Emotions

Hello classmates of Modern Literature,

I know it is late, but do to some family dysfunctions of my own I was kept busy all weekend and I now have a free moment. The theme of my weekend however, fits very well into my blog post for this week; family.

Chapter five in The Rhetoric of Fiction is about the reader's emotions and beliefs. As I Lay Dying is centered around family, however it is not the traditional family that everyone believed in the 1930s and most people still find the structure of it shocking, because the family breaks many of the beliefs people have when they think of a family.

The first instance this appears is when we discover from Cora that Anse does not have any sweat stains on his shirt. Anse is the father and husband of the household so he is supposed to be the main bread winner of the family. There are some households where that is still true today. The fact that Anse does not work to help keep the family with a way to survive and leaves it all on the children. He is supposed to be the family's back bone, and instead he stabs them in the back on multiple occasions. The occurrences continue throughout the novel by how he treats his family and they just keep coming one after the other after the other. I will list them in order of birth from Addie and then working all the way to Vardamen.

Anse starts by violating Addie. He forced her into a marriage that led directly to children when that was not at all what she wanted. A husband is supposed to be protecting of his wife, the place where she always feels safe, but instead he does the opposite. He makes her feel unsafe and disgusted. He sends her to the point of wanting to kill her, and it was only to have the children to do the work so he no longer had too. Even the one good thing he says he will do for Addie is not even for her. A husband is supposed to mourn after his wife's death, and yet he is only concerned about the new teeth that await him in Jefferson. After not even a day of burying his wife, he has already remarried another woman. Anse only came to Jefferson to fulfill his own selfish reason so that he could get what he wants as well as someone else to do all the work around the house again.

When it comes to Cash, Anse is beyond awful to him. When Cash breaks his leg in the river while trying to save the wagon, Anse refuses to take him to Dr. Peabody because it will cost him to much money. Instead he makes a concrete cast to set Cash's leg in. Even when Cash's leg turns black from the lack of blood flow, Anse still remains unconcerned and only has cool water poured over the concrete to lessen the swelling. I don't know about anyone else, by my natural, parental instincts are telling me that this boy needs to get to the hospital and no matter how bad it gets, Anse refused because he does not want to pay. On top of putting Cash's leg on the line, he also places Cash's livelihood on the line when he sells Cash's carpentry tools. Those were not his to take, but that is all Anse does, takes from those who he won't owe anything too.

Jewel is used by Anse and he is not even Anse's son. He sells Jewel's horse out from under him without waiting to ask for his permission. If it had been a horse Anse had bought for him for a birthday or some sort of celebration, I could understand that, but Jewel worked many long nights in the pitch black to earn this horse. He put his blood, sweat, and tears into earning that horse on his own and it is swept out from under him without a second thought. This does not just violate the views that we have of a father figure, but how a decent human being should ask.

Dewey Dell is one that I feel extremely bad for, she had ten dollars set aside for to help her start the next part of her life. It would either buy a marriage certificate to start a life with her lover, or relieve her of the uncertainty of her unborn child. Anse steals the money from Dewey Dell to buy his own marriage certificate not even a day after they bury Addie. Anse places his own happiness over the happiness of his own daughter, who he is supposed to protect.

Anse is the perfect example of how the reader reacts emotionally to parts of the book and how it affects the entire story line. If you do not like someone in the beginning then it affects how you view them through the rest of the novel and that dislike increases until you hate them and builds from there.

The Good, The Beautiful, The True

Going back to Chapter 5 of Booth, there are many things, of course, that caused me to continue reading As I Lay Dying. When I finished the book, I could not believe that I stuck around for the rest of the book only to figure out that Anse is just ridiculous and just completely does not care about anything but himself. In the last section, Anse has just sent Darl, his second oldest son, to an insane asylum, and all Anse has done since is gotten his fake teeth and a new wife. I read the book with Practical Interest, expecting something bad to happen to Anse, as a way of karma for his lack of care towards his children. Of course, nothing happens. That was highly disappointing.

Another thing that kept my interest throughout the book was Darl. I wanted an explanation for his ability to see things that have not happened near him, such as when he knew his mother had died even though he was not at home with her, and understand the emotions of his siblings so well, especially Dewey Dell. Aside from these odd things, I enjoyed Darl as a character because he seemed to be the only person that even attempted to connect with Vardamen at all. To me, this was huge. Everyone else sort of brushes Vardamen off as a child and focuses on their own problems, but Darl actually talks to him and answers his questions. Specifically, when Vardamen was worried that his mother was a horse, Darl made sure to let him know that only Jewel’s mother is a horse, instead of ignoring him or saying no one’s mother is a horse. This kept my Practical Interest, even if later they just threw Darl into an asylum. I guess him being crazy is some kind of explanation for his weird sort of powers? Or not.

Overall, Faulkner employed a really odd sort of truth to the story that held my Intellectual Interest. The story was following the most dysfunctional family I have ever heard of, and there is no happy ending for anyone but Anse. Really, I took this story as a chapter of reality. Nothing in life turns out how it is expected to and people that stick out get sent to asylums and when parents don’t care about their children, they get pregnant, get their prized horse traded without permission, think their dead moms are fish, and get their broken legs cast in cement. Really, neither Addie nor Anse seem to have wanted the children at all, or each other, even. This family sticks together for completely unknown reasons. If there was no explanation that they were related, the characters would have no premise for being together through the whole story. My real question was why stayed together, and the only answer I got was that staying together was that staying was easier than leaving.

Did Faulkner do that on purpose? What was his reasoning for all this imperfection and dysfunction in the family?

The idiot and the other three

On page 152, Booth puts in parenthesis "Faulkner can use the idiot for part of his novel only because the other three parts exist to set off and clarify the idiot's jumble." This bolsters his point that not all the characters are qualified (or just not smart enough) to narrate a story. I find this very amusing, yet sad. In particular, Vardaman and his confused mumblings through out As I Lay Dying. Is he really the idiot?

After observing his mother die, his reaction is stunted - because the whole family is stunted and he has no nurturing from this lovely family. He associates the death with the fish he found "down to the bridge", as he has no idea what is really happening. The fish was all cut up into not-fish, and now his mother is not-momma. One minute, momma's there, then the doctor arrives (against Anse's wishes - was this observed by the little one?) and she dies. Blaming Peabody would be a natural thought process.

Although mumbling through multiple thoughts per paragraph, one particular sentence caught my eye. It is profound in a way that is beyond the years of Vardaman, and I wonder how it had been slipped in for his thought process. On page 66 he rants:

              "It was not her. I was there looking. I saw. I though it was her, but it was not. It was not my                 mother. She went away when the other one laid down in her bed and drew the quilt up.
               She went away."

To make the rather adult observation that his mother left when she got into bed and the one there was no longer his mother is a concept many use to ease the pain of watching someone waste away into death. The person you loved died before all this pain, try to remember the happy times... She went to a better place, no more suffering...

Is Vardaman really the idiot here? While grown adults will cliche everyone to death in order to remove the pain of close people dying, Vardaman is dealing with the loss the same way. Awfully adult of him to deny the loss and pain and try to find some comfort in words (in Addie's definition).

Unfortunately, he returns to rabbits not in the box, bananas for everyone, and the shiny train in the window. The poor child.

The Loud Voices of the Silent

As Booth states, “the author can achieve effects which would be difficult or impossible if he allowed himself or a reliable spokesman to speak directly and authoritatively to us.” (Booth, 273)  Faulkner has 15 different dramatized narrators in which lies “a confused variety of more-or-less reliable narrators, many of them puzzling mixtures of sound and unsound.” (Booth, 274) 

 Peabody only speaks at the beginning and ending of the book. Faulkner has Peabody place a great deal of judgment on Anse. Peabody’s negative perception of the Bundrens comes from him coming from a different social class and not being able to understand the ways in which a less fortunate family gets by. Peabody attempts to discredit Anse by judging the way he treats Cash’s leg injury. ‘Concrete, I said. ‘God Almighty, why didn’t Anse carry you to the nearest sawmill and stick your leg in the saw? That would have cured it. Then you all could have stuck his head into the saw and cured a whole family…’ (Faulkner, 240) Peabody is an example of an unreliable narrator. Anse, regardless of how barbaric his attempts are to help his son Cash, does it with the best intentions. 

The ending of the novel with Anse introducing his children to his new wife is told by Cash one of the most reliable narrators in the novel. Nowhere in the novel does it explicitly say that Anse from the viewpoint of his children is a selfish person. This is an example of the “authorial silence” that allows readers to work out their own interpretation of the novel. As the novel unravels it is clear that Anse along with the rest of the Bundren family are in fact after their own selfish interests.

Functional Dysfunction

As we have discussed in class, our idea of what family means is very different from the Bundren family. It is more like a set of individuals that have their own interests, goals, and lives, and see everyone else as means to their own end. This is one of the main ideas that keep the interest of a reader. The reader has intellectual interests about a family that seems to be unfamiliar to one’s own concept of family. The conflict of beliefs draws us in, and makes a person want to understand why they do these unusual things. Peabody states:

     “I can remember how when I was young I believed death

     to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely

     a function of the mind-and that of the minds of the ones 

     who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end;

     the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality is no 

     more than a single family moving out of a tenement

     or a town"(43-44).

Addie's death is a symbol of the thing that pushes the family into a new period in their lives. It is her death that releases them of the labels and positions they were given during her life. Darl seems to be the only one that has all of the information about the families past, so I don't find it strange that Cash says: "This world is not his world; this life his life"(261). The family has transitioned to a new "tenement" and Darl's knowledge will not allow him to live in that place. The curiosity about how each character deals with her death drives the reader to want to know more about the facts of their actions.

The reader’s qualitative interest is fulfilled by all of the motives that each family member has in the beginning of the story: Anse wants to purchase new teeth; Vardamann wants to get his hands on bananas; Dewey Dell wants medicine to abort her baby; and Cash wants to buy a record player. Even though this sounds so dysfunctional when a mother and wife dies, the reader is interested in how this will all play out. Booth writes: “All good works surprise us, and they surprise us largely by bringing to our attention convincing cause-and-effect patterns which were earlier played down” (127). Throughout the book one sees how each situation and person effects another one, but many times the reader is left clueless of what direction one is being led, but soon finds that it all makes sense.

The practical interests of the reader are satisfied in this book depending on the perspective of each reader. Anse is one that seems to be a horrible person, in which one would like to see the consequences of his actions, but he never seems to have to answer for all of the people that he uses throughout his life. I suppose one could say that because he is the head of the household that would mean his lot would end up being his children’s lot. In this way, one can be satisfied that all did not suffer the consequences of his actions. “Booth states: “It is of course true that our desires concerning the fate of such imagined people differ markedly from our desires in real life” (130). A greater tolerance is found for Anse and Addies’ death, because of the readers curiosity about how everything will end. 

Anse

Booth writes in his book about Intellectual writing. “We have, or can be made to have, strong intellectual curiosity about “the facts.” For Qualitative, he says: “a strong desire to see any pattern or form completed.”  Then he says about Practical. “We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire for the success or failure of those we love or hate” (Booth 123).

I believe that Faulkner relies on these interests to help develop desires in the reader. Anse for example is a character that is easy to hate. He is a very selfish person, but he would want us to believe that he is a saint.

Addie Bundren has been sick for a while, lying in bed waiting to die. Her last wish is that she be buried in Jefferson. Anse intends to honor her wish by taking her to Jefferson, but he has ulterior motives. Addie has not been for dead 10 minutes, and he says. “Gods will be done,” he says. “Now I can get them teeth.” (52) At this point it is hard to see if this is really Anse’s motives because, Darl, who is not even home when Addie dies, narrates the chapter.

 Anse begins to talk to Darl and Cash about respect for their mom, who is dead and lying in a coffin. “I says I got some regard for what folks says about my flesh and blood even if you haven’t, even if I have raised such a durn passel of boys, and when you fixes it so folks can say such about you, it’s a reflection on your ma” (105-106) He, talks like he is being respectful and concerned about how people see him, but right after this he says again. “But now I can get them teeth.” Anse is not concerned about paying his wife respect; his ulterior motive is his own interest.

In the last chapter, Cash gives us more desire to hate Anse. Right after they have buried Addie, Cash tells us. “It’s Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell, “ pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. “Meet Mrs. Bundren,” he says” (261). They have not even made it back home, they just buried Addie, and Anse has a new set of teeth and a new wife.

Throughout the book we read of Anse selfish acts, and as we see this pattern continue, our hate for him grows, tell we learn the truth of his journey to Jefferson was his teeth and marriage.

Mysteriousness

Ma takes Ruthie, Winfield, and Rose of Sharon to a barn to keep warm and that is where they find the dying man and a little boy concerned about his father’s well-being. Ma tells him repeatedly to hush when the boy would cry about his dad not making it. The little boy mentioned he had busted into a store window and stole bread to give to his father, but his father could not keep it down and at that point his father was weaker than before.

Ma throughout the novel has always been concerned for others. In any way she can help out she definitely will. In one of the Hoovervilles she shared the little that she had of her stew not only with her family but also with fifteen little ones who surrounded her as she cooked. The generosity and kindness comes from Ma understanding what it is to have nothing and also the experiences she has had with people treating her like she was less than dirt.

In the last scene of The Grapes of Wrath Rose of Sharon smiled “mysteriously” once she gives the dying man milk from her breast. Steinbeck used the undramatized narrator technique as he ends the book to help the reader develop his or her own opinion of whether Rose of Sharon went through a dynamic change or a relative change. I believe it was a dynamic change because Rose of Sharon has been through a lot. She was on the road for weeks in a crammed up truck, witnessed the family dog get run over, her grandmother and grandfather died on this same road trip, her husband, after making life plans with her, decides to abandon her (like a coward) and not mention to anyone that he left, and throughout all of this she ends up losing her baby. When the dying man is there in the barn almost lifeless the mysteriousness begins. Rose of Sharon who throughout the novel has been all about her own personal advancement is willing to help a dying man without anyone forcing her to do so. A positive change has come over her and Ma is proud of her for it. Rose of Sharon has done something that is bigger than herself and is becoming like Tom and Jim Casy, a piece of the whole shebang.

Symbolism of the dog to the farmers

I agree with Booth's analysis of direct commentary. When used in the right way and at the right time, direct commentary can be extremely helpful to the novel. The direct commentary in Chapter 13 when the Joad's dog is brutally murdered by a car is a perfect example. The two symbols in this paragraph are the dog and the car.

The dog represents all of the small farmers across the country.They are carefree people who work hard for a living and are minding their own business. The car represents the "man" and the machines that are taking away the farmers livelihood.

The dog's innocence represents to the innocence of the farmers as they continued on with their lives. The cold, mechanical car that is speeding down Route 66 represent the emotionless acts of the "man."  When the car initially hits the dog, is equivalent to when the family is originally told that they will have to leave their homes and no longer have a job. The slow death of the poor animal is equivalent to when the families have to leave and are forced to find jobs somewhere where none exist. The lack of jobs leads to slow deaths of the farmer and his family. During this time, many of people were dying from starvation, a very slow and painful death. The dog did not die on contact with the machine, the animal suffered greatly before his death, just like the farmer does as he watches his children and wife go hungry. The suffering of the dog is mirrored twice in the suffering of the family and in the farmer.The final death of the dog is inevitable and it is hopeless. That is how the farmer feels, hopeless.

This commentary of comparing the suffering dog to the suffering families helps you feel more for the families. A lot of people have had at least one dog that they have liked, or they see dogs as helpless and in need of protection. By making the dog the symbol of the farmers, Steinbeck helps to transfer those feelings of love or protect to the families that are suffering as much as the dog was.

Hooptedoodle

Hooptedoodle is the extra descriptions or words in a story, but I believe it still holds value. In Sweet Tuesday, Mack says:  “The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice.” Booth states: “If all art is trying for the same effect-a kind of pure realization of another world or a disinterested contemplation of pure form-then obviously music (or sometimes painting, the more abstract the better) should be our model.” Hooptedoodle is the art of the writer. It isn't necessarily needed to understand the story, but it is what sets one author apart from another. Anyone can take a picture of a scene, but it is the artist that paints a different way of looking at the scene. 

Too much of it becomes overwhelming, and begins to be more for the sake of creativity than to actually tell a story. In Grapes of Wrath, the intercalary chapters were similar to the titles that Mack talks about:

Suppose there’s chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. That’s all right, as far as it goes, but I’d like to have a couple of words at the top so it tells me what the chapter’s going to be about. Sometimes maybe I want to go back, and chapter five don’t mean nothing to me. If there was just a couple of words I’d know that was the chapter I wanted to go back to.”

These chapters give the reader a chance to take a peak at theme for the next chapter. It paints the picture, and provides one with the angle used to look at the scene. I think every intercalary chapter could also be skipped, and one could still read the rest of the chapters, and be able to understand the whole story. This hooptedoodle is Steinbeck’s signature for his artwork.

Do You Wanna Build a Snow-Turtle? (Or Hooptedoodle?)

A merry March the 1st to all. I hope everyone is enjoying the icy remnants of winter, or at least not slipping and falling all over the place as you attempt to go outside. I've decided to talk about hooptedoodle. What is hooptedoodle you ask? Good question. Here is the passage from "Sweet Tuesday" by Steinbeck: 

 No,” said Mack. “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that’s writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right at first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story come out.”

From this small passage, I concluded that hooptedoodle is all the fancy things that writers use that readers don't need, or fluff. My first thought was of a story I began in high school. It was about something really outlandish (like a girl traveling to another dimension or something) and I had seven pages just on the girls thoughts about leaving somewhere she had always known (her dimension?) when ultimately I could have said "she missed home ferociously." Was it good writing? I think so, and so did my friends, but ultimately, it had nothing to do with the story. That is hooptedoodle. The long introductory chapters at the beginning of novels that don't make it into the movie adaptions: those are hooptedoodle. All that nice explanation on hobbits and their life is hooptedoodle in Lord of the Rings. If any of you have read the book Bitterblue by Kristen Cashore, every time Bitterblue thinks about her mother or how she feels about her love interest is hooptedoodle. It is something you read and want to skip because the story was good, but it turned into nothing but fluff-vomit (that's what I call it.). 

Obviously authors like Steinbeck have a different kind of hooptedoodle, probably conductive to their thoughts and feelings while writing the story, but ultimately not conductive to the story itself. I think Steinbeck's are his explanations of things we already understand, like Chapter 14. Thankfully, Steinbeck doesn't have too large a concentration of hooptedoodle all in one big chapter by itself, like I did, but he has it sprinkled about the novel. Is Chapter 14 a big one? Yes. Is it seven pages of unnecessary fluffiness? No. I feel like Steinbeck's hooptedoodle is what Booth was talking about in Chapter 4(?) about leaving some explanations up to the reader to figure out. Steinbeck can be very obvious at points about what he is saying, especially in the interchapters. I like that he gives the readers a chance to catch on to what he is saying, but he gets more and more obvious as the novel continues. 

How do you guys feel about hooptedoodle? Where in this novel and in other novels have you seen it and what does it do to the book as a whole?