Estelle's post on Eiseley

In a complexity of vivid details and life questioning prose Loren Eiseley weaves a wonderful description of his time on the shores of Costabel Beach. I loved this memoir and I think that for me one of the biggest reasons why this was a successful narrative is the use of tone, and the tonal shift that occurs over the 16 page course of this essay. Specifically Eiseley’s focus on death and the dominance that it claims over the entirety of the world, “He looked full at me with a faint question kindling in his eyes, which seemed to take on the far depths of the sea. “I do not collect,” I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments. Neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector.”” And then the way he begins to shift his attitudes towards life after he meets and ponders his run in with ‘The Star Thrower’.

The tonal shift is very gradual throughout the work and it isn’t until near the very end that Eiseley expresses his new outlook on the world, “I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. I spoke once briefly. “I understand,” I said. “Call me another thrower.” Only then I allowed myself to think, He is not alone any longer, After us there will be others.”

Another aspect of this work that I found to be very impactful was the repetition of certain themes and images. There were three major examples of this that I noted; one example of this to be used was the lifelessness of the beach and the hopelessness that was found on the shore for the marine life that was sentenced to death there. And the second was the Buddhist Skull and Eye, which Eiseley used to clear his mind so that he was able to focus on the specific scenes of reflection that were shared in the essay. The use of the skull and eye at first was described by Eiseley as being him looking at the word with an air of pessimism he felt on the shore. “Upon that shore meaning had ceased. There were only the dead skull and the revolving eye. With such an eye, some have said, science looks upon the world. I do not know. I know only that I was the skull of emptiness and the endlessly revolving light without pity.”

It was in a segment of the book that Eiseley was using the image of the Skull and Eye to reflect on his mother, and he mentions briefly the painful past that seemingly was the leading contributor to his negative view held at the beginning of the work. Eiseley uses the eye to seek out answers to questions that he mentions during the work and it is through these questions and reflections that he ultimately comes to realize that he appreciates life. “I had been unbelieving. I had walked away from the star thrower in the hardened indifference of maturity. But thought mediated by the eye is one of nature’s infinite disguises. Belatedly, I arose with a solitary mission. I set forth in an effort to find the star thrower.”

The third and, in my opinion, most powerful image that was used by Eiseley is, of course, the Star Thrower himself. This character represents many different themes for Eiseley and his life. Such as the contrast of life and death in the first scene on Costabel Beach where when all Eiseley and the “collectors” found or noticed on the beach was the death of creatures, the Star Thrower looked for life and tried to preserve it rather than accept demise. Another view that one can look at and compare the Star Thrower to is an almost God-appointed role, the way he considers it his given duty to find the life amongst the debris of death and save it.

 I also thought that along with the use of tone and repetition, Eiseley’s choice of breaking this moderately long block of text into sections was an interesting choice stylistically. It sort of reminded me of Poe’s “the Masque of the Red Death” and the way in that story the different stages of life and realization were symbolized in the different colored rooms; these sections represented the personal growth and maturing of Eiseley in the midst of his encounter with the Star Thrower. 

Bechdel's artist/autistic colony

Bechdel's chapter 5, "The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death", starts with images of radiance, the sunset and rise and her father sunbathing, and a meditation on why her father stayed in Beech Creek, a stifling, inhibiting place. On page 129 Bechdel starts to write and to draw or paint. Her child character writes a poem, her father adds lines to it, and she plunks down a "muddy watercolor sunset" to illustrate it. Bechdel adds other panels where we see her child’s art start to grow but always in the shadow of her parents' more consummate abilities.

On page 135, she inexplicably starts talking about her "obsessive-compulsive disorder". This after describing their house to be "like an artists' colony." The descriptions of her OCD go on for several panel/pages and then she discovers Dr. Spock and she starts to put it together. Bechdel uses her childhood OCD and Dr. Spock like she used the myth of Daedalus and Camus and later James Joyce: as an alternative narrative that is superimposed on her family life. You see this covertly in how she describes her OCD but then more overtly when she returns on page 139 to her parents. Her father has just come home late for dinner and her parents quarrel.

This missed-dinner drama happens inside the panels on the page while her child character is absorbed in reading Dr. Spock and it finishes up with her returning to the "artist colony" motif, a two page column panel (at the bottom of the page) of their home shown from the outside, and a revision of that characterization by referring to their house as an "autistic colony". This play on words arrives in perfect logical fashion by way of her own recollections of her OCD as a symptom of the dysfunctional family life and is demonstrated in miniature by the short scene of her father coming home late dinner and her mother's anger. We suddenly understand why she's been telling us about her OCD. It is reaction to her family life but she does not say it outright but shows it happening all around her while she is trying to discover its (the OCD) roots while at the same time (as writer) knowing all about it.

The writer/artist Bechdel is a character in her own memoir by being the puppet master leading us down paths where we are told to pay attention to one thing while she is subtly showing us something else. It's like she is a tour guide in a museum. We listen to her talk to us about the paintings but behind our backs the paintings are acting out a drama all their own. She knows this but doesn't let on. We are both captive of her narrative and privy to her narrative machinations.

How can we describe this technique for use in our own memoirs? Bechdel wants us to see how she gets to the idea that the house she grew up in was like an artists' colony. A benign sort of characterization that we might, if we were writing it, let stand. But she doesn't let it stand because it is more complicated than that. She knows that artists are motivated as much by compulsion as by inspiration. And that indeed, their inspiration often comes from their compulsions. So how to argue this without making an argument, by instead dramatizing it so we see what she is talking about. The best way is to show us the home as artist colony and then segue into the compulsion, work with what is going on with the compulsion and slowly bring the home as artist colony idea back in again but differently, as an autistic colony. That way, what was posited (home as artist colony) is now by way of an alternative narrative (OCD) transformed into something different (autistic colony): a result of considering the alternative narrative that at first appears out of the blue but slowly starts to make sense and is finally something that seems necessary in order to understand the deeper meaning of what home-as-artist-colony can be.

In its simplest form: She takes an idea, pushes it through an alternative narrative, and comes out with a more complicated picture of what that idea means. Try this technique; it will be revelatory for your own first impressions of what something means.

Chris Offutt from "Same River Twice"

I found it interesting that Offutt starts this section of his memoir by telling us what he isn’t: a soldier, an animal or “the consummate hitchhiker.” What also struck me was that Offutt does not tell the reader what he is. It’s poetic that Offutt also ends this section of the memoir by telling us what he isn’t. But again, he leaves out what he is. Which is, perhaps what he is trying to explore with this piece.

Offutt talks about the Parrot Lady a lot. He is intrigued by her and hypnotized by her act. He describes the atmosphere in the room: “A palpable sense of guilt congealed with lust in the tend, and the men refused to look at one another.” Offutt himself feels this guilt/ashamedness when the Parrot Lady finds him in the audience and holds eye contact. What does the Parrot Lady represent to Offutt? Lust? His youthful sexual inadequacies? Someone braver than he is, someone who isn’t afraid to outwardly show that they’re a “freak”? During their conversation in her trailer, Offutt doesn’t understand why the Parrot Lady wants to be a freak, he’s drunk and naïve and obviously confused. And it can be confusing as to why anyone would want to outwardly label themselves as a ‘freak’. There’s a sense of irony here, because the woman who purposely tattooed herself in order to outwardly show her ‘freak’ status is the most popular act in the show.

When Offutt and the other animal trainers want to see Gabe the ape’s genitals, they trick him into standing on his hind legs so they can see them. It’s quiet a childish thing to do. In the end, this childish thing to do requires each of the men to confess their deepest, darkest secrets to Gabe. We find out that Offutt was a transvestite in New York. This doesn’t come into play in this section of his memoir, but the way in which his secret comes out is interesting. Offutt has not mentioned anything about his past, which he seems almost ashamed of, and his “greatest secret” comes out to an ape.

Throughout the story, Offutt doesn’t change how the circus people speak. He uses phrases like, “I sneaked you a snack,” and other idioms that could have been corrected, but make the story more real for the reader when left in. 

Bechdel’s Greek Chorus

In the first section of Fun Home, Bechdel uses the myth of Icarus and his father, Daedalus, to get us into the mystery of her family life and the role of her father in it. We know from the beginning, the "airplane game", that her father and their relationship will be at the heart of the book. She uses the backstory of the Daedalus myth--the father fashioning wings for his son Icarus who then disobeys him and flies too close to the sun thus melting the wax that binds the wings which then causes the son to fall to his death--to form the early backdrop for the narrative of family life. She is not claiming a position in the family myth but says: "For if my father was Icarus, he was also Daedalus" (7).  We only realize later that she is intimating that her father will "fall"--die at some point in the memoir. We are led to believe that it has something to do with his passion--for his craft (fixing up the house but not much to do with his job of teaching HS English)--but also "passion in every sense of the word."

Let's look more closely at the panels on p. 7 because many of the themes of the book are revealed in these drawings and words. The two panels at the top of the page are a unit. If you read what happens inside the panels, it is a story of a Bechdel's child rejecting her father's choice of wallpaper and him bushing aside her distaste with the juvenile remark: "Tough titty."  They are both doing two different things in the panels. He is holding a curtain to the window and she is holding up a roll of wallpaper. The commentary above the panels talks about Icarus and Daedalus and how he, Daedalus, "answered not to the laws of society, but to those of his craft." It is Bechdel's adult/writer talking matter-of-factly from a distance.

The action and words inside the panel are from the perspective of Bechdel's child. The effect of bolding "hate" in "But I hate pink! I hate flowers!" is a small, strident cry from the child that her likes and dislikes should be taken serious. And he isn't even looking at her in the panel when he says: "Tough titty." He's seeing if the curtains match. The commentary puts another spin on the scene by talking about "laws", laws of society and laws of craft. Laws are being broken here but laws are also being upheld.

Thus the core ambiguity in the memoir between her father's desire to sublimate his sexuality into a practice of craft is revealed, sort of. Society here is the wider society of the fifties that does not approve of homosexuality but also the society that is the typical family unit comprised of others like Bechdel's child who are governed by rules that the "Old father, old artificer" chooses to ignore, too. He ignores them on both accounts for his craft but in the case of the first, his homosexuality, his craft is symptom of something hidden, while in the second, his family, sees this craft as part of an overweening pride that is an inflexible mask over the same seething passion.

We're not sure how Bechdel comes down on the craft vs. society divide. We know that her child wants her father to play by the family societal rules but he refuses. And it becomes clear that as the memoir goes on that the child in the panels starts to learn her father's nature only by fits and starts. So what is the role of the top-panel commentary then? I think it acts somewhat like a Greek chorus that knows the truth but has a precarious position in that they cannot reveal too much of it because their role is fixed in the drama. They provide ideas such as the myth of Daedalus and later Joyce's Ulysses as archetypes that provide veiled commentary that helps describe what is going on under the surface of family life where there is very little that actually happens or very little that is actually said about the true motives of family characters. Oh, we hear about the fights and the silences between her parents and we see her mother's passive aggression but we don't really see her father as a victim of passion. He hides it. Everything about his sexuality comes out slowly as Bechdel's own sexual preference become clear.

In the end, we can say that Bechdel needs the commentary--the Greek chorus/stage director talk--because there is so little going on as far as truth telling in the family. Her family uses language to hide the truth. (Similar to what Howard does with elocution and the Attitudes.) But the top-panel commentary can't be too revealing; it can only talk in myths, stories, and riddles. That's its role. And that's fine because it gives the reader a chance to figure out the puzzle of this family as Bechdel leads us through a maze of events and motives that reveal the truth by and by. The narrative dynamic of a wise but reticent chorus layered on the portrayal of a child struggling to know the truth, keeps us reading and it keeps us involved in the story.   

Note: For your response to this post please take a series of panels from the book and explicate them from a writer's perspective as I have done above.

Maureen Howard "from Facts of Life"

Opening on her brother George, we are eased into the story presented in “from Facts of Life” by visiting Howard's family, both just before the meat of the story and decades later; from the time she is reflecting on to the time she is reflecting from. While George's story is not very important to Howard's own and serves mainly as an explanation for why she began lessons with Mrs. Holton, Howard uses it to establish the basic themes and characters of her own story. Her father's mixture of anger and elegance, her mother's “painful submission” (73), and admiration of eloquent speaking ability. Jumping ahead to herself looking back, Howard explains her family now ridicules the way she speaks eloquently and claim it cannot be how she really speaks. What becomes a major theme of the piece, the “realness” of elequence, can be seen in what on first glance appear to be two small, unrelated scenes leading us into the true story.

Mrs. Holton is the primary figure of the story outside of Holton, our narrator, and she serves at the ultimate ideal of elegance. Her home is spotless and perfectly designed, but Howard's descriptions of every location give away the darkness of such perfection. Mrs. Holton is described as “some old idea of beauty” (70), the embodiment of a concept without being truly beautiful herself, her home is called “lifeless,” the flowers “seemed never to grow or bloom,” and when remembering how she felt within the home even at the time, Howard says that “nothing ever happened here or ever would” (71). Truly, the house and Mrs. Horton embody the same eloquence Howard's Mother wants for her, but when it is truly achieved it is no longer filled with life, but just an imitation. Even Mrs. Horton’s daughter, who passed away at a young age, is presented as a perfect, lifeless image of what a daughter should be, that Mrs. Horton tries to turn Howard into throughout the piece.

Howard best explains this idea of imitating life with The Attitudes. A series of movements taken from the Deslarte Method, they are meant to convey and imitate emotions, greetings, and directions such as Welcome, Calling, Hearing, Greeting, Farewell, Rejection, Fear, Love, Laugher, and Sorrow. By turning these emotions into a series of rigid movements, it allows a true lady to separate from emotions and simply present to the world what she should be feeling. Howard capitalizes all of The Attitudes, so you can separate them from a real emotion, and it magnificently shows how attempting to control emotions renders them meaningless, and lets you see when she truly feels something. When she describes her “father's raised first of Angxer” or her “mother's Unrequited Love” (74) Howard capitalizes the emotions. Was her father truly angry? Did her mother truly love her? Their actions sometimes say yes, but by placing their emotions within The Attitudes, she lets us know she does not think so. On the other hand, when she expresses being “in love with an Italian boy” (77) she does not capitalize love, making it clear she truly has the emotion for him. By using capitalization to separate emotion from the image of emotion, she is able to convey very different feelings using the same words.

Even Howard is able to see how useless the lessons are. She grew ashamed of her performances, and when sent back for obedience training it does not stick at all. The scene where Howard goes back to meet with Mrs. Holton seems very cold, her nursing room home described as looking almost exactly like her home, giving the impression her life stayed just as empty until the day she died, and Howard tried to take as little from her as possible, to illustrate the distance between them. She adds how on how everything she kept from Mrs. Holton was destroyed, to nicely put a bow on the story and the time of her life. Finally, as she says good by to her daughter, she is comically doing the Attitudes. By presenting herself now mocking what she used to care about so deeply, Howard is showing how she has long abandoned many of the ideas Mrs. Holton placed on her, even as she tells her daughter “Chin up. That's Mummy's darling” (79). By tying the end of the piece to a new generation, Howard makes the entire piece a very neat, self-contained story.  She also provides her answer to the question presented in her memoir, "Does showing an emotion still mean anything if you don't really mean it?"

The Amen Corner

Let's start talking about the section "The Amen Corner" (235) by talking about the title of the section. It recalls for me the Amen Corner at the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, GA although I do not know what it means in that context either. Time to do some research. According to about.com, The Amen Corner originated in New York City circa 1900. It was in front of a building where bibles were manufactured and where sidewalk preachers congregated. And because of the preachers and their many "amens" spoken to the crowd, it was called Amen Corner. More specifically for Wolff, it refers to a place where "a group of ardent worshipers [gather] in a church" (Free Dictionary). Let's leave this for a moment and come back to it.

Wolff begins this section with the simple declarative sentence: "Chuck got drunk almost every night." This sets the tone and shows us bad Chuck, the Chuck that threw himself against "unyielding objects" (237). Jack (aka Toby), the narrator, puzzles about the two personalities Chuck has and prepares us for what the bad Chuck is going to do first by describing him as a kind and affectionate person (240). Wolff’s actual physical description of him is done with such clear insight; he appears like an angel:

Milky skin with a wintry spot of red on each cheek. Yellow hair that turned white in sunshine. Wide forehead. He also had his mother's pale blue eyes and her way of narrowing them when she listened, looking down at the floor and nodding in agreement with whatever you said. (240)

What you should pay attention to here is that his description is twofold: 1) he describes what his subject looks like in straightforward bursts of color, strong nouns and simple adjectives and no verbs; and, 2) he shows us a characteristic thing his subject does by comparing it to someone else's similar behavior--his mother's. The economy of this description is breathtaking. We not only see Chuck but his mother, the yin and the yang of the family.

The bad Chuck comes to the fore right after this section on 240 when they go off to steal the gas from the Welches. As Wolf builds this scene we see how doomed these boys are. They proceed to the Welches' house through a boggy field. Psycho, their friend, struggles to keep up: Jack says that he hears him "shout and rage behind us" (241).

When they get to the house and Chuck starts siphoning the gas, Jack's narration changes from past tense of "I watched the house" to something more immediate, descriptive/reflective: "I had never been here before, but I knew the Welch boys from school. There were three of them, all sad, shabbily dressed . . . " (emphasis added 241). At the end of the paragraph we are returned to the past tense after hearing a story of Jack sparring with one of the Welch boys in PE. The function of the "here" is to put us in the scene beside Jack and there listen to his ruminations about the Welches. He puts us in the mud and we smell the gasoline. I take it that this "here" for Wolff is that timeless time that occurs every time after the Welches when he smells gasoline. He is immediately back in that muddy yard stealing gas from people who "weren't making it" (245).

So let's jump to the end of the Welch segment and think about why Jack doesn't apologize. It has something to do with “The Amen Corner” and  the "damnation-dream" he has--the stop-action moment Wolff gives from his future self: "two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks" (246). But it is also that Jack finally gets it. He finally gets how perverse he is.

At the beginning of the section he wants to go up to the Amen Corner in church but doesn't because he fears that Chuck will ridicule him and that Mr. Bolger, the preacher, "would see through me and and be disgusted" (239). Here in the aftermath of seeing Chuck apologize to Mr. Welsh, he can't bring himself to say he is sorry. He can't give himself a pass finally because he is that bad. He isn't resentfully bad but damnation bad. All he wants to do is get away.  Wolff the writer does not give his boy Jack an out here. There is no redemption for him. There are no easy "sorries", no rationalizations based in feelings of "fear, or pity or disgust" (246). He could not walk up to the Amen Corner with Chuck and shout "I'm sorry." The reader would see through him and be disgusted. Such is the power of titles (i.e., The Amen Corner) if you let them resonate throughout your memoir.

Reynolds Price "from Clear Pictures"

From the outset we are intrigued by the notion that Price is going to describe a man, his uncle Mac (Make), as a man who has "found peace in a lifetime's work." This is a universal consideration--how to find a good work--and from the beginning the reader is hooked. Why? Because we all work or have had jobs we hate and the prospect of a life of more and more jobs we hate is daunting. That's why we're in college. But even college has its moments of drudgery and "warm spit" knowledge production so our ears are pricked by what Price is going to say about his uncle.

The reader sees from the beginning, Price's adult reflection on what he saw as a child. He tells us reporter-like, what he heard as a child living in these houses in the "pit of the Great Depression": "little snatches of worry about a bill, little dry quick laughs at the specter of loss" (173).  The parallel construction of this account reinforced by the normalization of "snatches" and "laughs" and the simple adjective "little" and "dry", help make it concrete, a clean articulation.

Price wants to disabuse us of the fact that it (his family life) might all be about money. That you get to a good work by way of money. That money is what work is all about. Yet Mac, the uncle, described not as "cloistered monk" about it--that is he didn't go around rhapsodizing about the Earth (capital E). He worked. But that was a mediation in itself.

But if they never talked about money then what? He starts by talking about what his uncle is not. So what is he? Why does he want to write about his uncle? It has to have something to do with Mac’s affect on him, Price. The answer starts to come when the boy is alone with his uncle in the store where the men are playing checkers.

Price says: "that was my chance for a swift operation." He wanted something, money to buy a new microscope, from his uncle. He gets his five dollars but that's not the end of it. There is something in the economics between nephew and uncle. We know this because the idea of money has just been brought up and a writer never just brings up an idea just to do it. There has to be some purpose down the line in the piece of writing. Price is giving us clues. His uncle is not about money, but he is obviously about money when it comes to "Ren's" request for money, if what he wanted "sounded 'educational'" (174).  

We find out what more it has to do with money and what else when Mac takes the narrator into his tobacco field. We are squarely put into time and place. Price is a wizard at the local. First, its the "fields by the Baptist Church" and then "curing barns, the scene of catfish fries" (175)--all details that center us in that world of Price's childhood summers with his uncle. We see him describe the geography that finally gets us to a particular place at the end of a row of tobacco. Mac asks the boy to identify a row of tobacco that he likes. The boy does and the man says: "'Then it's yours. In late September you watch the mail.'" Price says about his boy character: "I barely understood."

This is the spot in the memoir where the piece makes a turn. We've been hearing about money and about how it's not important. The row of tobacco that he’s told is “yours” is puzzling to the boy. We suspect that it has something to do with the price the tobacco will sell but like Price's boy we sort of understand but we don't.

When the fifty dollar bill comes, they--the boy and his mother and his class at school--are "thunderstruck" (an adjective as simple, concrete, and as visual as they come). What this teaches the boy--and it's how it was done with such forthrightness--is something about "the deep satisfaction of generosity" (176). Price does not merely let this insight sit there on the page but follows it up with how he continued to put his uncle's generosity together as part of "a training in gratitude" (177).  In way, a different way, unlike that of a Virgil, his uncle's bucolic knowingness gets translated for the boy into a practical skill of how to live in the world with those you love and those who love you. And his question for this short memoir? How do I live with the fact that I have been given so much by the people who love me?

--Dr. A