly in his own mind. Asking “Was his wife a Negro?” sounds like he wants to make fun of black or blind people. His wife asks, “Are you drunk?” and says that he has no friends; I thought he’s an unhappy man who gets drunk and acts “crazy” a lot and that she doesn’t really expect him to be that nice.

• It sounds like these people have plenty of food and things, but aren’t very happy. They all sound smart, but the narrator is ignorant, and he has no religion. All three characters have some bad or ner vous habits (alcohol, cigarettes, drugs; insomnia; suicide attempt; divorce).

What is the setting of the story?

• Mostly in the house the eve ning the blind man arrives. But after the intro there’s a kind of flashback to the summer in Seattle ten years ago (par. 2). The story about the visit starts again in paragraph 6, and then the wife tells the husband more about the blind man’s marriage— another flash- back in paragraph 16. In paragraph 17, “the time rolled around” to the sto- ry’s main event. After that, it’s chronological.

• We don’t know the name of the town, but it seems to be on the U.S. East Coast (five hours by train from Connecticut [par. 1]). It can’t be too long ago or too recent either: they mention trains, audiotapes, color TV, no Internet. No one seems worried about food or health the way they might be today.

• I noticed that travel came up in the story. Part of what drives the wife crazy about her first husband is moving around to different military bases (par. 4). In paragraph 46, Robert tells us about his contact with ham radio operators in places he would like to visit (Guam, Alaska). The TV show takes Robert and the narrator on a tour of France, Italy, and Portugal.

What do you notice about how the story is written?

• The narrator is irritating. He repeats words a lot. He uses ste reo types. He seems to be informally talking to someone, as if he can’t get over it. But then he sometimes uses exaggerated or bored- sounding phrases: “this man who’d first enjoyed her favors,” “So okay. I’m saying . . . married her childhood etc.” (par. 4). His style is almost funny.

• Things he repeats: Paragraphs 2 and 3: “She told me” (3 times), “he could touch her face . . . he touched his fingers to every part of her face . . .” (and later “touched her nose” and “they’d kept in touch”). “She even tried to write a poem . . . always trying to write a poem” (and 4 more times “poem”). The words “talk,” “tape,” “told” are also repeated.

What does the story mean? Can you express its theme or themes?

• The way the narrator learns to get along with the blind man must be important. The narrator is disgusted by blind people at first, and at the end he closes his eyes on purpose.

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• I think it makes a difference that the two men imagine and try to draw a cathedral, not a flower or an airplane. It’s something made by human beings, and it’s religious. As they mention, the builders of cathedrals don’t live to see them finished, but the buildings last for centuries. It’s not like the narrator is saved or becomes a great guy, but he gets past what ever he’s afraid of at night, and he seems inspired for a little while. I don’t know why the wife has to be left out of this, but probably the husband couldn’t open up if he was worrying about how close she is to Robert.

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a response paper may use a less formal or ga ni za tion and style than a longer, more formal essay, but it should not just be a summary or description of the work. Indeed, a response paper could be a step on the way to a longer essay. you need not form a single thesis or argument, but you should try to develop your ideas and feelings about the story by making reference to some specifies. The point is to get your thoughts in writing without worrying too much about form and style.

almost everything in the following response paper comes directly from the notes above, but notice how the writer has combined observations, adding a few direct quo- tations or details from the text to support claims about the story’s effects and mean- ing. (For ease of reference, we have altered the citations in this paper to refer to paragraph numbers. Unless your instructor indicates other wise, you should always follow convention by instead citing page numbers when writing about fiction.)

Rupton 1

Wesley Rupton Professor Suarez En glish 170 6 January 2019

Response Paper on Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”

Not much happens in Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” and at first I wondered what it was about and why it was called “Cathedral.” The narrator, the unnamed husband, seems to be telling someone about the eve ning that Robert, a blind friend of his wife, came to stay at their house, not long after Robert’s own wife has died. After the narrator fills us in about his wife’s first marriage and her relationship with the blind man, he describes what the three characters do that eve ning: they drink a lot of alcohol, eat a huge dinner that leaves them “stunned” (par. 46), smoke marijuana, and after the wife falls asleep the two men watch TV. A show about cathedrals leads the husband to try to describe what a cathedral looks like, and then the men try to draw one together. The husband seems to have a different attitude at the end: he likes Robert and seems excited about an experience “like nothing else in my life up to now” (par. 131).

The husband’s way of telling the story is definitely important. He is sort of funny, but also irritating. As he makes jokes about ste reo types, you start to dislike or distrust him. When he hears about Robert’s wife, Beulah, he asks,

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Rupton 2

“Was his wife a Negro?” (par. 12) just because her name sounds like a black woman’s name to him. In three paragraphs, he flashes back to the time ten years ago when his wife was the blind man’s assistant and the blind man

asked if he could touch her face. . . . She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face. . . . She even tried to write a poem about it. . . .

. . . In the poem, she recalled his fingers . . . over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt . . . when the blind man touched her nose and lips. (pars. 2-3)

The narrator seems to be going over and over the same creepy idea of a man feeling his wife’s face. It seems to disgust him that his wife and the blind man communicated or expressed themselves, perhaps because he seems incapable of doing that. When his wife asks, “Are you drunk?” and says that he has no friends, I got a feeling that the husband is an unhappy man who gets drunk and acts “crazy” a lot and that his wife doesn’t really expect him to be very nice (pars. 8- 13). He’s going to make fun of their guest (asking a blind man to go bowling). The husband is sort of acting out, though he’s mostly rude in his own mind.

There’s nothing heroic or dramatic or even unusual about these people (except that one is blind). The events take place in a house somewhere in an American suburb and not too long ago. Other than the quantity of alcohol and drugs they consume, these people don’t do anything unusual, though the blind man seems strange to the narrator. The ordinary setting and plot make the idea of something as grand and old as a Eu ro pe an cathedral come as a surprise at the end of the story. I wondered if part of the point is that they desperately want to get out of a trap they’re in. I noticed that travel came up in the story. Part of what drove the wife crazy with her first husband was moving around to different military bases (par. 4). In paragraph 46, Robert tells us about his contact with ham radio operators in places he would like to visit (Guam, Alaska). The TV show takes Robert and the narrator on a tour of France, Italy, and Portugal.

The way the narrator changes from disliking the blind man to getting along with him must be important to the meaning of the story. After the wife goes up to “get comfortable,” suggesting that they might go to bed, the story focuses on the two men. Later she falls asleep on the sofa between them, and the narrator decides not to cover up her leg where her robe has fallen open, as if he has stopped being jealous. At this point the narrator decides he is “glad for the company” of Robert (par. 84). The cooperation between the two men is the turning point. The narrator is disgusted by blind people at first, and at the end he closes his eyes on purpose. The two men try to imagine something and build something together, and Robert is coaching the narrator. Robert says, “let’s do her,” and then says, “You’re doing fine” (pars. 115, 118; emphasis added). I think it makes a difference that they imagine and draw a cathedral, not a flower or a cow or an airplane. It’s something made by human beings, and it’s religious. I don’t think the men are converted to believing in God at the end, but this narrow- minded guy gets past what ever he’s afraid of at night and finds some sort of inspiring feeling. I don’t know why the wife has to be left out, but probably the husband couldn’t open up if he was worrying about how close she is to Robert.

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Rupton 3

The ideas of communicating or being in touch and travel seem connected to me. I think that the husband tries to tell this story about the cathedral the way his wife tried to write a poem. The narrator has had an exciting experience that gets him in touch with something beyond his small house. After drawing the cathedral, the narrator says that he “didn’t feel like I was inside anything” (par. 135). Though I still didn’t like the narrator, I felt more sympathy, and I thought the story showed that even this hostile person could open up.

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Rupton 4

Work Ci t ed

Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, edited by Kelly J. Mays, shorter 13th ed., W. W. Norton, 2019, pp. 28-38.

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Because it focuses on both narration and character in Raymond Carver’s Cathe- dral, the following essay would be an appropriate response to essay assignments involving either of these ele ments. more specifically, Bethany Qualls here tackles a series of in ter est ing, interlinked questions: How does narration contribute to char- acterization in the story? How, if at all, might the story’s central character develop over its course?

Read this essay as you would one of your peers’ drafts, looking for opportuni- ties for the writer to improve her argument and pre sen ta tion in revision. How effectively does the draft answer the questions it poses? are there claims that might be developed further? other evidence that should be considered? How might the conclusion be strengthened? (For one critique and revision of the conclusion, see ch. 31, “The Lit er a ture essay.”)

For ease of reference, we have altered the citations in this essay to refer to para- graph numbers. Unless your instructor indicates other wise, you should always fol- low convention by instead citing page numbers when writing about fiction. For more on citation, see chapter 34.

Qualls 1

Bethany Qualls Professor Netherton En glish 301 16 January 2019

A Narrator’s Blindness in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”

A reader in search of an exciting plot will be pretty disappointed by Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” because the truth is nothing much happens. A suburban husband and wife receive a visit from her former boss, who is blind. After the wife falls asleep, the two men watch a TV program about cathedrals and eventually try to draw one. Along the way the three characters down a few cocktails and smoke a little pot. But that’s about as far as the action goes. Instead of focusing on plot, then, the story really asks us to focus on the characters, especially the husband who narrates the story. Through his words even more than his actions, the narrator unwittingly shows us why nothing much happens to him by continually demonstrating his utter inability to connect with others or to understand himself.

The narrator’s isolation is most evident in the distanced way he introduces his own story and the people in it. He does not name the other characters or

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himself, referring to them only by using labels such as “this blind man,” “His wife,” “my wife” (par. 1), and “The man [my wife] was going to marry” (par. 2). Even after the narrator’s wife starts referring to their visitor as “Robert,” the narrator keeps calling him “the blind man.” These labels distance him from the other characters and also leave readers with very little connection to them.

At least three times the narrator notices that this habit of not naming or really acknowledging people is significant. Referring to his wife’s “officer,” he asks, “why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?” (par. 5). Moments later he describes how freaked out he was when he listened to a tape the blind man had sent his wife and “heard [his] own name in the mouth of this . . . blind man [he] didn’t even know!” (par. 5). Yet once the blind man arrives and begins to talk with the wife, the narrator finds himself “wait[ing] in vain to hear [his] name on [his] wife’s sweet lips” and disappointed to hear “nothing of the sort” (par. 46). Simply using someone’s name suggests an intimacy that the narrator avoids and yet secretly yearns for.

Also reinforcing the narrator’s isolation and dissatisfaction with it are the awkward euphemisms and clichés he uses, which emphasize how disconnected he is from his own feelings and how uncomfortable he is with other people’s. Referring to his wife’s first husband, the narrator says it was he “who’d first enjoyed her favors” (par. 4), an antiquated expression even in 1983, the year the story was published. Such language reinforces our sense that the narrator cannot speak in language that is meaningful or heartfelt, especially when he tries to talk about emotions. He describes his wife’s feelings for her first husband, for example, by using generic language and then just trailing off entirely: “she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc.” (par. 2). When he refers to the blind man and his wife as “inseparable,” he points out that this is, in fact, his “wife’s word,” not one that he’s come up with (par. 16). And even when he admits that he would like to hear his wife talk about him (par. 46), he speaks in language that seems to come from books or movies rather than the heart.

Once the visit actually begins, the narrator’s interactions and conversations with the other characters are even more awkward. His discomfort with the very idea of the visit is obvious to his wife and to the reader. As he says in his usual deadpan manner, “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit” (par. 1). During the visit he sits silent when his wife and Robert are talking and then answers Robert’s questions about his life and feelings with the shortest possible phrases: “How long had I been in my present position? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.)” (par. 46). Finally, he tries to escape even that much involvement by simply turning on the TV and tuning Robert out.

Despite Robert’s best attempt to make a connection with the narrator, the narrator resorts to a label again, saying that he “didn’t want to be left alone with a blind man” (par. 57). Robert, merely “a blind man,” remains a category, not a person, and the narrator can initially relate to Robert only by invoking the ste reo types about that category that he has learned “from the movies” (par. 1). He confides to the reader that he believes that blind people always wear dark glasses, that they never smoke (par. 43), and that a beard on a blind man is “too much” (par. 18). It follows that the narrator is amazed about the connection his wife and Robert have because he is unable to see Robert as a person like any

46 SamPLe WRITInG

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other. “Who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?” (par. 16), he asks rhetorically about Robert’s wedding to his wife, Beulah.

Misconceptions continue as the narrator assumes Beulah would “never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved,” since the compliments he is thinking about are physical ones (par. 16). Interestingly, when faced with a name that is specific (Beulah), the narrator immediately assumes that he knows what the person with that name must be like (“a colored woman,” par. 11), even though she is not in the room or known to him. Words fail or mislead the narrator in both directions, as he’s using them and as he hears them.

There is hope for the narrator at the end as he gains some empathy and forges a bond with Robert over the drawing of a cathedral. That pro cess seems to begin when the narrator admits to himself, the reader, and Robert that he is “glad for [Robert’s] company” (par. 84) and, for the first time, comes close to disclosing the literally nightmarish loneliness of his life. It culminates in a moment of physical and emotional intimacy that the narrator admits is “like nothing else in my life up to now” (par. 131)— a moment in which discomfort with the very idea of blindness gives way to an attempt to actually experience blindness from the inside. Because the narrator has used words to distance himself from the world, it seems fitting that all this happens only when the narrator stops using words. They have a tendency to blind him.

However, even at the very end it isn’t clear just whether or how the narrator has really changed. He does not completely interact with Robert but has to be prodded into action by him. By choosing to keep his eyes closed, he not only temporarily experiences blindness but also shuts out the rest of the world, since he “didn’t feel like [he] was inside anything” (par. 135). Perhaps most important, he remains unable to describe his experience meaningfully, making it difficult for readers to decide whether or not he has really changed. For example, he says, “It was like nothing else in my life up to now” (par. 131), but he doesn’t explain why this is true. Is it because he is doing something for someone else? Because he is thinking about the world from another’s perspective? Because he feels connected to Robert? Because he is drawing a picture while probably drunk and high? There is no way of knowing.

It’s possible that not feeling “inside anything” (par. 135) could be a feeling of freedom from his own habits of guardedness and insensitivity, his emotional “blindness.” But even with this final hope for connection, for the majority of the story the narrator is a closed, judgmental man who isolates himself and cannot connect with others. The narrator’s view of the world is one filled with misconceptions that the visit from Robert starts to slowly change, yet it is not clear what those changes are, how far they will go, or whether they will last.

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Work Ci t ed

Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, edited by Kelly J. Mays, shorter 13th ed., W. W. Norton, 2019, pp. 28-38.

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Telling Stories AN ALBUM

Is it human nature or human culture? Is it hardwired in our brains or inspired by our need to live with others in a community? What ever the cause, people tell stories in every known society. Professional and amateur storytellers, as well as scholars in the humanities and sciences, have been paying more atten- tion to the phenomenon of stories or narrative in recent de cades. online forums and organizations around the world are dedicated to a revival of oral storytelling. educators, religious leaders, therapists, and organizers of programs for the young or the needy have turned to various publications and programs for guidance on how the techniques of storytelling might benefit their clients.

Stories are part of our everyday lives, and everyone has stories to tell. Perhaps you have heard the life stories broadcast every week on national Public Radio’s Morning Edition in conjunction with the StoryCorps project, which allows ordi- nary americans to record their own interviews with friends or family (often in a traveling “studio” van) and have their recordings archived in the Library of Con- gress. most likely you are familiar with blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube videos, and other means of producing or sharing some version of yourself, some aspect of your experience or your life.

authors of short fiction have often reflected on the irresistible appeal of stories by making storytelling part of the plot or action within their fiction. We include here three stories that do just that. as you read the stories, think about what each implies about how stories and storytelling work and what they can do for us. When and why do we both tell stories and listen to those of others? What do we derive from the act of telling or listening, as well as from the story itself? What makes a story compelling, worth listening to or even writing down, according to the charac- ters in these stories? How might the sorts of choices we make in telling a story resemble those a fiction writer makes in writing one? as listeners or readers, how are our expectations of a story and our responses to it shaped by our knowledge of or assumptions about its teller? In what different ways might stories, whether oral or written, be “true”? When and why does (or doesn’t) the truthfulness of a story matter?

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GRACE PALEY (1922–2007)

A Conversation with My Father

Like many of her fictional characters, Grace Good- side Paley was a lifelong New Yorker and the child of immigrants—in her case, Ukrainian Jewish social- ists exiled by the czar for their po liti cal activities. By the time Grace was born, her working- class father had completed his medical studies and become a

doctor. Paley thus grew up in a comfortable middle- class Bronx home that also included her two much older siblings and her father’s mother and sister. Thanks to them, Rus sian and Yiddish were her first languages, animated conversation and po liti cal engagement second nature. Being, by her own account, too busy reading and writing, Paley attended college without earning a degree. But a night class with poet W. H. Auden provided the seventeen- year- old what she styled her “first” and greatest “lesson as a writer”—to eschew conventional literary language in order to write truthfully, in the way she and those around her actually spoke. As her Begin Again: Collected Poems (2000) demon- strates, that lesson transformed Paley’s poetry, just as it shapes the essays, reviews, and lectures collected in Just as I Thought (1998). But its richest fruits are the short stories she began to write only in her thirties and for which she is today hailed as “among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women— mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers—in all their dailiness.” A twice- married mother of two and self- described “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist,” Paley was also a dedicated activist, participating avidly in campaigns on behalf of women’s and Palestinians’ rights and against nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

M y father is eighty- six years old and in bed. His heart, that bloody motor, is equally old and will not do certain jobs any more. It still floods his head with brainy light. But it won’t let his legs carry the weight of his body around the house. Despite my meta phors, this muscle failure is not due to his old heart, he says, but to a potassium shortage. Sitting on one pillow, leaning on three, he offers last- minute advice and makes a request.

“I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” he says, “the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.”

I say, “Yes, why not? That’s possible.” I want to please him, though I don’t remem- ber writing that way. I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: “There was a woman . . .” followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

Finally I thought of a story that had been happening for a couple of years right across the street. I wrote it down, then read it aloud. “Pa,” I said, “how about this? Do you mean something like this?”

Once in my time there was a woman and she had a son. They lived nicely, in a small apartment in Manhattan. This boy at about fifteen became a

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junkie, which is not unusual in our neighborhood. In order to maintain her close friendship with him, she became a junkie too. She said it was part of the youth culture, with which she felt very much at home. After a while, for a number of reasons, the boy gave it all up and left the city and his mother in disgust. Hopeless and alone, she grieved. We all visit her.

“O.K., Pa, that’s it,” I said, “an unadorned and miserable tale.” “But that’s not what I mean,” my father said. “You misunderstood me on pur-

pose. You know there’s a lot more to it. You know that. You left everything out. Turgenev1 wouldn’t do that. Chekhov wouldn’t do that. There are in fact Rus sian writers you never heard of, you don’t have an inkling of, as good as anyone, who can write a plain ordinary story, who would not leave out what you have left out. I object not to facts but to people sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices from who knows where . . .”

“Forget that one, Pa, what have I left out now? In this one?” “Her looks, for instance.” “Oh. Quite handsome, I think. Yes.” “Her hair?” “Dark, with heavy braids, as though she were a girl or a foreigner.” “What were her parents like, her stock? That she became such a person. It’s

interesting, you know.” “From out of town. Professional people. The first to be divorced in their

county. How’s that? Enough?” I asked. “With you, it’s all a joke,” he said. “What about the boy’s father. Why didn’t

you mention him? Who was he? Or was the boy born out of wedlock?” “Yes,” I said. “He was born out of wedlock.” “For Godsakes, doesn’t anyone in your stories get married? Doesn’t anyone

have the time to run down to City Hall before they jump into bed?” “No,” I said. “In real life, yes. But in my stories, no.” “Why do you answer me like that?” “Oh, Pa, this is a simple story about a smart woman who came to N.Y.C. full

of interest love trust excitement very up to date, and about her son, what a hard time she had in this world. Married or not, it’s of small consequence.”

“It is of great consequence,” he said. “O.K.,” I said. “O.K. O.K. yourself,” he said, “but listen. I believe you that she’s good-

looking, but I don’t think she was so smart.” “That’s true,” I said. “Actually that’s the trouble with stories. People start out

fantastic. You think they’re extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they’re just average with a good education. Sometimes the other way around, the person’s a kind of dumb innocent, but he outwits you and you can’t even think of an ending good enough.”

“What do you do then?” he asked. He had been a doctor for a couple of de cades and then an artist for a couple of de cades and he’s still interested in details, craft, technique.

“Well, you just have to let the story lie around till some agreement can be reached between you and the stubborn hero.”

1. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818– 83); his best- known novel, Fathers and Sons, deals with intergen- erational conflict.

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“Aren’t you talking silly, now?” he asked. “Start again,” he said. “It so happens I’m not going out this eve ning. Tell the story again. See what you can do this time.”

“O.K.,” I said. “But it’s not a five- minute job.” Second attempt:

Once, across the street from us, there was a fine handsome woman, our neighbor. She had a son whom she loved because she’d known him since birth (in helpless chubby infancy, and in the wrestling, hugging ages, seven to ten, as well as earlier and later). This boy, when he fell into the fist of adoles- cence, became a junkie. He was not a hopeless one. He was in fact hopeful, an ideologue and successful converter. With his busy brilliance, he wrote persuasive articles for his high- school newspaper. Seeking a wider audience, using important connections, he drummed into Lower Manhattan newsstand distribution a periodical called Oh! Golden Horse!2

In order to keep him from feeling guilty (because guilt is the stony heart of nine tenths of all clinically diagnosed cancers in America today, she said), and because she had always believed in giving bad habits room at home where one could keep an eye on them, she too became a junkie. Her kitchen was famous for a while— a center for intellectual addicts who knew what they were doing. A few felt artistic like Coleridge3 and others were scientific and revolutionary like Leary.4 Although she was often high herself, certain good mothering reflexes remained, and she saw to it that there was lots of orange juice around and honey and milk and vitamin pills. However, she never cooked anything but chili, and that no more than once a week. She explained, when we talked to her, seriously, with neighborly concern, that it was her part in the youth culture and she would rather be with the young, it was an honor, than with her own generation.

One week, while nodding through an Antonioni5 film, this boy was severely jabbed by the elbow of a stern and proselytizing girl, sitting beside him. She offered immediate apricots and nuts for his sugar level, spoke to him sharply, and took him home.

She had heard of him and his work and she herself published, edited, and wrote a competitive journal called Man Does Live By Bread Alone. In the organic heat of her continuous presence he could not help but become interested once more in his muscles, his arteries, and nerve connections. In fact he began to love them, trea sure them, praise them with funny little songs in Man Does Live . . .

the fingers of my flesh transcend my transcendental soul the tightness in my shoulders end my teeth have made me whole

To the mouth of his head (that glory of will and determination) he brought hard apples, nuts, wheat germ, and soybean oil. He said to his old friends, From now on, I guess I’ll keep my wits about me. I’m going on the natch. He said he was about to begin a spiritual deep- breathing journey. How about you too, Mom? he asked kindly.

2. Horse is slang for heroin. 3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772– 1834), en glish Romantic poet, claimed that his poem “Kubla Khan” (p. 1134) recorded what he remembered of a dream stimulated by opium. 4. Timothy Leary (1920– 96), american psychologist, promoted the use of psychedelic drugs. 5. michelangelo antonioni (1912– 2007), Italian film director (Blow- Up, Zabriskie Point). Nodding: a slang term referring to the narcotic effect of heroin.

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His conversion was so radiant, splendid, that neighborhood kids his age began to say that he had never been a real addict at all, only a journalist along for the smell of the story. The mother tried several times to give up what had become without her son and his friends a lonely habit. This effort only brought it to supportable levels. The boy and his girl took their electronic mimeograph and moved to the bushy edge of another borough. They were very strict. They said they would not see her again until she had been off drugs for sixty days.

At home alone in the eve ning, weeping, the mother read and reread the seven issues of Oh! Golden Horse! They seemed to her as truthful as ever. We often crossed the street to visit and console. But if we mentioned any of our children who were at college or in the hospital or dropouts at home, she would cry out, My baby! My baby! and burst into terrible, face- scarring, time- consuming tears. The End.

First my father was silent, then he said, “Number One: You have a nice sense of humor. Number Two: I see you can’t tell a plain story. So don’t waste time.” Then he said sadly, “Number Three: I suppose that means she was alone, she was left like that, his mother. Alone. Probably sick?”

I said, “Yes.” “Poor woman. Poor girl, to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools. The

end. The end. You were right to put that down. The end.” I didn’t want to argue, but I had to say, “Well, it is not necessarily the

end, Pa.” “Yes,” he said, “what a tragedy. The end of a person.” “No, Pa,” I begged him. “It doesn’t have to be. She’s only about forty. She

could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on. A teacher or a social worker. An ex- junkie! Sometimes it’s better than having a master’s in education.”

“Jokes,” he said. “As a writer that’s your main trouble. You don’t want to rec- ognize it. Tragedy! Plain tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end.”

“Oh, Pa,” I said. “She could change.” “In your own life, too, you have to look it in the face.” He took a couple of

nitroglycerin.6 “Turn to five,” he said, pointing to the dial on the oxygen tank. He inserted the tubes into his nostrils and breathed deep. He closed his eyes and said, “No.”

I had promised the family to always let him have the last word when arguing, but in this case I had a different responsibility. That woman lives across the street. She’s my knowledge and my invention. I’m sorry for her. I’m not going to leave her there in that house crying. (Actually neither would Life, which unlike me has no pity.)

Therefore: She did change. Of course her son never came home again. But right now, she’s the receptionist in a storefront community clinic in the East Village. Most of the customers are young people, some old friends. The head doctor said to her, “If we only had three people in this clinic with your experiences . . .”

“The doctor said that?” My father took the oxygen tubes out of his nostrils and said, “Jokes. Jokes again.”

6. medicine for certain heart conditions.

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“No, Pa, it could really happen that way, it’s a funny world nowadays.” “No,” he said. “Truth first. She will slide back. A person must have character.

She does not.” “No, Pa,” I said. “That’s it. She’s got a job. Forget it. She’s in that storefront

working.” “How long will it be?” he asked. “Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in

the face?” 1974

QUESTIONS

1. What different ideas about stories and storytelling do the narrator and her father seem to have in a Conversation with my Father? What might account for their different attitudes?

2. In what ways is the narrator’s second version of her story an improvement over the first? Why does her father still reject the story?

3. Why does the narrator’s father object so strongly to the jokes in her stories, even though he compliments her “nice sense of humor” (par. 36)? are jokes out of place in a story about someone facing death?

A U T H O R S O N T H E I R W O R K

GRACE PALEY (1922– 2007) From “Conversation with Grace Paley” (1980)* I have lots of pages that I’ll never turn into a story. [. . . They] are just a para- graph of nice writing, or something like that [. . .] It’s not that they’re not worth working with, but nothing in that paragraph gives me that feeling which is one of the impetuses of all storytelling: “I want to tell you a story— I want to tell you something.”

• • •

[. . . E]verybody tells stories, and we all tell stories all day long. I’ve told about seven or eight today myself. And we are storytellers— I mean, we’re keeping the record of this life on this place, on earth, you know— all the time. And often you tell a story and somebody says to you, “Gee, that’s a good story,” and you think to yourself, “Well, it certainly is a good story— it must be good— I’ve told it about six times.” But then you don’t write it. And you don’t write it because you’ve told it so many times. And also because in writing there has to be [. . .] some of the joy of mystery. [. . .] There’s a way I have of thinking about what you write, really write— you write what you don’t know about what you know.

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I don’t really intend to be funny. [. . .] I have a story [. . .] “Conversation with My Father,” in which my father keeps telling me: “All you do is tell jokes.” And it was true [. . .] this was one of the things that he would always kind of bug me about.

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anTon CHeKHov Gooseberries 55

He’d say, “Okay, yeah, more jokes, you think that’s funny, right?” And I’d say, “No, I didn’t say it was funny. If people laugh, I can’t help it— I didn’t say it was funny.”

*“Conversation with Grace Paley.” Interview by Leonard michaels. Threepenny Review, no. 3, autumn 1980, pp. 4– 6. JSTOR, www . jstor . org / stable / 4382967.

ANTON CHEKHOV (1860–1904)

Gooseberries1

The grand son of a serf who purchased his family’s freedom, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the Rus sian port city of Taganrog, where he apparently learned from his mother how to read, write, and spin a good yarn. In 1875, his devoutly religious and some- what tyrannical father, a grocer facing imprisonment

for debt, fled to Moscow; shortly thereafter, the family lost its house to a former friend, a misfortune that Chekhov would revisit in his last play, The Cherry Orchard (1904). Chek- hov would not begin writing for the stage until 1887, three years after earning his MD from Moscow University. Throughout the 1880s, he supported his family, financed his studies, and began to make a name for himself by instead writing short stories and sketches for newspapers and magazines. His first collection appeared in 1884, the same year he experienced the first symptoms of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. Declar- ing, “If I’m a doctor, I need patients and a hospital; if I’m a littérateur, I need to live among the folk,” Chekhov in 1892 moved his family into a newly purchased estate near Moscow; here he would live for the next seven years, becoming both an industrious landowner and an unpaid doctor to the peasants of his own and surrounding districts. Though theater was Chekhov’s primary focus after 1895, he continued until the end of his life to write fiction, including the 1898 trilogy of which “Gooseberries” forms a part. Each of the three stories in this, Chekhov’s only, sequence or cycle (the others are “Man in a Case” and “About Love”) features a story told either by or to the veterinarian Ivan Ivanych and his friend, the schoolteacher Burkin, during their trip into the countryside.

The sky had been overcast with rain clouds since early morning. The weather was mild, and not hot and oppressive as it can be on dull grey days when storm clouds lie over the fields for ages and you wait for rain which never comes. Ivan Ivanych, the vet, and Burkin, a teacher at the high school, were tired of walk- ing and thought they would never come to the end of the fields. They could just make out the windmills at the village of Mironositskoye in the far distance— a range of hills stretched away to the right and dis appeared far beyond it. They both knew that the river was there, with meadows, green willows and farm- steads, and that if they climbed one of the hills they would see yet another vast

1. Translated by Ronald Wilks.

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expanse of fields, telegraph wires and a train resembling a caterpillar in the distance. In fine weather they could see even as far as the town. And now, in calm weather, when the whole of nature had become gentle and dreamy, Ivan Ivanych and Burkin were filled with love for those open spaces and they both thought what a vast and beautiful country it was.

“Last time we were in Elder Prokofy’s barn, you were going to tell me a story,” Burkin said.

“Yes, I wanted to tell you about my brother.” Ivan Ivanych heaved a long sigh and lit his pipe before beginning his narra-

tive; but at that moment down came the rain. Five minutes later it was simply teeming. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin were in two minds as to what they should do. The dogs were already soaked through and stood with their tails drooping, look- ing at them affectionately.

“We must take shelter,” Burkin said. “Let’s go to Alyokhin’s, it’s not very far.” “All right, let’s go there.” They changed direction and went across mown fields, walking straight on at

first, and then bearing right until they came out on the high road. Before long, poplars, a garden, then the red roofs of barns came into view. The river glinted, and then they caught sight of a wide stretch of water and a white bathing- hut. This was Sofino, where Alyokhin lived.

The mill was turning and drowned the noise of the rain. The wall of the dam shook. Wet horses with downcast heads were standing by some carts and peas- ants went around with sacks on their heads. Every thing was damp, muddy and bleak, and the water had a cold, malevolent look. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin felt wet, dirty and terribly uncomfortable. Their feet were weighed down by mud and when they crossed the dam and walked up to the barns near the manor house they did not say a word and seemed to be angry with each other.

A winnowing fan was droning away in one of the barns and dust poured out of the open door. On the threshold stood the master himself, Alyokhin, a man of about forty, tall, stout, with long hair, and he looked more like a professor or an artist than a landowner. He wore a white shirt that hadn’t been washed for a very long time, and it was tied round with a piece of rope as a belt. Instead of trousers he was wearing underpants; mud and straw clung to his boots. His nose and eyes were black with dust. He immediately recognized Ivan Ivanych and Burkin, and was clearly delighted to see them.

“Please come into the house, gentlemen,” he said, smiling, “I’ll be with you in a jiffy.”

It was a large house, with two storeys. Alyokhin lived on the ground floor in the two rooms with vaulted ceilings and small win dows where his estate man- ag ers used to live. They were simply furnished and smelled of rye bread, cheap vodka and harness. He seldom used the main rooms upstairs, reserving them for guests. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin were welcomed by the maid, who was such a beautiful young woman that they both stopped and stared at each other.

“You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you, gentlemen,” Alyokhin said as he followed them into the hall. “A real surprise!” Then he turned to the maid and said, “Pelageya, bring some dry clothes for the gentlemen. I suppose I’d better change too. But I must have a wash first, or you’ll think I haven’t had one since spring. Would you like to come to the bathing- hut while they get things ready in the house?”

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56 TeLLInG SToRIeS: an aLBUm

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch01_001-728.indd 56 8/29/18 1:08 PM

hn hk io il sy SY ek eh

hn hk io il sy SY ek eh

hn hk io il sy SY ek eh

hn hk io il sy SY ek eh

hn hk io il sy SY ek eh

hn hk io il sy SY ek eh

The beautiful Pelageya, who had such a dainty look and gentle face, brought soap and towels, and Alyokhin went off with his guests to the bathing- hut.

“Yes, it’s ages since I had a good wash,” he said as he undressed. “As you can see, it’s a nice hut. My father built it, but I never find time these days for a swim.”

He sat on one of the steps and smothered his long hair and neck with soap; the water turned brown.

“Yes, I must confess . . .” Ivan Ivanych muttered, with a meaningful look at his head.

“ Haven’t had a wash for ages,” Alyokhin repeated in his embarrassment and soaped himself again; the water turned a dark inky blue.

Ivan Ivanych came out of the cabin, dived in with a loud splash and swam in the rain, making broad sweeps with his arms and sending out waves with white lilies bobbing about on them. He swam right out to the middle of the reach and dived. A moment later he popped up somewhere else and swam on, continually trying to dive right to the bottom.

“Oh, good God,” he kept saying with great relish. “Good God . . .” He reached the mill, said a few words to the peasants, then he turned and

floated on his back in the middle with his face under the rain. Burkin and Alyokhin were already dressed and ready to leave, but he kept on swimming and diving.

“Oh, dear God,” he said. “Oh, God!” “Now that’s enough,” Burkin shouted. They went back to the house. Only when the lamp in the large upstairs

drawing- room was alight and Burkin and Ivan Ivanych, wearing silk dressing- gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in armchairs and Alyokhin, washed and combed now and with a new frock- coat on, was walking up and down, obvi- ously savouring the warmth, cleanliness, dry clothes and light shoes, while his beautiful Pelageya glided silently over the carpet and gently smiled as she served tea and jam on a tray— only then did Ivan Ivanych begin his story. It seemed that Burkin and Alyokhin were not the only ones who were listening, but also the ladies (young and old) and the officers, who were looking down calmly and solemnly from their gilt frames on the walls.