Surreal, Real, Too Real

Nathan Gale

In The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr we see the spectacle of intense realism shifted into almost surrealism with the Liberian apartheid. The narrator describes to us untold quantities of reckless violence which compared to the minute tragedies of Western living seems somewhat surreal, distorted and nightmarish. Although the story is based in pure historical realism this realism takes on a new persona from what is described to us, it takes on qualities of hyperrealism. The narrators quest for some kind of solid real world in which the order he once knew can return like the ledgers he once filled out and the bowl of rice he ate everyday at lunch starts with his relentless walking and ends up killing a man where he is chased by his guilt to a boat. As he travels to America, his life comes into focus for him, he no longer knows how to make sense of his life as he seems to exist in a duality between living and his guilt, all order has disappeared with the new order he has discovered. With this paradigm shift between unstable to stable, his life becomes oddly surreal. To cope with the pain he inflicted and once bore, he buries 5 beached whale’s hearts, a way of copping that signifies this shift in his being. What was dead grows into what feeds us. For him this a way of both burring his emotions and communing with aspects of his mother that stood out to him, he is in a sense regrowing his mother. Just as decaying matter restores life back to the world, the garden restored order back to is own life. His only friendship with a deaf girl seems to show us that he feels more emotionally attached to someone who is alone inside themselves not able to properly communicate with the world at large, as he feels this too both in his homeland and America, a stranger to himself. Yet We are never positive if his guilt drives him, or his loss of all identity. And in the end it makes us wonder what does the word “home” truly mean for him anymore.

In the Fathers Blessing, the story is narrated by a Catholic Father with uncomfortable realism. His way of making logic often leaves us with a creepy feeling of uneasiness, at first, wanting the measurements of the bride and groom for their burial, he makes it seem perfectly necessary yet we are suspicious of his logic. It is simplistic in reason, and we almost want to become empathetic with his wisdom but the peculiarity holds us back. Throughout the story his logic becomes more twisted. And we are suddenly given a scene in which both mother and daughter climb inside of the daughters vagina, and with that the transition is made. The priest follows his logic and we see just how logic and reason can easily become disturbed and make little to no sense. What may seem perverted to us the Father convinces us that it is in his line of duty. Yet this space the mother the and daughter discover is something in which they both have in common both in a literal and metaphorical sense. Just as a male, in sex, returns to the womb, the mother returns to her daughter through the shared passageway of their femininity, in a sense finding the mother inside of her daughter. In his “duty” the priests then suckles at the tit, he then shows us how a father, male in every aspect of the idea discovers a counterpart space in himself, his anima. That he has rekindle that aspect of his life which is so foreign and alien, and becomes a knew in his own eyes, a “midwife”, as he calls himself. That for once he sees the importance life has upon the world, a feminine aspect unknown to him, that death in its practicality is not nearly as important as the birth of new creation.

In the Two Brothers we are given a background and foreground that make no sense to us, no boundaries or certain details. We don't know where we are, what time we are set in or how are characters even come into play with each other, we know nothing for certain except for the fact both Aurel and Theron are brothers, perhaps this is all the author wants us to know. From the very begin realism is very short and undefined, the only two people who are to interact with each other in any defined fashion are the two brothers. The house seems to exist as an extension of their imagination a sort of extra room on their imagination that they walk between, as we never really know if dehydration and starvation are speaking or if the world they describing is truly real. Does the house really go on forever, does Daddy Norton really die, does anything really happen? The author tries tricking us into a world where we wonder what is real and what is hallucination, but all that is certain is the connection the two brothers hold for each other. Some things are certain and some things can never be certain. The brutal violence is grotesque and makes the characters seem emotionless but the intimacy they spend with each other defies that. It points out that the two main human emotions that all emotions divert from are the need for love and the inherit need to conquer and dominate each other.

When Mr. Pirzad Came To Dine by Jhumpa Lahiri is set in the stark realism of childhood, is a very Point of View Story as the narrator is a young innocent girl who knows nothing of the world and is isolated from her own culture except when the 6‘o'clock news rolls around. Her world is made up of the limitations of her knowledge but the innocence it is grounded in fundamentally rings true. An intense social tragedy is set upon the family of Mr. Pirzada, but we see it through such a small perspective we do not really know the stature of it, except that the narrator feels the pressure to pray, something odd for children to do on their own. Some things feel way to soft for comfort while others things become more dramatic, like the embarrassment the narrator has in explaining the tragedy of Dacca to her Trick o Treating partner. The child is limited by the weight of the emotions and knows not how to convey them. I too in my own childhood experienced the loss of not knowing the weight of a tragedy with the event of September 11 which i knew was something terrible, I had no way of constructing a clear image of the situation in my head, it seemed almost blurred. Like in The Caretaker, the protagonist play a role of cultural duality neither Indian or American, or African or American. They can identify properly which self image to pick from as either is valid as the other. While she may have Indian descent and parents she has grown up only knowing America, this odd tension seems to carry, as the conflict through the TV soon becomes her only glimpse of one of her two worlds. As with the denial of her teacher, she knows not any other way to communicate with her Indian heritage then to wait and listen for news of disaster and destruction. This is shared with Mr. Pirzad as well as he has just watched his country be annexed into another, his identity is a blur, who he was has vanished. Just as her identity becomes transparent with her teacher calling a book on Indian irrelevant, but how can any part of us become irrelevant?

Response 2

Alora Young
Introduction to Writing and Literature - Response 2
9/29/09

Fantasy vs. Realism

Humans have always had a fascination with the fantastic. This is evident from the earliest known oral tales and literatures – all seem to include divine gods, sorcery, obvious scientific impossibilities, or utter improbabilities. All of the readings this week were stories based in the real world, but that didn’t necessarily make them ‘realistic’. ‘The Father’s Blessing’ had obvious elements of fantasy, while ‘The Caretaker’ was clearly realism.

‘The Father’s Blessing’ seemed at first to be wholly set in reality, and then some odd things started happening. After he tried to convince a newlywed couple to have their last rites, “even [bringing his] friend the undertaker with [him]”, I thought perhaps our priest protagonist was just slightly mentally unstable. As the story continued, however, the story just got more and more strange. I had no idea the significance of what happened in the final couple scenes. I had to assume it was symbolic, but I couldn’t seem to work my way past what actually happened in the story to even begin to figure out what in the world something like that is symbolic for.

After our class discussion, I see that Mary Caponegro intended this entirely – we aren’t supposed to understand what is happening because neither does the Father. Once I understood, I appreciated that it was a clever technique, and a refreshing use of the fantastic in what had initially appeared to be realism.

‘The Caretaker’, on the other hand, was almost too real at times. It just seemed to get worse and worse for our protagonist Joseph, and for the world around him. The imagery used when explaining the guerrilla warfare was graphic, sickening: “terrorists in football cleats trampling the bellies of pregnant women.” It is made worse by the fact that it reminds you, yes, humans are capable of things like this, and yes, things like this do really happen. A lot. Joseph loses everything multiple times; he goes through so much, and all we want is a happy ending for him. What we’re given, though, is too real to make us feel the relief of closure. “Home, she signs. You are going home.” The words themselves sound comforting, but we know that he has hardly a home to go to. If his house has survived the war, it’s not as if his mother is there anymore. Or if death, perhaps is his home, that is equally depressing.

Response 2

Jenna Wilhelmi

September 26, 2010

What is Literature, really?

After hearing some sound arguments from my teacher and peers, I decided to reevaluate my definition of the word literature before reading this weeks stories. I started by simply going to the Literature section at the bookstore and seeing what exactly was kept there. There were a lot of award winning authors and star reviewed books. There were enduring classics and famous works from around the world. However, most of the books either could not really be placed into one genre or transcended their genre in some way. I would call these books ‘game-changers.’ People who either dared to break the rules or tackled a subject no one had touched before wrote these books. This observation trumps my earlier definition of literature. The only ‘rule’ I still think applies to the word is that literature is something that makes you feel a strong emotion; whether that emotion is negative or positive.

This weeks readings defied being placed in any one genre, besides the fact that all the stories were fiction. The Caretaker dealt with the ups and downs of a war refugee’s life. There were touches of history, war, injustice, poverty and even a hint of romance in this story. Which I think actually made the character of Joseph more real. He had extreme highs and lows, to be certain, but he still dealt with life in a way that made him an easy character to sympathize with. Being able to feel the same things as a character is one way literature allows us to connect with its imaginary worlds. This can also be said of deplorable characters.

If you truly hate a character it can make you just as invested in a story as if you love a character. Take the story Two Brothers for example. Theron’s actions, the abusive way he treats his brother, makes you hate him. Nevertheless, your hatred for the character drives you to continue reading because you want to see what happens to him, to see if he is punished. The opposite goes for Aurel. He is the easier of the two to sympathize with, so you stick around to see if he stands up to or escapes his brother. Either way, for concern or hatred, you stick around to see what happens to these characters.

Literature isn’t romance, but it can be romantic. It isn’t adventure, but it can be adventurous. Literature is overall none of these micro genres, but it can also be any of them. Basically, I would venture to say that the word literature and the books that carry this title defy being told that they are any one type of story. Literature books dare to be several things at once.

My best and favorite example of this would be Frankenstein. Frankenstein is a horror story and a story of redemption. Frankenstein is a feminist piece, since it was the first major book of its time to be written by a woman, but it also talks about what makes us human. The more you think about the subject matter of Frankenstein the harder it is for you to place it into any one genre. This is what books that bear the title of literature do. Literature books try to avoid being placed into one genre so that you, the reader, will see it for what it is and what it is trying to say rather than what title it bears.

Nightmares of the Past

For me this week’s reading was a little too real, and a tad bit too depressing. Most of them were just sad thing after sad thing. No smiles and little hope. Especially, Anthony Doerr’s “The Caretaker.” This story is about the American Dream, and just getting away from your past. Also with having to deal with your present, while accepting the past. It is very realistic, and, at times, too realistic. But this story does happen to hold some hope.

In “The Caretaker,” the main character lives through an awful war that makes him need to just run away. He just wants to “throw himself into the bay and drown himself.” The character is being overtaken by the evil of the war. And this war was described so realistically that I understand why he wanted to jump. The war had taken everything from him, and it had even made him a killer. So then he decides to run away and have a dream: the American dream. This even made it much more realistic because I know people ran away from their past. And, it’s odd, but they always run to America. Mostly because America’s cliché idea is that it “is the land of the dreamers.” I guess that is true, but at same time many dreams die.

I actually begin to really like the story as it progresses. Mostly because of the symbolism that was hidden behind almost everything. My favorite part was about the whales, and how, even if they did push them back into the ocean, they were doomed to come back. These whales were like Joseph’s memories and his past. He may hide them in “the dungeon,” but they’re still there. And they will still come back to haunt him. I also loved them so much, because of the symbolism behind their hearts. Since those giant hearts are like all the hearts and souls left behind. It also shows that where the narrator was from held many beliefs for the heart. Maybe tt could have been where the soul was kept or the heart was so large it meant that it had a lot of love. There can be many different ideas.

Another amazing thing about these whale hearts was that the main character went through all that work to bury them. To him it is like burying all the forgotten people from his past that never were buried. Giving them a proper burial makes him feel at least a little better about him himself, since he so burdened with guilt. Though he guild still sticks. But he loses a bit more of it after he saves the life of his old boss’s daughter. I love how he questions fate, and if all the utter shit in his life happened for a reason. Since if he had not lived through a war, lost his mother, and ran to America; this girl would have drowned. The girl becomes a large character, because she is the first person he has really let in since his mother. She even begins to take care of him. But somewhere between this he gets the amazing idea to create life from death, and make a garden where he buried the hearts.

I honestly had really mixed feeling for this story. At times it was hard for me to read, and then I just started to really like it. I can’t be sarcastic or even witty about it, because it is a very serious story. I guess if I really hated it I could have been super sarcastic, but I only a hated a few parts. Like when he was being lazy and selfish. Since that is how he used to be, and then the whales came along. Those whales made him flourish. Made him actually grow up. In a way this story is a bildungsroman, because Joseph used to be like an oversized kid. You know, relying on his mother for everything and just taking without asking. But as the story goes on he becomes a man and begins to finally care for others.

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine ...

When Mr. Pirzada came to dine, Jhumpa Lahiri made me feel welcomed. The authenticity of writing in first person helped me to relate to the narrator Lilia. As an American-Mexican, I understand the sense of displacement being between two cultures.
This idea of “double-consciousness”, that one can feel like an object and a subject, not belonging to one complete identity, is always a contemporary issue in America-everyone having immigrated at one point. It is in this way that Lilia feels connected to Mr. Pirzada, both being without country. One of the most admirable and unavoidable attributes to a good writer, is writing yourself into the piece. It was a very personal experience for Jhmupa Lahiri which is perhaps why she chose to write in a direct and personal first person.
In picking a child’s perspective, the writer can create an innocent point of view. The girl’s fascination with this dinner guest unfurls the curiosities of where her parents are from and of the war going on in Pakistan/India. While trick-or-treating, a neighbor comments on Lilia dressed as an Indian witch, making her more aware of her cultural differences. Also, Mr. Pirzada is uneasy when Lilia is unaccompanied to roam the streets at night. Lahiri’s choice to write in Halloween contrasts the protection of America versus the danger elsewhere. This is an appreciated technique to distinguish the use of realism and cultural identity.
Because of Lilia’s interest, we see how unsupportive American education is of our plentiful cultures and differences. Lilia is discouraged to learn anything other than American history. But, the natural assimilations of being ‘Americanized’ also show up in the story when this child begins to pray “never prayed for anything before, has never been taught or told to…” This could be American culture- “one nation under God”- or out of pure innocence. Either way, this choice still heightens the sense of displacement.
Knowing that Jhumpa Lahiri specifically wrote When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine for an American audience, I realized the simplicity in the language. In group discussion, we realized the lack flowery language in the writing. This helps the readers understand a delicate experience. It can also allow immigrants, not well-read in English, to comprehend the story as well. Every reader will take something different from the text whether it’s a third-generation American or an immigrant like Lilia’s parents.

What is reality? Isn't it really what each person makes it? Isn't everything a perception of one's mind? What one person may label as "real" can be labeled as "fantastical" by another. If I were to compare this weeks readings to last, I would nudge this weeks to the "more real" side.

For some reason I was really drawn to the awkward stories involving religion. "The Father's Blessing" started off on a normal track and apparently lost everyone when they went for a stroll in the daughter's womb. However, it lost me long before that. Once the bride gave birth to her child and the priest found the picture of the dead baby I assumed it was the couple's dead baby. I read through the rest of the story waiting for him to announce the death but then the bride started preparing to nurse... I had to retrace my thoughts. I re-read but was still somewhat confused. I wasn't so shocked when he began to suck milk from the bride's breast. I was expecting it once the mother said, "I wish I had two mouths." It was basically the priest's cue to start sucking.

"Two Brothers" did shock me quite a bit. I had no idea what the story would be about when I read the first few pages. Once I read about the father trying to cut off his leg I was interested. I wasn't sure how the mother died, a lot was going on at that part in the story. This story required me to go back and re-read previous text often. I felt like there was a lot going on within such a small frame in the story to the point that I couldn't fully grasp what was going on because something else was thrown my way.

Both stories had a tendency to lose me because of the immense amount of information shoved in. Yet, they both continued to broaden my idea of literature by crossing boundaries.
-Ariana Allison

Response 2 - Fantasy Vs. Realism

Chelsa Lauderdale
Introduction to Writing and Literature
9/29/10

Excluding biographies, nearly every story, no matter how real it may seem, has an element of fantasy. Even some stories that are based on complete truths are also based on lies and what are lies but an element of the unreal, fantastical mistruths. The stories that were read this week had both realistic elements as well as things that seemed truly outrageous.
A great example of this is The Father’s Blessing by Mary Caponegro, which is the story of a priest and a family that is in his charge. At first the priest seems to be going about his duties as any normal priest might, but as the story progresses, events seem to get increasingly outlandish. After a period of restlessness and feeling unhelpful, the priest decides to lend a hand in an extremely odd situation. This might be to show the extent to which a priest might care for his flock, or a way to further his experience to better connect with them. This story starts off normal but gets increasingly strange and then just downright weird, so even though the story is seems very real, it's still got that backing element of fantasy.
Two Brothers by Brian Evenson is a story that could be disgustingly real but seemingly improbable. Dying due to an easily fixed broken appendage, or starvation by choice is seemingly insane, but not exactly unheard of, especially where extreme religious worship is involve. This story could possibly be trying to show what happens when man worships a Deity too extensively that it takes over the lives of everyone involved. Also, the effect that something like that has on the impressionable minds of children. The confusing thing about this story is trying to discern whether or not it is fantasy or not. It seems as though it's real, but still the reader hopes that it's not.

Response 2 Fiction

Vanessa Hernandez

Intro to Writing/Lit

Eric Olson

29 September 2010

Tools

Normally what came to my mind when thinking of the term ‘fiction’ and its correlation to literature, was images of brightly colored stories about scenarios that could never possibly happen. However, this week’s assignment has cleared my foggy vision and opened my eyes to the abundant techniques that fiction possesses. For instance, the realistic style present in The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr illuminates the actuality of war and its horrors.

Doerr’s choice of writing the story in third person is a purposeful technique that distances the character from the reader and forces us to invest our thoughts in trying to scratch that surface. I enjoyed this alienated aspect in the story but did find the whale heart a bit too cheesy for my taste. I felt the heart was an obvious symbol and took away from the cold tone the story had been putting on. Also, when it was mentioned in class, how Anthony Doerr had nothing to do with the war, and wasn’t even African American, I instantly understood why the story tended to have its cheesy symbolic moments. Anthony was trying to portray a story of something that he had noting to do with, or possibly did, I don’t know.

It was also mentioned in class that Two Brothers by Brian Evenson based its context on fabulism, but I felt that his story beautifully exemplified the use of fiction as a reflection to realism. A young boy very well could have brutally killed his parents, gained an unnatural sexual attachment to his brother, and laid in his carcass as if it were a fluffy cloud. Possibly I’m too heavily interested in abnormal psychology and murders, but this story could have happened, even though it was indeed very horrible.

The Father’s Blessing by Mary Caponegro is the story that best portrays fiction writer’s use of fabulism by Father’s normality after witnessing Mrs.Callahan venture into her daughter Kathleen’s hollow womb. The first person point of view used in the story made me feel more connected to Father, unlike Joseph in The Caretaker. Though Father is one weird fellow, I had a sense of pity for him, because his choice in religious position holds him back from ever having intimacy in any relationship. I could sense his tension and longing for knowledge, and even though he is the “direct messenger of god”, Father knows little about true life beyond spirituality. I could feel his emotions through Caponegro’s use of diction.“…crept inside, one after the other, to be embraced by those contours which are, even in the imagination, forbidden to the man who inhabits a vocation, a chamber of secrets.” Pg. 164

I myself have never confined my writing style or preferences to a specific fiction genre, literature is literature, and limitations can hold me back from discovering some amazing pieces. Though I do not like how many force themselves to only prefer one genre, I do agree that the various styles used in fiction attain different effects on the readers.

The Caretaker, Week 2

In 'The Caretaker', Anthony Doerr captures the horrors of the Liberian civil war and the racism faced by refugees in America. To combine this complex history with poetic insight regarding guilt and morality, Doerr combines a journalist's objectivity with a poet's metaphors. His loaded symbolism, however, is not as powerful as his elegant simplicity.

When I first began reading 'The Caretaker', I thought it was a satire because Joseph Saleesby, the main character, seemed so stick-like--the classical Mama's boy. As complexities such as Joseph's business in trafficking were introduced, it felt more extraordinary because the traumatic events clashed with the point-blank writing style. On page 97, a man describes the process of killing Nigerian peacekeepers in a horrifyingly subdued manner, “They die so easily. It's like sprinkling salt on the backs of slugs.” When Joseph is called a killer for the first time, he defends himself by crying back that he is only a cook. When he is called an African savage, he thinks to himself that he could not be so inhumane, because he is a gardener. He has reduced morality to professions, a simple concept, but also a deep analysis regarding labels. When the civil war ends, Joseph is apathetic about being deported; he has become as distant as the omniscient narrator. In this way, the author avoids a cliché happy ending.

However, the whale metaphor in this story is not so simple. Instead, it is a long image, drawn out for many pages, and it is desperate to serve as a symbol for the countrymen Joseph was unable to bury. Even after the discussion, I still think the story would have lost nothing had this section been left out. For one, when Joseph was unable to bury his countrymen in Africa, it is left to the reader to notice this. This image does not need to be brought up again when Joseph tries to bury the whales because the dead Liberians are horrific enough without the symbolism. The reference towards the immense guilt Joseph feels are all addressed in less obvious fashions when Joseph punishes himself by failing to meet the expectations of the couple he worked for and by refusing to eat as his own garden flourishes. These events did not seem inserted for the sake of a metaphor, but added to the storyline. When Joseph went to work, it was logical, because most people want jobs. When he refused to work, I remembered the times at Marshalls Department Store and how, no matter how much effort I put into picking up socks, my managers did not think I picked up socks well enough. I could understand why Joseph did not think working would do him any good. As for starving himself, I can understand why the guilty would do so. As for burying whale hearts, well, this was stretching my boundaries, and I do not want to assume that he just buried whale hearts because he is a Liberian refugee. In this way, the whale metaphor seemed only a metaphor, as opposed to an experience anyone else could feel.

I have always enjoyed simplicity in writing, probably because I do not want to be told by the author, “Pay attention. I am being very deep, and very powerful. You can tell because I am suddenly writing about a whale, and what other purpose could a whale possibly have other than a metaphor?” When the language is simple but the message is powerful, it is as though the reader and the reader's life experience create the power, rather than the fantastical imagery. For this reason, the whale scene, which held no literal and only figurative significance, seemed pointless. The rest of 'The Caretaker', however, was heartfelt and real in its journalistic approach as well as in its simplicity.

Attention to....the new Authors We're Reading Tab!

Hey Everyone,

I'm enjoying the intelligent and insightful comments you are all making about the reading here. Truly, it's been a pleasure to get this first taste of your unique voices!


If you scroll down a bit, you'll see a new Authors We're Reading tab. I'm adding links to their web pages and anything else interesting I find on them, for your quick access. I find it fun to read an author's bio imagining myself in their life, see the steps they've taken, browse their book titles, and marvel at the awards or residencies they've won over the years. Then, think how I'm going to make it happen for myself. Not to unhealthily compare myself or my work to the work of another writer, instead to inspire myself and visualize what success looks like to me. I always learn something each time I look these crazy writers up. For example, what kind of residencies are out there-- it's never too early to start thinking about this kind of stuff. Residencies pretty much pay you to write your own work! Imagine that! Another thing, simply a book title could end up being an excellent writing prompt or lead you into a whole new area of investigation for your own writing.



Guess what I found out? George Saunders won an award for Sea Oak! Bet you didn't know that! I sure as hell didn't!

Enjoy,
L

Literature

Alora Young
Intro to Writing and Literature
9/22/2010

Literatrue

C.S. Lewis once said, “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.” Literature should make you feel, make you think. The best literature can change your life. But who’s to say a piece of writing that makes me ponder life and all its heart-breaking horrors will have any effect at all on the person who sat beside me on the bus last Tuesday? Who decides what literature is or is not? Ronald Banthes wrote about ‘jouissance’, a more uncomfortable sort of pleasure, and about the point in reading when one finds themselves lost within a text – when a person becomes so involved that the outside world has no impact on their reading of the world within the text. Surely that is literature. Again, however, not everyone will find jouissance in the same pieces of writing.

Some stories we read challenge our perceptions of literature, and some stories conform to them. My idea of literature was challenged in my reading of ‘Sea Oak’ by George Saunders. If it is indeed considered literature, then in my opinion it is bad literature. It began with promise, implying taboo themes with an opening at a male strip club. It wanted to shock me, and I wanted to be shocked. And then Saunders seemed to try too hard, took it too far, so that it quickly surpassed shocking. It became stupid. I didn’t care about the characters or their clichéd, bottom class struggles, or the fact that Min and Jade “debate about how many sides a triangle has” while studying for the GEDs that they apparently skipped because they couldn’t keep their legs shut any better than they can keep their foul mouths shut.

I think for something to be shocking it has to be plausible, and I didn’t believe for one instant that any of the characters in this story were real. Aunt Bertie almost succeeded in being a little more than two-dimensional, and then she came back from the dead. When she was “basically just a pile of parts”, I caught myself scoffing at the stupidity of the whole thing. “’Show your cock,’ she says, and dies again” just topped it off. I thought the piece was entirely pointless, it didn’t conform in the slightest to my opinion of literature, and I just didn’t like it. Under normal circumstances, I would have stopped reading part-way through, and would have promptly forgotten about it.

Wells Towers’ ‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’, on the other hand, I liked quite a lot. There’s a fine line between successfully and unsuccessfully writing a historically-based fiction in modern language, and I felt that this piece was quite successful. Once you read enough to gather that the characters are Vikings, and get used to the profanities and way the characters talk in modern-day slang (“Djarf get at you yet?”), it becomes really enjoyable. It achieves this, I think, because within all the pillaging, berserking and talk about a curse of having “horns like a goat” and “shit[ting] little shits like a goat” verses the curse of “a seven-foot dick that you had to have hanging out of your pants at all times”, there are moments of true, relatable emotion.

“When I got back in bed, she tucked the covers over her face, hoping I’d think she was angry instead of crying” was a sentence that I felt. It was real, and my empathy for the characters grew with every well-placed and well-written sentence like it. At the story’s end, when our protagonist Harald says, “You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know what awful things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself”, it brings to the surface an awful reality that many of us don’t ever want to think about. Sometimes we do wish we loved nothing in life because it would make so many things easier. And then we hate ourselves and wish we were better people, and resolve never to think a thing like that again – let alone put it down on paper and get it published. I was sure after reading that sentence that this story was indeed ‘literature’ to me, because it resonates for both good emotions and bad. It makes me feel, makes me think, and adds to reality by taking us almost entirely out of the one we know, yet managing to keep the unfamiliar storyscape and supposedly barbaric characters utterly, unexpectedly real.

Do Not Disturb Response to Literature

Jenna Wilhelmi

9/20/10

Response 1

The Anchor Book of

New American Short Stories

Do Not Disturb

Do Not Disturb made me think about how people are losing the ability to empathize and I am talking about the wife in this story. People seem to think that if someone is not feeling the same pain as them that automatically makes others’ pain less important or easier to bear. As humans, we are constantly trying to win arguments, which includes the game of ‘I’m sicker than you, so I deserve all the pity.’ Even though this is a game you probably don’t want to win, we still can’t stand the thought of losing. I believe that when one person in a relationship is afflicted with illness, both parties are affected. Perhaps the husband’s back pain was his way of empathizing with his wife. He seemed to know that she liked to be the strong one and so he became weak to try and compensate. I also think he may have been trying to regain his part as the ‘victim’ or ‘submissive’ one in the relationship. Some people seem to only be able to play the role they are type cast for.

This story also reminded me of a couple of other things I have seen. One is a short film I saw a while back called ‘The Spine’ by Chris Landreth. In it the husband of a similarly abusive wife literally lost his spine. In the film, peoples’ emotional damage manifested physically. Reading about what happened to the husband at the end of the story reminded me of that immensely. It leads me to believe that the husband’s back pain was real, but that it was due to psychological damage, almost as though he was trying to punish himself for even thinking about leaving his wife.

Subsequently, there was another short story I read a few weeks ago that also tied me to this story. Well, actually it was a one shot comic book. The one shot series is called Demo and it is written by Brian Wood and illustrated by Becky Cloonan. The issue I’m referring to was called Sad and Beautiful World. It was about a couple that fought constantly like the one in Do Not Disturb, but if they left each other or got too far apart in general, wounds would start to appear all over their bodies and this would not stop until they were in each other’s arms again. Do Not Disturb’s relationship is in the same vein. Sometimes the person you hate and who drives you crazy is the one person that you really need in order to live.

Some relationships don’t make sense to me, such as this one. However, they seem to make sense to the people who are in them. It seems as though everyone can’t have the stereotypical fairytale relationship, but that they will instead seek out one that makes sense to them.

So how does this story apply to the word literature? When I think of literature I think o four things: One, it is usually taught in some level of schooling. Two, it makes you think - this is not beach reading. Three, it usually shows some horrid aspect of society. Four, it makes you feel some strong emotion, be that good or bad. In this case, Do Not Disturb, hit the mark on on four of these. Obviously, as stated above, this story made me think quite a bit about the conventions of relationships. In turn, it also show some horrid aspect of society when it made me feel as though people are losing the ability to empathize. Though, I must say that the author showed abusive relationships in a rather comical way. It was hard to figure out whether to be saddened or to laugh. All in all, I would consider it literature based on my criteria, but isn't literature an outdated word? Who says what is worthy of this fancy title or not? Literature is what you make of it, be it bad, good, confusing, infuriating, so-so, adventurous, or depressing.