point of view in 'pale horse, pale rider'

Katherine Anne Porter's short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider is the stunning portrayal of a young woman's struggle to survive a war-torn America and the influenza outbreak of 1918. Within this world, protagonist Miranda weighs personal morality and social expectation, love in the face of dire circumstances, the waking versus the unconscious/delirious world, sickness and health, and, ultimately, the differences between life and death. 

Throughout the fifty page story, Porter negotiates these dichotomies without ever seeming overly conscious of doing so, and all from the point of view of a woman who is, at various points in the story, asleep, awake, healthy, sick, and nearly dead. One article described Porter's use of “structured stream of consciousness.” Everything is indeed set in close third person point of view, and while reading I felt very much as if I was inside Miranda's head the entire time, experiencing and thinking about everything as she was experiencing and thinking about it. 

It begs us to ask the question: why have this story in third person at all? If there is no veil between what she sees and what we see, why not simply tell it in first person? Before I can attempt to answer this question, I want to examine the areas in which there are deviations from the standard point of view. For instance, there are different treatments of Miranda's thoughts. Most of the time we receive her thoughts in close third as “she... decided she was past praying for.” Other times we get her verbatim thoughts as dialogue: “Miranda, desperately silent, had thought, “Suppose I were not a coward”....” Other times her verbatim thoughts are written without quotes: “I can't let Adam see me like this, she told herself.” Still other times Porter actually switches to first person, and it is this striking shift that I want to focus on in this post. The shift occurs as early as the second paragraph of the story, which starts, “Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet.” Both the first and second paragraphs reference Miranda's thoughts, but the first paragraph refers to them only via the pronouns “she” and “her,” which is what makes the second paragraph's POV choice so surprising. 

This latter technique of shifting to first person POV occurs rather infrequently, though, after this first usage in which Miranda is narrating her dream (as it is occurring) about the Pale Rider. There are only three other times in which “I” is used outside of quotations and not prefaced by “she thought.” One passage occurs while Miranda is on her way to the cantonment hospital with a group of other women—and in this passage it eventually becomes clear that the "I"'s in question are representative of the dialogue of the women around her, and not Miranda herself. In fact, Miranda breaks this passage with a physical act: the paragraph ends with a dash, as if interrupted, and the next paragraph starts: “Miranda, carrying her basket of flowers, moved in among the young women, who scattered out and rushed upon the ward uttering girlish laughter....” Even though we were inside her head at the beginning of the previous paragraph, and return to her by the beginning of the next, that nebulous space in between is occupied quite directly by the dialogue of others. This example is really fascinating, because their dialogue is not in quotations, and it reads the first time as if it were an interior thought process. While most of the time we are seeing others through Miranda's thoughts and feelings, here we are reading the dialogue of others as Miranda's most intimate (first person) thoughts and feelings. Porter so deftly sets the stage for a depiction of the fragmentation of self, and of Miranda's (and others) “continual effort to bring together and unite firmly the disturbing oppositions in her day-to-day existence, where survival, she could see clearly, had become a series of feats of sleight of hand.” Miranda's existence is invaded by expectations of how she should think about the war, so much so that the women's banal chatter about the soldiers' experiences has wended its way into her interior thoughts.

The third passage of first person not prefaced by “she thought” occurs when Miranda is musing over Chuck's words at the play. She begins to think of how men seem to view the war, especially men who are not allowed to fight, which leads to stream of consciousness: “Bread will win the war. Work will win, sugar will win, peach pits will win the war. Nonsense. Not nonsense, I tell you....” Here, Miranda's consciousness has again been invaded by the rhetoric impressed on her by others, but in this case she actually seems to be answering back. Because here we are not only in first person, but also making reference to second person. Who is the “you” she is speaking to in her mind? Herself? Society? The reader? Perhaps all three. It is not altogether clear. 

The opening of the last section signifies the last use of unqualified first person. “Now if real daylight such as I remember having seen in this world would only come again....” Miranda is now the embodiment of the fragmented self, not quite dead but not wholly alive, with “one foot in either world,” as she puts it. This first person narrative demonstrates how Miranda is capable of only tepid twilight living immediately following her recovery. But it can also be understood as that in-between state between so many other things, the smaller moments that can indeed become imbued with as much personal importance as more grandiose things such as life and death. The first instance of first person is in reference to Miranda's dream of death, the second of the social rules of talking about war, the third of the rhetoric of war, the fourth of Miranda's waking up to life again, only to feel its “dead cold light.” 

In many ways, these passages told in the most personal POV, first person, are the least personal. They are simply iterations of death, which is by nature impersonal (i.e. death doesn't discriminate and gets us all in the end). We tend to get much more of Miranda's emotions through the “Miranda thought she...” or “Miranda thought, I...” close third convention (not to conflate the use of she versus I in this convention: the prevalence of both styles of close third in this story warrant their own essay, but I won't be discussing their differences here). To revisit the original question, why have this story in third person? Perhaps Porter wanted to underscore the distance Miranda has had to set up from herself in order to survive all the death that surrounds her. Death, the impersonal, has become the personal, while direct first person narration has lost all of its intimacy. Because thoughts are veiled, actions are monitored and love is futile, life itself in this story has lost its intimacy.

There is one final deviation in point of view worth mentioning. Near the very end of the story, there is a paragraph told from the point of view of Miss Tanner, the nurse that has resurrected Miranda from the dead. We have the entire time been inside Miranda's head, and yet four pages from the end of the story we get this: “(Miss Tanner) had an affection for the salvaged creature before her, the silent ungrateful human being whom she, Cornelia Tanner, a nurse who knew her business, had snatched back from death with her own hands. 'Nursing is nine-tenths, just the same,' Miss Tanner would tell the other nurses; 'keep that in mind.'” Again Porter has subverted our expectations of point of view by suddenly dropping back into a more omniscient role. The veil of life through Miranda's eyes is briefly lifted and a whole other world is revealed. This underscores the concept of narrative and personal distance, of course, but it also highlights another dichotomy. In many ways, Miss Tanner is actually Miranda's foil: while Miranda initially wants nothing to do with the death (though she comes to represent it), Miss Tanner dedicates herself to bringing life back to those patients “past saving.” The placement of this split in POV is also important. Because it occurs just after Miranda has regained consciousness and lost all her desire to live, it serves to contrast how utterly changed Miranda is from all those around her who have not themselves experienced death. By breaking established POV conventions at this moment, Porter is able to show how Miranda's thoughts have now completely isolated her from the women around her who tend to the dying. Like the men coming back from the war, Miranda is now detached from life in a way that those who have not experienced death will never fully understand.

Porter is more fully able to express Miranda's thoughts and feelings to us through these aberrations in POV, these refractions of her perspective. It is almost as if we can only see Miranda's situation clearly through the reflection of a slightly angled mirror, sometimes through her eyes, sometimes through our own, but always a step removed from the actual experience. Even Miranda is aware of this. At times Miranda literally watches herself, as in a dream in which “she saw herself run swiftly down this gangplank to the slanting deck, and standing there, she leaned on the rail and waved gaily to herself in bed.” Or in attempting, while delirious, to talk to her doctor, when “to her horror she heard herself babbling nonsense, knowing it was nonsense though she could not hear what she was saying.” There is a way in which Miranda could not tell this story entirely in first person, but a way in which to use only third person would seem ridiculous. The novel becomes much stronger in the close third, with these brief, sparse, powerful first person and omniscient interludes that remind us of the impossibility of remaining completely immersed in the self during immediate and prolonged trauma. Ultimately, Porter's use of this technique creates a haunting reading experience that echoes the dissociation that occurs when our own traumas unfold.

conflict minerals

The Enough Project is spreading the word about conflict minerals. Not diamonds this time, but tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold... basically the materials that comprise our cellphones, laptops, iPods, etc. The harvesting of these minerals in the eastern Congo is creating the worst (the WORST) sexual violence against women in the world. Learn more here. Or send an email asking the 21 biggest electronic companies to buy their raw materials elsewhere.

"correction"

Oh, how silly of me. My earlier post about the new Afghan law condoning marital rape was incorrect. It turns out the law does not actually condone rape. Instead it condones starving your wife if she refuses sex. That's much better.

cognitive dissonance in "the swimmer"

In the New York Times article "In Praise of the American Short Story," film critic A.O. Scott asks readers to rethink their affinity for the Great American Novel. One line, in particular, caught my attention: “no sprawling, anguished epic of marital unhappiness or suburban malaise can match the insight and elegance of, say, 'The Swimmer,' Cheever’s perfect parable of affluent anomie.” After reading the Cheever piece in question, I decided that I didn't agree with Scott's opinion (frankly, I'm not sure why we are always being asked to make a choice between our allegiances to the novel and the short), but “The Swimmer” is indeed a gorgeous and fascinating short story.

The story was apparently pared down from over 150 pages of notes to just under 5,000 words. Perhaps it was Cheever's long distillation process that makes the story feel so real and unreal. He uses time and space in a way that I've never quite seen—you cannot read the story entirely literally or figuratively. Neddy Merrill sets off to swim from swimming pool to swimming pool until he reaches his own home eight miles to the south, an adventure that spans the course of one Sunday afternoon in midsummer. It is clear though, by the end, that the seasons have changed. While he walks under “flowering apple trees” near the beginning of the journey, by the end leaves are “falling down around him” and he smells “wood smoke on the wind.” The twilight reflecting off the pool water has “a wintry gleam.”

There is no literal possibility of such drastic weather changes occurring over the course of one midsummer's day. And yet there is certainly a way in which the story is meant to be read as occurring over the space of one day, at least in the mind of Neddy. For instance, in the second to last paragraph Neddy is still intensely affected by the rudeness of his earlier interactions with the bartender and his mistress, as if the conversations with them had indeed occurred that day. Not to mention the fact that he's still barefoot and in his swimming trunks, despite the dark and the chill. This raises some uncertainty as to whether the season has actually changed—whether months or maybe even years have passed, and Neddy is simply thinking of this experience of swimming the county as a figurative “day” in a lifetime of swimming in other people's pools—or whether the season changing is only something Neddy perceives, and that in fact the story is depicting a man who is coming to terms within the space of one day with all the things he's blocked himself off from acknowledging.

Cognitive dissonance is when a person holds two conflicting thoughts in her mind at the same time. What I found really appealing about this story was Cheever's use of setting details and a slowly unraveling narrator to create a cognitive dissonance in the reader's ability to judge a clear sense of time and space, a dissonance that mirrors Neddy's own struggle to do so: it cannot be midsummer when the autumn leaves are falling, it cannot be that Lucinda and the girls are at home when the home is empty, etc.

As we are forced to hold all this in our minds, we become uncomfortable. Supposedly humans are not capable of experiencing cognitive dissonance for very long because it is too difficult to maintain a grip on the world. And it becomes clear by the end that Neddy has lost his grip on reality, in fact hasn't had a grip on it since before he was introduced to us as the protagonist of this story. Because we are forced to experience this state with Neddy, and because we presumably can maintain our grip, we end up doing what most humans do when confronted with the dissonance: we enforce a change in our thinking in order to resolve the dissonance.

For me, in the case of this story, I made the decision that this story does take place over the course of one day, with Neddy forced to confront the mistakes of the past in almost the way a dam begins to crack. Water is a major symbol in the story, and I think it's an apt metaphor: we are witnessing Neddy about to be lost in the deluge of a reality he has tried to block out. But then I think of the seasons again, and I become uncomfortable... again. And I wonder if the story is set over perhaps decades of pool parties and seasons: the long despair of a life where all that matters has been lost. I also have to reevaluate whether or not the people in the story who are supposedly living in "reality" have not also lost their grip, in a manner of speaking.

This to me is the key to the heart of this story's mystery, and Neddy's mystery, and the mysteries of those who live their lives next door to ours. Because there is never a clear answer for the story of anyone's life, even our own, and yet we must always forge a way of seeing the world that allows us (and them) to exist comfortably within it. And while we can't live with cognitive dissonance for very long, reading a story which depicts its traps, especially when the story in question is so beautiful and powerful, makes for thought-provoking reading.

new author find: pam houston

I went to Writers with Drinks last night and discovered a writer named Pam Houston. She read from sections 80-84 of a novel composed of several small vignettes, and concepts that blur the line between novel and short story tend to appeal to me. I don't think what she read has been published yet, though it might have been from Sight Hound, her latest novel. I just can't find any evidence that Sight Hound is divided into several small, numbered parts. In any case, she was wonderful. Her prose is beautiful and bracing, and drifts along in what feels like a mostly timeless landscape until a character touches on something like the current political mood of the country. Her reading voice matched her written voice, it seemed, pretty well--a rather dry tone tinged with irony, a gruffness that doesn't quite hide the endearing qualities of her characters.

everything ravaged, everything burned

So, my memory's not the best. When I read a big anthology of short stories, it takes a lot for me to remember individual names. Wells Tower was one that stuck out, though, for a story that ended up in the Pushcart Prize 2003 anthology: "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." The story brilliantly reinterpreted the everyday life of your average Viking, and included one very visceral image that still haunts me.

Anyway, turns out Tower's new collection of same title is out. Here is a review of the book by Michiko Kakutani. Another book I can't wait to read.

stories about marketing

After reading this article about the iPod nearing its consumer saturation point, I was reminded of two fantastic short stories about marketing. Interestingly enough, they are both about snack cakes:

• "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes" by Haruki Murakami*
  
• "Mr. Squishy" by David Foster Wallace

Ah, marketing. A fascinating field with equally fascinating--if sometimes warped--people populating it. I don't mean to speak of it in terms of clichés. Still, I am so glad to have distanced myself from that world, with all its allure and bizarre logic and desire to turn people into consumer equations.

* I had the pleasure of hearing Murakami read this story aloud last fall in Berkeley. He had some interesting things to say about the relationship between marketing, critique, and academia/the literati.

my new story-making solution: ring-dexes

I find that, in settling on a short story idea, I generally pull two or three major observations together. I'm a constant note taker, so I might combine a certain character idea with a setting I'd jotted down, and try to work it towards a theme that has been on my mind. Sometimes everything comes together in one awesome bolt of lightning... but sometimes it doesn't. And actually, sometimes pairing two seemingly disparate elements ends up making for a more interesting story. So anyway, I was trying to find a way to put all these random little notes into one place where I could easily access them and pair them in unexpected ways.

I thought up a little device to help myself, and thought I would post for anyone in need of a fleshed-out story idea. I'm not sure if it'll work out yet but it makes sense, at least in theory:

Take a pack of ringed index cards. I found out about these from Dan, who is using them to study Japanese. Ring-dexes are already divided into four sections. I labeled the yellow section "Character," the green "Setting," the red "Plot," and the blue "Theme" but you could use whatever elements/divisions speak to you. Then I copied all my little notes down in the appropriate places. So if I want to write about Pigeon Point lighthouse, that's on a setting card. If I want to write about a weird old woman I saw on BART, that's a character card. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. So once that's done, or once you've amassed enough observational notes, you take them off the ring-dex and try to put a few together in a previously unforeseen way. It seems like it would make for unexpected story ideas, but the cool part is that it's all still things YOU were interested in originally, rather than those writing prompts where you need to write about an old car or something (even if you don't care about cars).

If it works for you, good! If not, at least you now know what an organizational dork I am.

no!

From an After the MFA interview with Edward P. Jones. This has just about made my day, and it's only 10:30am:

I don’t have much patience — you know, people will say, “Oh, you know I just let the characters take over…” I think that’s so much junk. It comes out of your mind, it’s in your brain, whether or not you’re going to acknowledge it. And sometimes people will say, “Well, do your characters live on after you finish?” No! They don’t do or say anything I don’t tell them to do or say. You know what I mean?

People want to make it seem like there’s some sort of magic. There is no magic. It’s “once upon a time, Jack and Jill went up the hill…” And you don’t need any fancy language, you know?

Read more.

I'm loving some of Jone's fiction, but the way he talks about writing and the literati is sort of unintentionally hilarious.

"worse than the taliban"

Apparently the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is trying to pass a law that would legalize marital rape, among other things.

The final document has not been published, but the law is believed to contain articles that rule women cannot leave the house without their husbands' permission, that they can only seek work, education or visit the doctor with their husbands' permission, and that they cannot refuse their husband sex.

Later in the Guardian's article, a western diplomat in Kabul says that "It is going to be tricky to change because it gets us into territory of being accused of not respecting Afghan culture, which is always difficult." I am in shock that someone actually feels this is a valid excuse.

Soraya Sobhrang, the head of women's affairs at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said western silence had been "disastrous for women's rights in Afghanistan".

"What the international community has done is really shameful. If they had got more involved in the process when it was discussed in parliament we could have stopped it. Because of the election I am not sure we can change it now. It's too late for that."

Read more.

the round, unlikeable character

In ZZ Packer's “The Ant of the Self,” main character Spurgeon, a bright young student, is forced to drive his deadbeat father Ray to DC to assist in his scheme to sell off some exotic birds for cash at the Million Man March in 1995. “The Ant of the Self” refers to the line in the story that a preacher at the March gives: “freedom is only attained when the ant of the self—that small, blind, crumb-seeking part of ourselves—casts of slavery and its legacy, becoming a huge brave ox.”

Spurgeon has enough trouble trying to cast off his father. What I was curious about, in reading this story the second time around, was how Packer was able to create a believable relationship between a son and such a meritless father. It is so difficult to depict a truly unlikeable character (like a deadbeat dad) without that character seeming flat. I was looking for the sentence, the snippet of dialogue, the intimation that underneath it all Ray had some good in him.

But that never happens. Ray is self-serving, manipulative, and often openly nasty throughout the course of the story. There is no moment of remembrance on the part of Spurgeon of when his dad did something nice for him (only a memory of his dad calling him a pussy for not fighting another boy), no moment of true remorse on the part of the father. The closest Ray comes is, when drunk, asking his son whether or not Spurgeon believes in him and, later, whether he understands him (certainly not the other way around).

Still, Ray is somehow still a larger than life character that seems believable. He does not feel static, and yet he does not seem to change of his own accord. What instead inhabits his character with life is the lens of the way his son views him. “He's so stupid, he's brilliant....” Spurgeon thinks. Later it is he that feels bad about getting angry at his father, though he seems to have said nothing that his father didn't deserve to hear. He even apologizes. Later, when the drunk Ray asks to be understood, Spurgeon really does try to, going so far as to ask his father how to understand him. Later, when Spurgeon says something even more devastating, it is he who tries to pull his own father back to him, “begging in the only way you can beg without words.” Always Spurgeon is yearning for his father's love and approval. And through this technique, Ray's character seems deeper than it otherwise would. Instead of Packer depicting Ray as a flawed but likable character (a more classically round character) that the son simply doesn't want to understand, she makes him an unlikeable character that becomes interesting because the son does wish to understand him. Our sympathies lie with the son, but in doing so we are roped into the son's desire to be liked by his father. Ray's character becomes a fuller character because of his son's perception of him.

And unlike a typical static or flat character, Ray does change. However, in this case it is also the son's actions and words that bring on that change—it is not an internal change or reflection, at least not yet. Toward the end Spurgeon says the one thing that “will kill (his) father.” He accuses his father of being a pussy himself by not going to Vietnam. Spurgeon then reflects, “I had turned him into something ugly, and of all the millions of words I've ever spoken to him in all my life, this is the one that blows him to pieces.” Though we never see Ray's reaction (other than to flee), we understand that Spurgeon has finally broken his father in some fundamental way.

Finally, Ray's plight seems more sympathetic because of the way the men at the March, who have never even met him, view him. “'You got to cut your father a little slack for caring for your sorry self!'” one man says. Another says, “'You have to take responsibility and reach out to him.'” Though on the one hand we can read this as just the misguided advice of men who assume Ray is a good father rather than one of the worst, the dialogue does call into question the maturity and compassion of Spurgeon's point of view (he is, after all, an angry high school kid who still tends to want to see things in black and white).

What I like about this technique (reflecting perceptions through the eyes of more round characters to show depth) is that it opens up an avenue for depicting a character that really has few to no redeeming qualities. To pretend that such people do not exist in the world is to avoid reality just as surely as to pretend that all cliches are always true. And yet, like cliches that are sometimes true, wholly unlikeable people still sometimes need to be written about. Especially in how they reveal the weaknesses, flaws and desires of more likable characters to which they are tied.

"the cab ride i'll never forget"

My sister sent me this blog post about a cab driver's most memorable charge. The writing is a bit too sentimental at times, but this woman really moved me.

sacrificing the story to the idea

Shamefully, I've not read much Chekhov. Actually, other than a barely-remembered story from a short fiction class from undergrad, I've read none at all. Why is this shameful? Because, of course, Anton Chekhov is widely considered to be the father of the modern short story. (You can't write short stories and tell people that you haven't read Chekhov.)

What may be more shameful than not having read much Chekhov, is to actually read one of his collections and realize that you are bored. (You probably shouldn't write short stories and tell people that you don't like Chekhov.) Alas, such was the case for me after reading Ward Number Six and Other Stories.

[Spoiler Alert... from 1892] The title piece depicts a relationship between a doctor and patient in a mental ward. Protagonist Dr. Andrew Yefimovich Ragin despairs of ever finding anyone who can hold an intelligent conversation with him—until he meets mental patient Ivan Gromov. He finds himself drawn to the ward again and again to talk with Gromov, philosophizing about the nature of pain and suffering, until people begin to take notice. Eventually Ragin's association with Gromov brands him as something of a lunatic himself.

About halfway through the story I realized where this was headed: Ragin is eventually tricked into becoming a patient himself. Knowing what was coming next made reading the latter half somewhat laborious. But even more laborious was suffering through what I felt I was being hit over the head with: the idea that there isn't much difference between those who are deemed crazy and those who are regarded as sane.

I am always wary of stories in which philosophies are espoused by the characters via long dialogue passages. Within this dialogue, there is an inordinate amount of text related to the vagueness of the label “insane.” For instance:

“'So why are we shut up? Why not you? Where's the logic of it?'” (p. 42)

“'There is no morality or logic about my being a doctor and you being a mental patient, it's sheer blind chance.'” (p. 43)

“'Which of us two is the lunatic? (…) Is it I, who try not to annoy other passengers? Or this megalomaniac who thinks he is cleverer and more interesting than everyone else, and so won't leave anyone alone?'” (p. 55)

And while I don't disagree that the idea of what is 'normal' and what is not is tenuous at best, I did not need a 46-page story to tell me so. And yet, this is Chekhov. And so I, meager student with nary a publishing credit to my name, decided it might behoove me to re-read.

I found that on a second read, the story was definitely more engaging. I was less distracted by idea and more focused on the plot structure. And I began to think that the fact that a reader can predict Ragin's fate is not necessarily unplanned—that his inevitable fate is indeed one of Chekhov's main points. That, as Ragin says, “the more you try to get away (from being labeled insane) the more you are enmeshed in the toils.” As readers we are forced to watch as Ragin roots himself in deeper and deeper, knowing all the while where he will end up. We more directly experience his helplessness because we, as readers, are helpless to do anything about the knowledge of his fate that we are given.

And still... the story feels manipulative. Ragin's main credo is that “man finds peace and contentment within him, not in the world outside.” This credo is disputed by Gromov, eventually tested and debunked by Ragin after he is forced to experience the true misery of a mental ward. So beyond this philosophical idea of whether or not the label of insanity is an arbitrary one (the question that troubles Ragin) we begin to see the deeper problem that troubles Chekhov—that of the people who believe their social systems are terribly flawed and yet do nothing but philosophize. It seems in this story that the fate of such people is to be slowly driven insane.

And, indeed, Chekhov slowly drives Ragin insane, or at least causes him to suffer mental anguish to the point that he doesn't care if he is labeled insane. But everywhere I felt that authorial hand. For instance, Ragin is described as “let(ting) things slide,” and yet for some reason he decides to follow one of the mental patients into Ward Number Six, which precipitates his meeting Gromov (which allows for the author's desired philosophical exchange). “'This is quite wrong,' he thought, looking at the bare feet and thin red ankles. 'And in this damp weather too!'” Nowhere is Ragin described, prior to this, as a person who would be moved to action by the plight of this shoeless man. Later, Ragin is duped by an idiotic trick into being committed. As apathetic as he might have grown by that point in the story, it doesn't feel like the ploy should have worked on him.

There is a certain parallel between the author's awkwardly deliberate plot devices in this story and the awkward idealism of Ragin's beliefs, and perhaps this is also intended. The unfolding of the plot in all the other stories of this collection feels much more fluid—obviously Chekhov is capable of unraveling an effortless story arc. Still, it makes for strange and not entirely satisfying reading.