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

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Wow, I have always loved Poe but I am really glad to have everyone here take my appreciation to a different level.

I've not really read him and taken the time to find out what the references are, etc.

I agree about the monastic tendencies of the character but I also thought that the texts referred to might have a more direct purpose. I thought that the last text he referred to might be the most purposeful reference in the story - I believe something that cannot be proven. I thought the narrator believed something about the teeth that cannot be proven.

Anyway, when I read Poe... mostly I just read his stories about 4 or 5 times over in one sitting, just kind of enfolded in the voice that Hugh mentions but also wondering, good God, how does he pull this off so well every single time? How do the endings feel inevitable, but shocking, and yet in keeping with character...? He just ... so completely takes me into the world of the story.

Maybe it's just my age or unfortunate upcoming birthday (actually, I'm totally fine with getting older, I'm rather enjoying it), maybe it's looking at my children and seeing how fully alive and trusting they are in and with their bodies, but when I read him now I am more interested in his ... obsession? ... with the decay of the body as it relates to the life of the mind and soul. I used to be more interested in the symbolism and the horror bits.

And, decay of body as it relates to mind/soul is relevant to the being buried alive thing, I think. Being mistaken for dead by others, living in a body that betrays you.

Well come on guys. That's not really fair... :-)

It didn't grab me - the title seemed the best part - but maybe I'm not thinking correctly about it.

Maybe I'm not experimental enough.

Maybe I'm not philosophical enough.

On Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, I know, I always go there first):

Though Markson's original manuscript was rejected fifty-four times, the book, when finally published in 1988 by Dalkey Archive Press, met with critical acclaim. In particular, the New York Times Book Review praised it for "address[ing:] formidable philosophic questions with tremendous wit." A decade later, David Foster Wallace described it as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country" in an article for Salon entitled "Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels >1960."

I'm not one to use an author's bio to understand the work, normally I prefer to just take the work at face value. But you have to admit, more than many authors, there is a common thread throughout much of his work that does relate to what we know of his life. Deep and soul-shaking love, a beautiful woman dying... happens a lot in his stuff.

Yeah, the vagina dentata thing is from myth/folklore. I get it, I see where it comes from, but I guess folklore doesn't always make sense to me.

I just don't think that was the goal here. The teeth are a symbol of her health, her life, but castration/sexuality, I don't really get that out of the story at all.

I think it's a soul vs. body story. Or mind/body. Material vs. Spirit.

Wasn't the woman Poe married quite a bit younger than him, and also his cousin?

Help me out here, you more theologically experienced people.

Or anyone, for that matter...! I swear, I am all over this thread like white on rice now. Back on the bandwagon of life. Got my act together (mostly) and life is settling down so I can focus on what matters. :-)

If we look at them all together and what Poe might be trying to... express through them/use them for...

The first one is about election, or the people chosen to be part of God's kingdom. The man who wrote this particular work questioned the idea that those who would be elected would even have to be Christians to be part of the Kingdom. Not a popular idea. Further, St. Augustine, whom he uses in the exact same passage, had this to say about election:

"For Augustine and his theological successors up to Calvin, the community of the elect is numerically restricted; their number corresponds to the number of fallen angels, who must be replaced through the matching number of redeemed men and women so that the Kingdom of God would be restored numerically."

(I find all that weird. Oh, and the criteria that the elected could not have defiled themselves with women, ok don't get me started.)

The second work, City of God, by Augustine, was (generally) about separating the spiritual world from the material...

And the third is about faith - "What I believe cannot be proven."

I could be making too much of all of this. But Poe was so careful, I have a hard time believing the selection wasn't entirely deliberate.

And, given the subject matter of the story - which is very much about the decay of life, the death of a virtuous life described in harrowing detail and a truly gruesome - the "material" act on the part of the main character at the end... how do these lofty ideas fit at all?

Here is the info I have found that appears to be relevant.

de Amplitudine Beati Regni dei

The work that got Curione into the most trouble was On the Great Extent of God's Blessed Kingdom (De amplitudine beati regni dei), 1554. In this he called the doctrine of election "a biased, hateful, and malicious belief, calculated to drive souls to despair" and contended that the number of people who would be saved was much greater than most people imagined, most of humankind. He also claimed that many could achieve salvation by observing natural law, without converting to Christianity. Because he knew that the book would be controversial, and possibly dangerous to himself, he delayed publishing it for seven years and ultimately had it published away from Basel, in Poschiavo in the canton of Grisons (Graubünden) in southeast Switzerland. It was dedicated to King Sigismund II of Poland. In 1557, when Vergerio found that De amplitudine was circulating in Poland, he tried unsuccessfully to have it condemned.

St. Austin's great work, the "City of God" ...

St Austin is St. Augustine, in case you couldn't tell by the title City of God... there is a Wikipedia entry on it. City of God had 22 books, which according to Wikipedia, "he wrote to restore the confidence of his fellow Christians, which was badly shaken by the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410...[earlier on the page:] When the Roman Empire in the West was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Church as a spiritual City of God (in a book of the same name) distinct from the material City of Man. His thought profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. Augustine's City of God was closely identified with the church, and was the community which worshipped God.

Tertullian "de Carne Christi"

De Carne Christi is a polemical work by Tertullian against the Gnostic Docetism of Marcion, Apelles, Valentinus and Alexander. It purports that the body of Christ was a real human body, taken from the virginal body of Mary, but not by way of human procreation. Among other justifications for the incarnation of Christ, it states that "the choice of 'foolish' flesh is part of [God's:] conscious rejection of conventional wisdom" and that "Without true incarnation, there can be no true redemption... God must have flesh, in order to have a real death and real resurrection." (De Carne Christi, Mahé edition).

Direct translation of the Latin:

The Son of God was born: there is no shame, because it is shameful.
And the Son of God died: it is wholly credible, because it is unsound.
And, buried, He rose again: it is certain, because impossible.

The phrase is sometimes associated incorrectly with the doctrine of fideism, that is, "a system of philosophy or an attitude of mind, which, denying the power of unaided human reason to reach certitude, affirms that the fundamental act of human knowledge consists in an act of faith, and the supreme criterion of certitude is authority." (Catholic Encyclopedia). Fideism as a school of thought was rejected by Church in the Middle Ages.

Tertullian's quotation actually implies a rejection of Fideism, in that he asserts that the Apostles, being reasonable people, would not have believed in something as incredible as the resurrection of Jesus Christ had they not seen it firsthand.

However, the line "What I believe in cannot be proven" can be taken neither as a statement of Fideism nor a statement against it, unless the nature of the unprovable be evaluated in some way. Tertullian thought that reasonable people will not accept contradictory assertions and will dismiss them as ridiculous or impossible unless they themselves have legitimate certainty concerning them.

Yeah, this is what I have read to.

The short of it is that he was a man ahead of his time in terms of his work itself, so publishing to make money was difficult.

He judged success of his work by how many copies it sold - he did work off and on in publishing, even running a journal for a period of time...

The reading list from this story...

My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise of the noble Italian Coelius Secundus Curio "de Amplitudine Beati Regni dei"; St. Austin's great work, the "City of God"; and Tertullian "de Carne Christi," in which the paradoxical sentence "Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est" occupied my undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.

Does anyone know these works? And I'll be a monkey's uncle if that Latin isn't Greek to me.

Also, his description of Berenice in contrast to himself before she falls ill is worth discussing, perhaps even from a literary perspective:

Yet differently we grew --I ill of health, and buried in gloom --she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers the ramble on the hill-side --mine the studies of the cloister --I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation --she roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice! --I call upon her name --Berenice! --and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah! vividly is her image before me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh! gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh! sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! --Oh! Naiad among its fountains! --and then --then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told.

The narrator speaks more than once of details that shall not be revealed and a story that should not be told... kinda makes you wonder about the telling.

A translation of the epigraph:

"My companion said I might find some alleviation of my misery in visiting the grave of my beloved."

A couple of interesting little factoids about this story.

First, the original version included a passage in which Egaeus watched Berenice move her finger and smile right before her burial. Apparently the outcry was such that he modified the story - apparently being buried alive was just crossing the line, but all that other stuff wasn't? - and it was republished.

Second, I've read a fair bit about Poe's life and his wife was quite ill for much of her adult life, if I recall correctly.

The monomania described in this story - would we call this obsessive-compulsive now?

Also, in Wikipedia there is this Freudian interpretation that seems off-base to me in the way that only Freud can be... but amusing, in a way only Freud can be... Seriously, I cannot connect these dots in any way:

"In Freudian terms, the removal of teeth can be a symbol of castration, possibly as punishment for masturbation. Another interpretation is thinking of the teeth as protection for an entrance to the cousin's body, another sexual connotation."

But this lady, I think, takes the cake:

"In addition, the psychoanalytic literary critic Princess Marie Bonaparte, in her book The Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, refers to the idea of vagina dentata in her critique of this story."

(Go ahead. Search vagina dentata on Wikipedia. Dare you.)

But let's not get fixated on the Freudian interpretation.

Let's start here:

Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, --as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? [emp. mine:]: --from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

Here is where we will discuss teeth and monomania and a beautiful woman's death.

http://infomotions.com/alex2/authors/...

Many thanks to Michael for this excellent suggestion. There is a lot to this story, I hope you all have fun with it.

MORE

Bonita mentioned issues with the link provided. She said she had success by googling the story and found it in "The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States" - This is where I found it when I googled the name of the book, which takes you to a "preview this book" area - the story starts on page 143, and the link to it is on the first page of the table of contents:

http://books.google.com/books?id=O290...

By the way, if anyone is interested, in the book The Shawl there is a story after it called "Rosa" that is about Rosa, living in Florida, after the war.

In thinking about why she chooses to survive... maybe Rosa represents a certain persistence - a certain never give up-ness - that is often talked about in synagogues, etc. The persistence of a people to survive in the face of near extinction.

I've read some Holocaust literature - can't be married into a Jewish family without having Night shoved into your hands at least once every five years, especially if you're the only shiksa in the room with a German last name - and a lot of it is like this.

In my experience there is an unreality to much of the literature because the events themselves do seem unreal. If you've ever been to the Holocaust museum you might know what I mean - the hair, the teeth, the shoes, the box cars and gas chambers. Even as I see how very real it all was, even as my stomach is turning with each room and each detail, it's hard for my teensy little mind to grasp it all as a larger story.

Even more impactful are the smaller stories of personal pain, because we cannot help but to place ourselves in that space. What makes this kind of literature nearly impossible for me to read is that it's almost too terrible to believe that people could ever have done those things to other people, and all of those smaller scenes of cruelty could add up, that there are roughly 8 million of those stories that become that one larger, nearly impossible to grasp story.

So what's my point, well, my point is that the story itself is immersive, or maybe submersive, in this reality that seems like it can't be real.

I thought the maroon showers were blood-filled urine, obviously turds are what they are, and that the smoke/fat had to do with the ovens.

At the end I was surprised, in a way, that self-preservation won out for Rosa. There is that paragraph where she says if she does this, they will shoot; if she does that, they will shoot; she is completely frozen by the knowledge that she, too, will die if she does anything but watch. I half expected her to run towards them anyway, or throw herself at the fence.

Well done, Lauren - that first year usually humbles a lot of people - good job!

I thought that the vocabulary, phrasing and rhythm lent the story a non-American flavor, as though it had been translated from Polish or some other language.

I agree on the names. With everyone being thin and malnourished, with the exception of Magda who looked Aryan, it was hard to figure out who was whom for a bit there. I think that may have been done on purpose, too, though.

OK, chirp chirp tweet? Is something wrong with the URL...?

OK, well, this story. Please don't read this if you haven't read the story ... spoilers ensue...

Let me first admit that I have a really hard time reading or watching anything in which a child is harmed or killed. When my kids were babies I couldn't at all, I would be upset for days, thinking of the child's innocence and undeserved pain, the parents' everlasting, unrelenting anguish, the absolute unfairness of a child dying before a parent.

In this story, it is the slowness with which it happens and the mother's desperate attempts to keep Magda alive that make me want to look away, even though I know I shouldn't, I know things like this and even worse really happened and we should all be forced to look man's inhumanity to man in the eye.

So I'm going to focus on the shawl itself to open the discussion. It serves so many important functions:

1. Warmth
2. A substitute for food/nourishment
3. A kind of mother for Magda
4. A life saver, literally, serving to hide Magda and calm her...

...I thought that the descriptions of Magda as she grew were heartbreaking. She suffered from every form of malnutrition possible, which affected both her brain and body's abilities to develop... and I wonder if she is deaf, or if she somehow understands that her life is saved by her silence. Then, at the end, when she howls for the shawl... missing her protector, her pacifier, she can't exist... so finally must die.

The few physical details we do get are haunting: In the barracks they spoke of "flowers," of "rain": excrement, thick turd-braids, and the slow stinking maroon waterfall that slunk down from thh upper bunks, the stink mixed with a bitter fatty floating smoke that greased Rosa's skin."

(I confess to not being conversant enough in Holocaust history to know what precisely she is describing, but the guesses I can hazard are pretty gruesome.)

The final paragraph will stick with me for a good, long time...The whole of Magda traveled through loftiness. She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine."

That sounds like Shel Silverstein.

Happy birthday Jennie and Patrick... !