The Week 2 readings for Literature in Life seemed to coalesce around a theme after I read them: The Sorrowful Woman, The Things They Carried, Slipping, Do Not Go Gentle, A Worn Path, The Book of Job ...the one that did not seem to fit was The Road Not Taken.
I'll begin with Job. Each time I read it for this class, about twice a year, it's as if I've never read it before. I have to start all over again. Somehow, it just doesn't stay with me. Other people read it and re-read it, and can remember it well, I can't. I've heard about it all my life, how patient Job was......I'm not sure about that. How his suffering was redeemed, yes he was given back several fold what he lost, but for some reason, though I have been through some horrendous losses and experiences in my life, I just cannot identify with him. So, now that he's out of the way, let's get on to the others.
When I read The Sorrowful Woman I see the total disintegration of a human personality and mind. This is written in the third person objective voice, so we never know what the woman is feeling, we just see what she is doing. Being modern Americans we immediately want to make a psychological diagnosis, to sum her up in a few words or a catch phrase. That is too facile. She cannot be summarized. She is going through something destructive, not only to herself but to those around her, but cannot stop it. I wonder when this started...we come in to her story after it's been ongoing for a while......what was the genesis, were the seeds of this behavior in her from birth? We don't know, and the author doesn't even explore that. Instead, Gail Godwin paints a detailed picture for us to inhabit, and when I read this, I do.
As happens with almost every war, some very good writing came out of the Vietnam War. Tim O'Brien has become what could be called the "Poet Laureate" of the Vietnam era. This story The Things They Carried gets to me every time I read it. The people are real, I smell the jungle, I hurt, I get claustrophobia when the soldier goes in the tunnel, I REMEMBER daily headlines from that time.....I'm old enough to do so. His use of the concrete is particularly memorable.....he doesn't just say they carried a lot, they carried letters, a New Testament, a hatchet, good dope.....very specific. Every war story is ultimately an anti-war story, starting with The Iliad.
Slipping and Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night are two poems about adults' parents dying, two very different approaches. One is a howl against the death of his father, begging him to fight death; the other is a depiction of a father's falling into Alzheimer's and the author learning to know him at the end of his life and the regret she has for not knowing him earlier. I lost both my parents too young, 56 and 69, both from heart attacks, so I did not have to see them suffer the indignities described by Joan Aleshire, but I can identify totally with Dylan Thomas' cry against death.
Phoenix in A Worn Path is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction. Eudora Welty presents her with grace and dignity, so we see the grace and dignity of this bent, tiny little old lady walking to help her grandson. She is walking as Welty says "Out of the ingrained habit of love" and in that has much in common with the father in Those Winter Sundays , though she is a much more obviously sympathetic character to the reader. I love it when she fools the hunter and gets the nickel. I love it when the attendant offers her some pennies, and she says "Five pennies make a nickel" and therefore has two nickels.....which she spends on her grandson, not herself.
I love Robert Frost's poetry, but The Road Not Taken is so overused and made trite in high school, I think I am going to change the Frost selection for the next session.
So, bad things do happen to good people, and we don't know why, but we carry on. If we let the bad things destroy us, then bad comes out of the event. It is up to us to redeem these bad events for our good, and the good of those around us.
No comments:
Post a Comment