Shel’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

I think believes is key here.

He pretty clearly places himself head and shoulders above her in class.

What's more interesting is the abandonment thing and how they came to be married in the first place. Maybe we can all relate to that more.

And the key in this story is the reveal, you know? That it takes place so far along, that he seems like just a guy and a dog walking along and her like a woman who just knows who he is.

See, this is where actually knowing some Russian history might come in handy.

Is what we're seeing a system of patronage? Does Yegor represent some kind of new class of person, or the forward motion of society?

Does Pelagea represent the pull of village life, the mentality of maintaining those roots, that needs to change?

So I went traipsing about the internet looking for some analysis of this story, and there was none to be found. So I guess I'm on my own...

First and foremost a story of abandonment. Of mismatch. Something that Yegor seems to understand but Pelagea seems to not quite get.

We're halfway through the story, maybe more, before we find out they're married.

Then there is class. Seems as though Yegor is enough of a craftsman that he is taken in by the upper classes. When we see him, he is in patched up gentleman's clothes and seems to be moving all the time, forward, down the line, words like taut strap used to describe him.

Pelagea, in contrast, is compared to a statue -- her eyes "seize" every step he takes. Every description of her is standing still or statue like, except when she is shown to be ecstatically happy for having found him, perhaps hoping he might come with her.

I have this fleeting and perhaps incorrect notion that what we're getting here is a portrait of marriage and village life that holds men back.

That women and domestic life keep a man from being who he really is.

(Let's just set aside my 2010 notion that the opposite and converse can also be true.)

If we look back at The Lady with the Little Dog, I think we see some similar themes around marriage and freedom, even though the main character is going from being with one woman to being with another.

I have a feeling we're dealing with not just a story about class and marriage but there's some kind of allegorical thing happening, too.

He's in motion, moving on up to the East Side, so to speak. She stands still, not moving, not changing.

I have to think about this one some more. And find some analysis to help me think some more.

He walked by a long road, straight as a taut strap. She, pale and motionless as a statue, stood, her eyes seizing every step he took. But the red of his shirt melted into the dark colour of his trousers, his step could not be seen, and the dog could not be distinguished from the boots. Nothing could be seen but the cap, and . . . suddenly Yegor turned off sharply into the clearing and the cap vanished in the greenness.

Go here to read the story:

http://chekhov2.tripod.com/030.htm

I'm working up a discussion intro in the next few hours...

Matt wrote: "this is like that episode of Seinfeld where George is in a book club..."

Well, I await your enlightenment. :)

Or... maybe we should all read it before the dork and watch the movie while we're there so we can have a discussion there.

That would mean that you *have* to come, e-monk.

Bonita, that's a great point about people in general who won't let anyone in...

I have an old copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's I picked up earlier this year at a book fair, so it's on my list, but I haven't read it, no.

The protagonist -- the writer with so much promise in the film -- writes those lines about Holly being a frightened woman, and there are all those references made to how he tried to help her (?). Which speaks to someone who isn't alienated, but his behavior seems much like the main character in Of Human Bondage. Cool, calm, detached exterior, hiding what precisely, we only get in small doses.

I think the fascination with her character as played by Hepburn is interesting (by that I mean odd), because she is so alienated until the last scene. I don't know... I feel like a woman that alienated is... rare. But, like I said in the Faulkner thread, I hesitate to generalize.

I just finished watching Breakfast at Tiffany's with my daughter... good film... I can never decide how I feel about Holly, in the end.

Chicago has the Lit Fair, at which I managed to pick up some pretty awesome stuff... that's in May... :)

I've heard the title... wasn't it a miniseries?

Depending on momentum I'd be up for it...

Kerry wrote: "Wow that lady is FANTASTIC! This sounds almost too good to be true!

I'm giddy with anticipation!"

Agreed. Brian, you have found a gem. Kayaking, anyone?

Lauren wrote: "Okay, so, I won't be able to make it the whole time. Probably the 2nd through the 5th (and I'm getting scolded for even that long...) My friend's bachelorette party is the 31st (tentatively) and he..."

I'm sure that's arrangeable. We usually have plenty of cars.

Works for me. I am firming up plans - may not be there the whole week but for a good chunk, definitely. :)

I think we can expect to hear more until the iPad is released. Then we'll hear more again.

Ditto on that, Jennie.

See - 2010 is SOOO much better already. :)

I thought that the beating scene with the horse showed the ultimate futility of Joe's approach to life. That he would just as soon do that to an animal as a human to get what out of it, exactly. He runs "completely out of the life of the horse as if it had never existed" -- or as if he had never existed.

Although, in a whole other way, Joe may represent the horse itself, standing there, beaten and bloodied, left to make sense of what happened and somehow get on with life.

Joe is endlessly complex (Faulkner makes him so, with assertions like ... maybe he realized he was causing pain, or maybe his arm was just tired), at times clearly abhorrent, at times saddening from the simple perspective of being a fellow human, because it's clear that he didn't "have" to turn out this way - but in Joe, Faulkner seems to be providing us with an example of what can happen when unending cruelty/misunderstanding/terrible circumstances are used to raise a boy into a man.

Joe is a special case all his own in terms of his separateness from others borne of his interminable self loathing; I think if you're looking at the other characters in the book, a more "traditional" lack of understanding between the genders exists.

Brian! How awesome you are!

I thought Adam and Eve because there is a deliberate innocence to them both. And Lucas Burch as God just didn't work for me... unless God is a loud-mouthed jackass.

I've tried to write men before and pretty quickly come up against a brick wall. It never feels genuine. It's not action, it's the moment to moment internal stuff.

How does he position himself in relation to the world. How does he view himself in relation to others, how does he see others. There are a few men I could draw fairly well, but they'd end up pretty Faulknerian because it would end up not-so-generous.

So I understand the problem. I think Faulkner handles it as well as Joyce, all things considered.

I never know how far to take these man-woman things because I feel like I'm talking out of school... mostly because I'm an individual woman of my own place and time with my own perceptions of men and other women. How universal can I get, really.

I'm sure there are feminist readings out there on Faulkner that would confirm what you guys are saying about this fear of women.

And I've only ever read LiA, of Faulkner's work.

So while I can say that most male writers I've read appear to be creating caricatures of women instead of characters, that they don't really seem to "get" how the female operates in the world, by that same token, Faulkner's eye - as acidic as it may be - isn't totally inaccurate either.

And have you read how most women write men?! Even I know much of that is just ... off.

Lena and the woman at the very end are pretty much the only female characters he's what I would call "generous" with (Byron being the male on that side), and Lena... I can't decide if she's supposed to be delusional, or maybe slightly mentally disabled, but there is something *so* different about her that she seems to not-fit *and* tie everything together.

If we're getting biblical, I'd suggest that Lena and Byron make an Adam and Eve kind of couple.

That looks pretty damn awesome, if I do say so myself.