Week 10


The Withlacoochee River, Florida


Good evening!  Hope all is well and that you are safe from the storm, which as I write is moving away from Havana, Cuba, and forecast to strike the Florida Keys sometime in the next ten hours.

It is week 10, the penultimate in the course, and class has been cancelled because of Hurricane Irma.  Thus, next week we will review final projects and the stories last assigned, by the contemporary authors Alice Munro (recent winner of the Nobel Prize), David Updike ("Summer"), and George Saunders.  The group response remains due and a short quiz on the several stories will be given in class.  There will be no final exam because of the disruption to our scheduled classes.

Saunders is very articulate on the matter of his writing process (see the links below). Please watch and/or read below as he discusses the work he does.

George Saunders on how to write a better story (video):  https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/419391/george-saunders-on-story/

(Essay:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/what-writers-really-do-when-they-write

-------------------------
A Response to "The Found Boat" by Alice Munro, and Notes on "Puppy" by George Saunders

We meet in "The Found Boat"  a group of two girls and three boys, all in the "flood" of changes that come with adolescence and the sexual awakenings of puberty.  The story is set in a small midwestern town on the banks of a river that has recently flooded, as it does every spring. It is a natural phenomenon and spectacle that draws everyone out to gaze and speculate.  Of the five youngsters, only Eva's consciousness is directly open to us; by means of the third-person narrator, readers know what she is thinking and imagining.  She has an adventurous, bold mind and spirit, in keeping with her name, which recalls the first woman in biblical myth. At the outset, though the boys and girls know each other from school by name, they pretend not to. The boys play antagonistic and dismissive of the girls, in what appears veiled interest. When the girls relay they have found an abandoned boat, the boys pay attention and the five of them now begin a project that mirrors the undertakings of adults.  Together they will rebuild the boat and it will take them places they have not been before.
       We learn of Eva's attraction to Clayton, whose storied name recalls that of Adam, first man, formed of clay by God.  Clayton is a leader among the boys, rather silently so, and the man of his home (his father dead), and Eva likes him.  The group's journey out of town in the boat on the flooded Wawanash sets the stage for the climactic encounter in which Eva boldly reveals her naked self to Clayton. It is a modern version of an ancient encounter that each enacts.  The story shows them driven by natural impulses and constrained by social mores in their expression.  The excitement and adventure of growing up is heightened by the spring setting, the overflowing river, and the novelty of the group's having a boat with which to navigate away from town, to explore the world and themselves. Eva has earlier been dreaming of sailing in a Viking ship, of being the figurehead on the boat's bow, underscoring how imagination and desire work upon us. Every society will "interpret" the archetypal climax scene in its fashion, but in the end, this is a story about growing up and the desires and dreams that come with it.




    
                                            Madeleine Vonfoester's "Mother of the Tree




In George Saunder's work, there is an element of the macabre, mixing uncomfortably with the day-to-day ordinary.  The haunted house motif introduced early in "Puppy" seems to me to embody this point of view on human consciousness as, well, a bit spooky.  His characters are aspirational; they want happiness, harmony, comfort, peace of mind regarding themselves and their family, but they live in a somewhat chaotic world of forces just beyond control, and in a branded, material world that seems absurd in so many ways. The past keeps flooding in for Marie and Callie, and sounding alarms. Ironies of all sorts emerge.

What separates and connects these women? Saunders constructs two distinct points of view, two sides to the story, Marie's, and Callie's, allowing the reader a comprehensive look at the struggles each faces.

Marie and her family are well-to-do and Callie and hers are poor.   How does their meeting illuminate some of these differences and the limits to their understanding one another?  Does the puppy's fate reflect these limits?  Do the high corn fields through which Marie drives with her two children as the story begins, and to which the helpless puppy will be abandoned at its end, have something to tell us about being human?  What themes is Saunders exploring in this story?





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