and Other Necessary Confusions - mcschools.net 2 Texts.pdf · and Other Necessary Confusions Anchor Text: ... question. Mrs. Whitaker puttered around the shop. They still hadn’t

Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 1

Unit 2: Magical Realism and Other Necessary Confusions

Anchor Text:

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka


Rules of Notice for Reading Fiction


CHIVALRY by Neil Gaiman

Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat.

Every Thursday afternoon Mrs. Whitaker walked down to the

post office to collect her pension, even though her legs were no

longer what they were, and on the way back home she would

stop in at the Oxfam Shop and buy herself a little something.

The Oxfam Shop sold old clothes, knickknacks, oddments, bits

and bobs, and large quantities of old paperbacks, all of them

donations: secondhand flotsam, often the house clearances of the

dead. All the profits went to charity.

The shop was staffed by volunteers. The volunteer on duty this

afternoon was Marie, seventeen, slightly overweight, and dressed

in a baggy mauve jumper that looked like she had bought it from

the shop.

Marie sat by the till with a copy of Modern Woman magazine, filling out a “Reveal Your Hidden

Personality ”questionnaire. Every now and then, she’d flip to the back of the magazine and check the

relative points assigned to an A), B), or C) answer before making up her mind how she’d respond to the

question.

Mrs. Whitaker puttered around the shop.

They still hadn’t sold the stuffed cobra, she noted. It had been there for six months now, gathering dust,

glass eyes gazing balefully at the clothes racks and the cabinet filled with chipped porcelain and chewed

toys.

Mrs. Whitaker patted its head as she went past.

She picked out a couple of Mills & Boon novels from a bookshelf—Her Thundering Soul and Her

Turbulent Heart, a shilling each—and gave careful consideration to the empty bottle of Mateus Rosé with

a decorative lampshade on it before deciding she really didn’t have anywhere to put it.

She moved a rather threadbare fur coat, which smelled badly of mothballs. Underneath it was a walking

stick and a water-stained copy of Romance and Legend of Chivalry by A. R. Hope Moncrieff, priced at

five pence. Next to the book, on its side, was the Holy Grail. It had a little round paper sticker on the base,

and written on it, in felt pen, was the price: 30p.

Mrs. Whitaker picked up the dusty silver goblet and appraised it through her thick spectacles.


“This is nice,” she called to Marie.Marie shrugged.

“It’d look nice on the mantelpiece.”

Marie shrugged again.

Mrs. Whitaker gave fifty pence to Marie, who gave her ten pence change and a brown paper bag to put

the books and the Holy Grail in. Then she went next door to the butcher’s and bought herself a nice piece

of liver. Then she went home.

The inside of the goblet was thickly coated with a brownish-red dust. Mrs. Whitaker washed it out with

great care, then left it to soak for an hour in warm water with a dash of vinegar added.

Then she polished it with metal polish until it gleamed, and she put it on the mantelpiece in her parlor,

where it sat between a small soulful china basset hound and a photograph of her late husband, Henry, on

the beach at Frinton in 1953.

She had been right: It did look nice.

For dinner that evening she had the liver fried in breadcrumbs with onions. It was very nice.

The next morning was Friday; on alternate Fridays Mrs. Whitaker and Mrs. Greenberg would visit each

other. Today it was Mrs. Greenberg’s turn to visit Mrs. Whitaker. They sat in the parlor and ate

macaroons and drank tea. Mrs. Whitaker took one sugar in her tea, but Mrs. Greenberg took sweetener,

which she always carried in her handbag in a small plastic container.

“That’s nice,” said Mrs. Greenberg, pointing to the Grail. “What is it?”

“It’s the Holy Grail,” said Mrs. Whitaker. “It’s the cup that Jesus drunk out of at the Last Supper. Later, at

the Crucifixion, it caught His precious blood when the centurion’s spear pierced His side.”

Mrs. Greenberg sniffed. She was small and Jewish and didn’t hold with unsanitary things. “I wouldn’t

know about that,” she said, “but it’s very nice. Our Myron got one just like that when he won the

swimming tournament, only it’s got his name on the side.”

“Is he still with that nice girl? The hairdresser?”

“Bernice? Oh yes. They’re thinking of getting engaged,” said Mrs. Greenberg.

“That’s nice,” said Mrs. Whitaker. She took another macaroon.

Mrs. Greenberg baked her own macaroons and brought them over every alternate Friday: small sweet

light brown biscuits with almonds on top.

They talked about Myron and Bernice, and Mrs. Whitaker’s nephew Ronald (she had had no children),

and about their friend Mrs. Perkins who was in hospital with her hip, poor dear.


At midday Mrs. Greenberg went home, and Mrs. Whitaker made herself cheese on toast for lunch, and

after lunch Mrs. Whitaker took her pills; the white and the red and two little orange ones.

The doorbell rang.

Mrs. Whitaker answered the door. It was a young man with shoulder-length hair so fair it was almost

white, wearing gleaming silver armor, with a white surcoat.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” said Mrs. Whitaker.

“I’m on a quest,” he said.

“That’s nice,” said Mrs. Whitaker, noncommittally.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

Mrs. Whitaker shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t think so,” she said.

“I’m on a quest for the Holy Grail,” the young man said. “Is it here?”

“Have you got any identification?” Mrs. Whitaker asked. She knew that it was unwise to let unidentified

strangers into your home when you were elderly and living on your own. Handbags get emptied, and

worse than that.

The young man went back down the garden path. His horse, a huge gray charger, big as a shire-horse, its

head high and its eyes intelligent, was tethered to Mrs. Whitaker’s garden gate. The knight fumbled in the

saddlebag and returned with a scroll.

It was signed by Arthur, King of All Britons, and charged all persons of whatever rank or station to know

that here was Galaad, Knight of the Table Round, and that he was on a Right High and Noble Quest.

There was a drawing of the young man below that. It wasn’t a bad likeness.

Mrs. Whitaker nodded. She had been expecting a little card with a photograph on it, but this was far more

impressive.

“I suppose you had better come in,” she said.

They went into her kitchen. She made Galaad a cup of tea, then she took him into the parlor.

Galaad saw the Grail on her mantelpiece, and dropped to one knee. He put down the teacup carefully on

the russet carpet. A shaft of light came through the net curtains and painted his awed face with golden

sunlight and turned his hair into a silver halo.


“It is truly the Sangrail,” he said, very quietly. He blinked his pale blue eyes three times, very fast, as if he

were blinking back tears.

He lowered his head as if in silent prayer.

Galaad stood up again and turned to Mrs. Whitaker. “Gracious lady, keeper of the Holy of Holies, let me

now depart this place with the Blessed Chalice, that my journeyings may be ended and my geas fulfilled.”

“Sorry?” said Mrs. Whitaker.

Galaad walked over to her and took her old hands in his. “My quest is over,” he told her. “The Sangrail is

finally within my reach.”

Mrs. Whitaker pursed her lips. “Can you pick your teacup and saucer up, please?” she said.

Galaad picked up his teacup apologetically.

“No. I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Whitaker. “I rather like it there. It’s just right, between the dog and the

photograph of my Henry.”

“Is it gold you need? Is that it? Lady, I can bring you gold . . . ”

“No,” said Mrs. Whitaker. “I don’t want any gold thank you. I’m simply not interested.”

She ushered Galaad to the front door. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

His horse was leaning its head over her garden fence, nibbling her gladioli. Several of the neighborhood

children were standing on the pavement, watching it.

Galaad took some sugar lumps from the saddlebag and showed the braver of the children how to feed

the horse, their hands held flat. The children giggled. One of the older girls stroked the horse’s nose.

Galaad swung himself up onto the horse in one fluid movement. Then the horse and the knight trotted off

down Hawthorne Crescent.

Mrs. Whitaker watched them until they were out of sight, then sighed and went back inside.

The weekend was quiet.

On Saturday Mrs. Whitaker took the bus into Maresfield to visit her nephew Ronald, his wife Euphonia,

and their daughters, Clarissa and Dillian. She took them a currant cake she had baked herself.

On Sunday morning Mrs. Whitaker went to church. Her local church was St. James the Less, which was a

little more “Don’t think of this as a church, think of it as a place where like-minded friends hang out and

are joyful” than Mrs. Whitaker felt entirely comfortable with, but she liked the vicar, the Reverend

Bartholomew, when he wasn’t actually playing the guitar.


After the service, she thought about mentioning to him that she had the Holy Grail in her front parlor, but

decided against it.

On Monday morning Mrs. Whitaker was working in the back garden. She had a small herb garden she

was extremely proud of: dill, vervain, mint, rosemary, thyme, and a wild expanse of parsley. She was

down on her knees, wearing thick green gardening gloves, weeding, and picking out slugs and putting

them in a plastic bag.

Mrs. Whitaker was very tenderhearted when it came to slugs. She would take them down to the back of

her garden, which bordered on the railway line, and throw them over the fence.

She cut some parsley for the salad. There was a cough behind her. Galaad stood there, tall and beautiful,

his armor glinting in the morning sun. In his arms he held a long package, wrapped in oiled leather.

“I’m back,” he said.

“Hello,” said Mrs. Whitaker. She stood up, rather slowly, and took off her gardening gloves. “Well,” she

said, “now you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful.”

She gave him the plastic bag full of slugs and told him to tip the slugs out over the back of the fence.

He did.

Then they went into the kitchen.

“Tea? Or lemonade?” she asked.

“Whatever you’re having,” Galaad said.

Mrs. Whitaker took a jug of her homemade lemonade from the fridge and sent Galaad outside to pick a

sprig of mint. She selected two tall glasses. She washed the mint carefully and put a few leaves in each

glass, then poured the lemonade.

“Is your horse outside?” she asked.

“Oh yes. His name is Grizzel.”

“And you’ve come a long way, I suppose.”

“A very long way.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Whitaker. She took a blue plastic basin from under the sink and half-filled it with water.

Galaad took it out to Grizzel. He waited while the horse drank and brought the empty basin back to Mrs.

Whitaker.

“Now,” she said, “I suppose you’re still after the Grail.”


“Aye, still do I seek the Sangrail,” he said. He picked up the leather package from the floor, put it down

on her tablecloth and unwrapped it. “For it, I offer you this.”

It was a sword, its blade almost four feet long. There were words and symbols traced elegantly along the

length of the blade. The hilt was worked in silver and gold, and a large jewel was set in the pommel.

“It’s very nice,” said Mrs. Whitaker, doubtfully.

“This,” said Galaad, “is the sword Balmung, forged by Wayland Smith in the dawn times. Its twin is

Flamberge. Who wears it is unconquerable in war, and invincible in battle. Who wears it is incapable of a

cowardly act or an ignoble one. Set in its pommel is the sardonynx Bircone, which protects its possessor

from poison slipped into wine or ale, and from the treachery of friends.”

Mrs. Whitaker peered at the sword. “It must be very sharp,” she said, after a while.

“It can slice a falling hair in twain. Nay, it could slice a sunbeam,” said Galaad proudly.

“Well, then, maybe you ought to put it away,” said Mrs. Whitaker.

“Don’t you want it?” Galaad seemed disappointed.

“No, thank you,” said Mrs. Whitaker. It occurred to her that her late husband, Henry, would have quite

liked it. He would have hung it on the wall in his study next to the stuffed carp he had caught in Scotland,

and pointed it out to visitors.

Galaad rewrapped the oiled leather around the sword Balmung and tied it up with white cord.

He sat there, disconsolate.

Mrs. Whitaker made him some cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches for the journey back and wrapped

them in greaseproof paper. She gave him an apple for Grizzel. He seemed very pleased with both gifts.

She waved them both good-bye.

That afternoon she took the bus down to the hospital to see Mrs. Perkins, who was still in with her hip,

poor love. Mrs. Whitaker took her some homemade fruitcake, although she had left out the walnuts from

the recipe, because Mrs. Perkins’s teeth weren’t what they used to be.

She watched a little television that evening, and had an early night.

On Tuesday the postman called. Mrs. Whitaker was up in the boxroom at the top of the house, doing a

spot of tidying, and, taking each step slowly and carefully, she didn’t make it downstairs in time. The

postman had left her a message which said that he’d tried to deliver a packet, but no one was home.

Mrs. Whitaker sighed.


She put the message into her handbag and went down to the post office.

The package was from her niece Shirelle in Sydney, Australia. It contained photographs of her husband,

Wallace, and her two daughters. Dixie and Violet, and a conch shell packed in cotton wool.

Mrs. Whitaker had a number of ornamental shells in her bedroom. Her favorite had a view of the

Bahamas done on it in enamel. It had been a gift from her sister, Ethel, who had died in 1983.

She put the shell and the photographs in her shopping bag. Then, seeing that she was in the area, she

stopped in at the Oxfam Shop on her way home.

“Hullo, Mrs. W.,” said Marie.

Mrs. Whitaker stared at her. Marie was wearing lipstick (possibly not the best shade for her, nor

particularly expertly applied, but, thought Mrs. Whitaker, that would come with time) and a rather smart

skirt. It was a great improvement.

“Oh. Hello, dear,” said Mrs. Whitaker.

“There was a man in here last week, asking about that thing you bought. The little metal cup thing. I told

him where to find you. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, dear,” said Mrs. Whitaker. “He found me.”

“He was really dreamy. Really, really dreamy,” sighed Marie wistfully. “I could of gone for him.

“And he had a big white horse and all,” Marie concluded. She was standing up straighter as well, Mrs.

Whitaker noted approvingly.

On the bookshelf Mrs. Whitaker found a new Mills & Boon novel—Her Majestic Passion—although she

hadn’t yet finished the two she had bought on her last visit.

She picked up the copy of Romance and Legend of Chivalry and opened it. It smelled musty. EX

LIBRIS FISHER was neatly handwritten at the top of the first page in red ink.

She put it down where she had found it.

When she got home, Galaad was waiting for her. He was giving the neighborhood children rides on

Grizzel’s back, up and down the street.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I’ve got some cases that need moving.”

She showed him up to the boxroom in the top of the house. He moved all the old suitcases for her, so she

could get to the cupboard at the back.

It was very dusty up there.


She kept him up there most of the afternoon, moving things around while she dusted.

Galaad had a cut on his cheek, and he held one arm a little stiffly.

They talked a little while she dusted and tidied. Mrs. Whitaker told him about her late husband, Henry;

and how the life insurance had paid the house off; and how she had all these things, but no one really to

leave them to, no one but Ronald really and his wife only liked modern things. She told him how she had

met Henry during the war, when he was in the ARP and she hadn’t closed the kitchen blackout

curtains all the way; and about the sixpenny dances they went to in the town; and how they’d gone to

London when the war had ended, and she’d had her first drink of wine.

Galaad told Mrs. Whitaker about his mother Elaine, who was flighty and no better than she should have

been and something of a witch to boot; and his grandfather, King Pelles, who was well-meaning although

at best a little vague; and of his youth in the Castle of Bliant on the Joyous Isle; and his father, whom he

knew as “Le ChevalierMal Fet,” who was more or less completely mad, and was in reality Lancelot du

Lac, greatest of knights, in disguise and bereft of his wits; and of Galaad’s days as a young squire in

Camelot.

At five o’clock Mrs. Whitaker surveyed the boxroom and decided that it met with her approval; then she

opened the window so the room could air, and they went downstairs to the kitchen, where she put on the

kettle.

Galaad sat down at the kitchen table.

He opened the leather purse at his waist and took out a round white stone. It was about the size of

a cricket ball.

“My lady,” he said, “This is for you, an you give me the Sangrail.”

Mrs. Whitaker picked up the stone, which was heavier than it looked, and held it up to the light. It was

milkily translucent, and deep inside it flecks of silver glittered and glinted in the late-afternoon sunlight. It

was warm to the touch.

Then, as she held it, a strange feeling crept over her: Deep inside she felt stillness and a sort of peace.

Serenity, that was the word for it; she felt serene.

Reluctantly she put the stone back on the table.

“It’s very nice,” she said.

“That is the Philosopher’s Stone, which our forefather Noah hung in the Ark to give light when there was

no light; it can transform base metals into gold; and it has certain other properties,” Galaad told her

proudly. “And that isn’t all. There’s more. Here.” From the leather bag he took an egg and handed it to

her.


It was the size of a goose egg and was a shiny black color, mottled with scarlet and white. When Mrs.

Whitaker touched it, the hairs on the back of her neck prickled. Her immediate impression was one of

incredible heat and freedom. She heard the crackling of distant fires, and for a fraction of a second she

seemed to feel herself far above the world, swooping and diving on wings of flame.

She put the egg down on the table, next to the Philosopher’s Stone.

“That is the Egg of the Phoenix,” said Galaad. “From far Araby it comes. One day it will hatch out into

the Phoenix Bird itself; and when its time comes, the bird will build a nest of flame, lay its egg, and die,

to be reborn in flame in a later age of the world.”

“I thought that was what it was,” said Mrs. Whitaker.

“And, last of all, lady,” said Galaad, “I have brought you this.”

He drew it from his pouch, and gave it to her. It was an apple, apparently carved from a single ruby, on an

amber stem.

A little nervously, she picked it up. It was soft to the touch—deceptively so: Her fingers bruised it, and

ruby-colored juice from the apple ran down Mrs. Whitaker’s hand.

The kitchen filled—almost imperceptibly, magically—with the smell of summer fruit, of raspberries and

peaches and strawberries and red currants. As if from a great way away she heard distant voices raised in

song and far music on the air.

“It is one of the apples of the Hesperides,” said Galaad, quietly. “One bite from it will heal any illness or

wound, no matter how deep; a second bite restores youth and beauty; and a third bite is said to grant

eternal life.” Mrs. Whitaker licked the sticky juice from her hand. It tasted like fine wine.

There was a moment, then, when it all came back to her—how it was to be young: to have a firm, slim

body that would do whatever she wanted it to do; to run down a country lane for the simple unladylike

joy of running; to have men smile at her just because she was herself and happy about it.

Mrs. Whitaker looked at Sir Galaad, most comely of all knights, sitting fair and noble in her small

kitchen.

She caught her breath.

“And that’s all I have brought for you,” said Galaad. “They weren’t easy to get, either.”

Mrs. Whitaker put the ruby fruit down on her kitchen table. She looked at the Philosopher’s Stone, and

the Egg of the Phoenix, and the Apple of Life.


Then she walked into her parlor and looked at the mantelpiece: at the little china basset hound, and the

Holy Grail, and the photograph of her late husband Henry, shirtless, smiling and eating an ice cream in

black and white, almost forty years away.

She went back into the kitchen. The kettle had begun to whistle. She poured a little steaming water into

the teapot, swirled it around, and poured it out. Then she added two spoonfuls of tea and one for the pot

and poured in the rest of the water. All this she did in silence.

She turned to Galaad then, and she looked at him.

“Put that apple away,” she told Galaad, firmly. “You shouldn’t offer things like that to old ladies. It isn’t

proper.”

She paused, then. “But I’ll take the other two,” she continued, after a moment’s thought. “They’ll look

nice on the mantelpiece. And two for one’s fair, or I don’t know what is.” Galaad beamed. He put the

ruby apple into his leatherpouch. Then he went down on one knee, and kissed Mrs. Whitaker’s hand.

“Stop that,” said Mrs. Whitaker. She poured them both cups of tea, after getting out the very best china,

which was only for special occasions.

They sat in silence, drinking their tea.

When they had finished their tea they went into the parlor.

Galaad crossed himself, and picked up the Grail.

Mrs. Whitaker arranged the Egg and the Stone where the Grail had been. The Egg kept tipping on one

side, and she propped it up against the little china dog.

“They do look very nice,” said Mrs. Whitaker.

“Yes,” agreed Galaad. “They look very nice.”

“Can I give you anything to eat before you go back?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Some fruitcake,” she said. “You may not think you want any now, but you’ll be glad of it in a few hours’

time. And you should probably use the facilities. Now, give me that, and I’ll wrap it up for you.”

She directed him to the small toilet at the end of the hall, and went into the kitchen, holding the Grail. She

had some old Christmas wrapping paper in the pantry, and she wrapped the Grail in it, and tied the

package with twine. Then she cut a large slice of fruitcake and put it in a brown paper bag, along with a

banana and a slice of processed cheese in silver foil.


Galaad came back from the toilet. She gave him the paper bag, and the Holy Grail. Then she went up on

tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.

“You’re a nice boy,” she said. “You take care of yourself.”

He hugged her, and she shooed him out of the kitchen, and out of the back door, and she shut the door

behind him. She poured herself another cup of tea, and cried quietly into a Kleenex, while the sound of

hoofbeats echoed down Hawthorne Crescent.

On Wednesday Mrs. Whitaker stayed in all day.

On Thursday she went down to the post office to collect her pension. Then she stopped in at the Oxfam

Shop.

The woman on the till was new to her. “Where’s Marie?” asked Mrs. Whitaker.

The woman on the till, who had blue-rinsed gray hair and blue spectacles that went up into diamante

points, shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. “She went off with a young man,” she said. “On a

horse. Tch. I ask you. I’m meant to be down in the Heathfield shop this afternoon. I had to get my Johnny

to run me up here, while we find someone else.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Whitaker. “Well, it’s nice that she’s found herself a young man.”

“Nice for her, maybe,” said the lady on the till, “But some of us were meant to be in Heathfield this

afternoon.”

On a shelf near the back of the shop Mrs. Whitaker found a tarnished old silver container with a long

spout. It had been priced at sixty pence, according to the little paper label stuck to the side. It looked a

little like a flattened, elongated teapot.

She picked out a Mills & Boon novel she hadn’t read before. It was called Her Singular Love. She took

the book and the silver container up to the woman on the till.

“Sixty-five pee, dear,” said the woman, picking up the silver object, staring at it. “Funny old thing, isn’t

it? Came in this morning.” It had writing carved along the side in blocky old Chinese characters and an

elegant arching handle. “Some kind of oil can, I suppose.”

“No, it’s not an oil can,” said Mrs. Whitaker, who knew exactly what it was. “It’s a lamp.” There was a

small metal finger ring, unornamented, tied to the handle of the lamp with brown twine.

“Actually,” said Mrs. Whitaker, “on second thoughts, I think I’ll just have the book.”

She paid her five pence for the novel, and put the lamp back where she had found it, in the back of the

shop. After all, Mrs. Whitaker reflected, as she walked home, it wasn’t as if she had anywhere to put it.


NICHOLAS WAS…

older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.

The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own,

twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the

factories.

Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he

would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves’ invisible gifts by its bedside. The

children slept, frozen into time.

He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.

Ho.

Ho.

Ho.

By Neil Gaiman


Source: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TherMan.shtml

There's A man in the Habit of Hitting Me

on the Head With an Umbrella

By Fernando Sorrentino

translated by Clark M. Zlotchew

There's a man in the habit of

hitting me on the head with

an umbrella. It's exactly five

years today that he's been

hitting me on the head with

his umbrella. At first I

couldn't stand it; now I'm

used to it.

I don't know his name. I

know he's average in

appearance, wears a gray

suit, is graying at the

temples, and has a common

face. I met him five years

ago one sultry morning. I

was sitting on a tree-shaded bench in Palermo Park, reading the paper. Suddenly I felt something

touch my head. It was the very same man who now, as I'm writing, keeps whacking me,

mechanically and impassively, with an umbrella.

On that occasion I turned around filled with indignation: he just kept on hitting me. I asked

him if he was crazy: he didn't even seem to hear me. Then I threatened to call a policeman.

Unperturbed, cool as a cucumber, he stuck with his task. After a few moments of indecision, and

seeing that he was not about to change his attitude, I stood up and punched him in the nose. The

man fell down, and let out an almost inaudible moan. He immediately got back on his feet,

apparently with great effort, and without a word again began hitting me on the head with the

umbrella. His nose was bleeding and, at that moment, I felt sorry for him. I felt remorse for

having hit him so hard. After all, the man wasn't exactly bludgeoning me; he was merely tapping

me lightly with his umbrella, not causing any pain at all. Of course, those taps were extremely

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TherMan.shtml


bothersome. As we all know, when a fly lands on your forehead, you don't feel any pain

whatsoever; what you feel is annoyance. Well then, that umbrella was one humongous fly that

kept landing on my head time after time, and at regular intervals.

Convinced that I was dealing with a madman, I tried to escape. But the man followed me,

wordlessly continuing to hit me. So I began to run (at this juncture I should point out that not

many people run as fast as I do). He took off after me, vainly trying to land a blow. The man was

huffing and puffing and gasping so that I thought, if I continued to force him to run at that speed,

my tormenter would drop dead right then and there.

That's why I slowed down to a walk. I looked at him. There was no trace of either gratitude or

reproach on his face. He merely kept hitting me on the head with the umbrella. I thought of

showing up at the police station and saying, "Officer, this man is hitting me on the head with an

umbrella." It would have been an unprecedented case. The officer would have looked at me

suspiciously, would have asked for my papers and begun asking embarrassing questions. And he

might even have ended up placing me under arrest.

I thought it best to return home. I took the 67 bus. He, all the while hitting me with his

umbrella, got on behind me. I took the first seat. He stood right beside me, and held on to the

railing with his left hand. With his right hand he unrelentingly kept whacking me with that

umbrella. At first, the passengers exchanged timid smiles. The driver began to observe us in the

rearview mirror. Little by little the bus trip turned into one great fit of laughter, an uproarious,

interminable fit of laughter. I was burning with shame. My persecutor, impervious to the

laughter, continued to strike me.

I got off - we got off - at Pacifico Bridge. We walked along Santa Fe Avenue. Everyone

stupidly turned to stare at us. It occurred to me to say to them, "What are you looking at, you

idiots? Haven't you ever seen a man hit another man on the head with an umbrella?" But it also

occurred to me that they probably never had seen such a spectacle. Then five or six little boys

began chasing after us, shouting like maniacs.

But I had a plan. Once I reached my house, I tried to slam the

door in his face. That didn't happen. He must have read my mind,

because he firmly seized the doorknob and pushed his way in

with me.

From that time on, he has continued to hit me on the head with

his umbrella. As far as I can tell, he has never either slept or

eaten anything. His sole activity consists of hitting me. He is with

me in everything I do, even in my most intimate activities. I

remember that at first, the blows kept me awake all night. Now I

think it would be impossible for me to sleep without them.

Still and all, our relations have not always been good. I've asked him, on many occasions, and

in all possible tones, to explain his behavior to me. To no avail: he has wordlessly continued to

hit me on the head with his umbrella. Many times I have let him have it with punches, kicks, and

even - God forgive me - umbrella blows. He would meekly accept the blows. He would accept


them as though they were part of his job. And this is precisely the weirdest aspect of his

personality: that unshakable faith in his work coupled with a complete lack of animosity. In

short, that conviction that he was carrying out some secret mission that responded to a higher

authority.

Despite his lack of physiological needs, I know that when I hit him, he feels pain. I know he

is weak. I know he is mortal. I also know that I could be rid of him with a single bullet. What I

don't know is if it would be better for that bullet to kill him or to kill me. Neither do I know if,

when the two of us are dead, he might not continue to hit me on the head with his umbrella. In

any event, this reasoning is pointless; I recognize that I would never dare to kill him or kill

myself.

On the other hand, I have recently come to the realization that I couldn't live without those

blows. Now, more and more frequently, a certain foreboding overcomes me. A new anxiety is

eating at my soul: the anxiety stemming from the thought that this man, perhaps when I need him

most, will depart and I will no longer feel those umbrella taps that helped me sleep so soundly.

Watch the Youtube Video Adaptation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHaCuArM6y8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHaCuArM6y8


By Nikolai Gogol

“Your name, if you would be so good?”

“No, no. What can my name matter? I cannot tell it you. I know many acquaintances such

as Madame Chektareva (wife of the State Councillor) and Pelagea Grigorievna Podtochina (wife

of the Staff–Officer), and, the Lord preserve us, they would learn of the affair at once. So say just

‘a Collegiate Assessor,’ or, better, ‘a gentleman ranking as Major.’”

“Has a household serf of yours absconded, then?”


“A household serf of mine? As though even a household serf would perpetrate such a crime

as the present one! No, indeed! It is my nose that has absconded from me.”

“Gospodin Nossov, Gospoding Nossov? Indeed a strange name, that!2Then has this

Gospodin Nossov robbed you of some money?”

2 Nose is noss in Russian, and Gospodin equivalent to the English “Mr.”

THE NOSE, PART I

ON 25 March an unusually strange event occurred in St. Petersburg. For that morning Barber

Ivan Yakovlevitch, a dweller on the Vozkresensky Prospekt (his name is lost now — it no longer

figures on a signboard bearing a portrait of a gentleman with a soaped cheek, and the words:

“Also, Blood Let Here”)— for that morning Barber Ivan Yakovlevitch awoke early, and caught

the smell of newly baked bread. Raising himself a little, he perceived his wife (a most

respectable dame, and one especially fond of coffee) to be just in the act of drawing newly baked

rolls from the oven.

“Prascovia Osipovna,” he said, “I would rather not have any coffee for breakfast, but,

instead, a hot roll and an onion,”— the truth being that he wanted both but knew it to be useless

to ask for two things at once, as Prascovia Osipovna did not fancy such tricks.

“Oh, the fool shall have his bread,” the dame reflected. “So much the better for me then, as I

shall be able to drink a second lot of coffee.”

And duly she threw on to the table a roll.

Ivan Yakovlevitch donned a jacket over his shirt for politeness’ sake, and, seating himself at

the table, poured out salt, got a couple of onions ready, took a knife into his hand, assumed an air

of importance, and cut the roll asunder. Then he glanced into the roll’s middle. To his intense

surprise he saw something glimmering there. He probed it cautiously with the knife — then

poked at it with a finger.

“Quite solid it is!” he muttered. “What in the world is it likely to be?”

He thrust in, this time, all his fingers, and pulled forth — a nose! His hands dropped to his

sides for a moment. Then he rubbed his eyes hard. Then again he probed the thing. A nose!

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/g/gogol/nikolai/g61n/#fn2

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/g/gogol/nikolai/g61n/#nr2


Sheerly a nose! Yes, and one familiar to him, somehow! Oh, horror spread upon his feature! Yet

that horror was a trifle compared with his spouse’s overmastering wrath.

“You brute!” she shouted frantically. “Where have you cut off that nose? You villain, you!

You drunkard! Why, I’ll go and report you to the police myself. The brigand, you! Three

customers have told me already about your pulling at their noses as you shaved them till they

could hardly stand it.”

But Ivan Yakovlevitch was neither alive nor dead. This was the more the case because, sure

enough, he had recognised the nose. It was the nose of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev — no less: it

was the nose of a gentleman whom he was accustomed to shave twice weekly, on each

Wednesday and each Sunday!

“Stop, Prascovia Osipovna!” at length he said. “I’ll wrap the thing in a clout, and lay it aside

awhile, and take it away altogether later.”

“But I won’t hear of such a thing being done! As if I’m going to have a cut-off nose kicking

about my room! Oh, you old stick! Maybe you can just strop a razor still; but soon you’ll be no

good at all for the rest of your work. You loafer, you wastrel, you bungler, you blockhead! Aye,

I’ll tell the police of you. Take it away, then. Take it away. Take it anywhere you like. Oh, that

I’d never caught the smell of it!”

Ivan Yakovlevitch was dumbfounded. He thought and thought, but did not know what to

think.

“The devil knows how it’s happened,” he said, scratching one ear. “You see, I don’t know

for certain whether I came home drunk last night or not. But certainly things look as though

something out of the way happened then, for bread comes of baking, and a nose of something

else altogether. Oh, I just can’t make it out.”

So he sat silent. At the thought that the police might find the nose at his place, and arrest

him, he felt frantic. Yes, already he could see the red collar with the smart silver braiding — the

sword! He shuddered from head to foot.

But at last he got out, and donned waistcoat and shoes, wrapped the nose in a clout, and

departed amid Prascovia Osipovna’s forcible objurgations.


His one idea was to rid himself of the nose, and return quietly home — to do so either by

throwing the nose into the gutter in front of the gates or by just letting it drop anywhere. Yet,

unfortunately, he kept meeting friends, and they kept saying to him: “Where are you off to?” or

“Whom have you arranged to shave at this early hour?” until seizure of a fitting moment became

impossible. Once, true, he did succeed in dropping the thing, but no sooner had he done so than a

constable pointed at him with his truncheon, and shouted: “Pick it up again! You’ve lost

something,” and he perforce had to take the nose into his possession once more, and stuff it into

a pocket. Meanwhile his desperation grew in proportion as more and more booths and shops

opened for business, and more and more people appeared in the street.

At last he decided that he would go to the Isaakievsky Bridge, and throw the thing, if he

could, into the Neva. But here let me confess my fault in not having said more about Ivan

Yakovlevitch himself, a man estimable in more respects than one.

Like every decent Russian tradesman, Ivan Yakovlevitch was a terrible tippler. Daily he

shaved the chins of others, but always his own was unshorn, and his jacket (he never wore a top-

coat) piebald — black, thickly studded with greyish, brownish-yellowish stains — and shiny of

collar, and adorned with three pendent tufts of thread instead of buttons. But, with that, Ivan

Yakovlevitch was a great cynic. Whenever Collegiate Assessor Kovalev was being shaved, and

said to him, according to custom: “Ivan Yakovlevitch, your hands do smell!” he would retort:

“But why should they smell?” and, when the Collegiate Assessor had replied: “Really I do not

know, brother, but at all events they do,” take a pinch of snuff, and soap the Collegiate Assessor

upon cheek, and under nose, and behind ears, and around chin at his good will and pleasure.

So the worthy citizen stood on the Isaakievsky Bridge, and looked about him. Then, leaning

over the parapet, he feigned to be trying to see if any fish were passing underneath. Then gently

he cast forth the nose.

At once ten puds-weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders. Actually he smiled!

But, instead of departing, next, to shave the chins of chinovniki, he bethought him of making for

a certain establishment inscribed “Meals and Tea,” that he might get there a glassful of punch.

Suddenly he sighted a constable standing at the end of the bridge, a constable of smart

appearance, with long whiskers, a three-cornered hat, and a sword complete. Oh, Ivan

Yakovlevitch could have fainted! Then the constable, beckoning with a finger, cried:


“Nay, my good man. Come here.”

Ivan Yaklovlevitch, knowing the proprieties, pulled off his cap at quite a distance away,

advanced quickly, and said:

“I wish your Excellency the best of health.”

“No, no! None of that ‘your Excellency,’ brother. Come and tell me what you have been

doing on the bridge.”

“Before God, sir, I was crossing it on my way to some customers when I peeped to see if

there were any fish jumping.”

“You lie, brother! You lie! You won’t get out of it like that. Be so good as to answer me

truthfully.”

“Oh, twice a week in future I’ll shave you for nothing. Aye, or even three times a week.”

“No, no, friend. That is rubbish. Already I’ve got three barbers for the purpose, and all of

them account it an honour. Now, tell me, I ask again, what you have just been doing?”

This made Ivan Yakovlevitch blanch, and ——

Further events here become enshrouded in mist. What happened after that is unknown to all

men.


Source: http://bigthink.com/videos/magical-realism-is-still-realism

SALMAN RUSHDIE:

Magical Realism is Still Realism

Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist and writer, author of ten novels including Midnight’s

Children (Booker Prize, 1981) and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.

Transcript of video interview:

Question: How do magic and fantasy help you arrive at realism?

Salman Rushdie: The question is: "What does truth mean in fiction?" Because of course the first

premise of fiction is that it’s not true, that the story does not record events that took place. These

people didn’t exist. These things did not happen. And that’s the going in point of a novel. So the

novel tells you flat out at the beginning that it’s untruthful. But then so what do we mean then by

"truth in literature?" And clearly what we mean is human truth, not photographic, journalistic,

recorded truth, but the truth we recognize as human beings. About how we are with each other,

how we deal with each other, what are our strengths and our weaknesses, how we interact and

what is the meaning of our lives? I mean this is what we look at. We don’t need to know that

http://bigthink.com/videos/magical-realism-is-still-realism


Anna Karenina really existed. We need to know who she is, and what moves her, and what her

story tells us about our own lives and about ourselves and that is the kind of truth that as readers

we look for in literature. And now once you accept that stories are not true, once you start from

that position, then you understand that a flying carpet and "Madam Bovary" are untrue in the

same way, and as a result both of them are ways of arriving at the truth by the road of untruth,

and so then they can both do it the same way. I mean this is the first novel in which I have

actually managed finally to include a flying carpet. I really I've been wanting to do it for a long

time and the immediate thing that I thought. The moment you decide you’re going to have a rug

that flies through the air is you must immediately ask yourself realistic questions about it. What

would that be like if you were standing on a carpet and it levitated? Would it be difficult to keep

your balance? Would the carpet be rigid or would the movement of the air under the carpet

make the carpet undulate? If you flew very high, wouldn’t it get very cold? How do you keep

warm on a flying carpet? And I think the moment you start asking yourself those kind of

practical, real-world questions the flying carpet becomes believable. It becomes a thing that

might exist and if existed, it would function like this. But in the end what you’re looking for in

this book, a fairy tale, a fable, an allegory, a fantasy is the same thing you’re looking for in kind

of kitchen-sink realism. You’re looking for people that you can believe in behaving in ways that

you can recognize, and which tell you something. Those behaviors tell you something about

your own behavior and your own nature and about the life of the person next door to you as well,

so human truth is what you’re looking for and you can get to that by many different roads.

Recorded November 12, 2010

Interviewed by Max Miller

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler


Source: http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.6.sixth.html

Metamorphoses

By Ovid

Written 1 A.C.E.

Translated by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al

Book the Sixth

The Transformation of Arachne into a Spider

Pallas, attending to the Muse's song,

Approv'd the just resentment of their wrong;

And thus reflects: While tamely I commend

Those who their injur'd deities defend,

My own divinity affronted stands,

And calls aloud for justice at my hands;

Then takes the hint, asham'd to lag behind,

And on Arachne' bends her vengeful mind;

One at the loom so excellently skill'd,

That to the Goddess she refus'd to yield.

Low was her birth, and small her native town,

She from her art alone obtain'd renown.

Idmon, her father, made it his employ,


To give the spungy fleece a purple dye:

Of vulgar strain her mother, lately dead,

With her own rank had been content to wed;

Yet she their daughter, tho' her time was spent

In a small hamlet, and of mean descent,

Thro' the great towns of Lydia gain'd a name,

And fill'd the neighb'ring countries with her fame.

Oft, to admire the niceness of her skill,

The Nymphs would quit their fountain, shade, or hill:

Thither, from green Tymolus, they repair,

And leave the vineyards, their peculiar care;

Thither, from fam'd Pactolus' golden stream,

Drawn by her art, the curious Naiads came.

Nor would the work, when finish'd, please so much,

As, while she wrought, to view each graceful touch;

Whether the shapeless wool in balls she wound,

Or with quick motion turn'd the spindle round,

Or with her pencil drew the neat design,

Pallas her mistress shone in every line.

This the proud maid with scornful air denies,

And ev'n the Goddess at her work defies;

Disowns her heav'nly mistress ev'ry hour,

Nor asks her aid, nor deprecates her pow'r.

Let us, she cries, but to a tryal come,

And, if she conquers, let her fix my doom.

The Goddess then a beldame's form put on,

With silver hairs her hoary temples shone;

Prop'd by a staff, she hobbles in her walk,

And tott'ring thus begins her old wives' talk.

Young maid attend, nor stubbornly despise

The admonitions of the old, and wise;

For age, tho' scorn'd, a ripe experience bears,

That golden fruit, unknown to blooming years:

Still may remotest fame your labours crown,


And mortals your superior genius own;

But to the Goddess yield, and humbly meek

A pardon for your bold presumption seek;

The Goddess will forgive. At this the maid,

With passion fir'd, her gliding shuttle stay'd;

And, darting vengeance with an angry look,

To Pallas in disguise thus fiercely spoke.

Thou doating thing, whose idle babling tongue

But too well shews the plague of living long;

Hence, and reprove, with this your sage advice,

Your giddy daughter, or your aukward neice;

Know, I despise your counsel, and am still

A woman, ever wedded to my will;

And, if your skilful Goddess better knows,

Let her accept the tryal I propose.

She does, impatient Pallas strait replies,

And, cloath'd with heavenly light, sprung from her odddisguise.

The Nymphs, and virgins of the plain adore

The awful Goddess, and confess her pow'r;

The maid alone stood unappall'd; yet show'd

A transient blush, that for a moment glow'd,

Then disappear'd; as purple streaks adorn

The opening beauties of the rosy morn;

Till Phoebus rising prevalently bright,

Allays the tincture with his silver light.

Yet she persists, and obstinately great,

In hopes of conquest hurries on her fate.

The Goddess now the challenge waves no more,

Nor, kindly good, advises as before.

Strait to their posts appointed both repair,

And fix their threaded looms with equal care:

Around the solid beam the web is ty'd,

While hollow canes the parting warp divide;

Thro' which with nimble flight the shuttles play,

And for the woof prepare a ready way;


The woof and warp unite, press'd by the toothy slay.

Thus both, their mantles button'd to their breast,

Their skilful fingers ply with willing haste,

And work with pleasure; while they chear the eye

With glowing purple of the Tyrian dye:

Or, justly intermixing shades with light,

Their colourings insensibly unite.

As when a show'r transpierc'd with sunny rays,

Its mighty arch along the heav'n displays;

From whence a thousand diff'rent colours rise,

Whose fine transition cheats the clearest eyes;

So like the intermingled shading seems,

And only differs in the last extreams.

Then threads of gold both artfully dispose,

And, as each part in just proportion rose,

Some antique fable in their work disclose.

Pallas in figures wrought the heav'nly Pow'rs,

And Mars's hill among th' Athenian tow'rs.

On lofty thrones twice six celestials sate,

Jove in the midst, and held their warm debate;

The subject weighty, and well-known to fame,

From whom the city shou'd receive its name.

Each God by proper features was exprest,

Jove with majestick mein excell'd the rest.

His three-fork'd mace the dewy sea-God shook,

And, looking sternly, smote the ragged rock;

When from the stone leapt forth a spritely steed,

And Neptune claims the city for the deed.

Herself she blazons, with a glitt'ring spear,

And crested helm that veil'd her braided hair,

With shield, and scaly breast-plate, implements of war.

Struck with her pointed launce, the teeming Earth

Seem'd to produce a new surprizing birth;

When, from the glebe, the pledge of conquest sprung,


A tree pale-green with fairest olives hung.

And then, to let her giddy rival learn

What just rewards such boldness was to earn,

Four tryals at each corner had their part,

Design'd in miniature, and touch'd with art.

Haemus in one, and Rodope of Thrace

Transform'd to mountains, fill'd the foremost place;

Who claim'd the titles of the Gods above,

And vainly us'd the epithets of Jove.

Another shew'd, where the Pigmaean dame,

Profaning Juno's venerable name,

Turn'd to an airy crane, descends from far,

And with her Pigmy subjects wages war.

In a third part, the rage of Heav'n's great queen,

Display'd on proud Antigone, was seen:

Who with presumptuous boldness dar'd to vye,

For beauty with the empress of the sky.

Ah! what avails her ancient princely race,

Her sire a king, and Troy her native place:

Now, to a noisy stork transform'd, she flies,

And with her whiten'd pinions cleaves the skies.

And in the last remaining part was drawn

Poor Cinyras that seem'd to weep in stone;

Clasping the temple steps, he sadly mourn'd

His lovely daughters, now to marble turn'd.

With her own tree the finish'd piece is crown'd,

And wreaths of peaceful olive all the work surround.

Arachne drew the fam'd intrigues of Jove,

Chang'd to a bull to gratify his love;

How thro' the briny tide all foaming hoar,

Lovely Europa on his back he bore.

The sea seem'd waving, and the trembling maid

Shrunk up her tender feet, as if afraid;

And, looking back on the forsaken strand,

To her companions wafts her distant hand.


Next she design'd Asteria's fabled rape,

When Jove assum'd a soaring eagle's shape:

And shew'd how Leda lay supinely press'd,

Whilst the soft snowy swan sate hov'ring o'er her breast,

How in a satyr's form the God beguil'd,

When fair Antiope with twins he fill'd.

Then, like Amphytrion, but a real Jove,

In fair Alcmena's arms he cool'd his love.

In fluid gold to Danae's heart he came,

Aegina felt him in a lambent flame.

He took Mnemosyne in shepherd's make,

And for Deois was a speckled snake.

She made thee, Neptune, like a wanton steer,

Pacing the meads for love of Arne dear;

Next like a stream, thy burning flame to slake,

And like a ram, for fair Bisaltis' sake.

Then Ceres in a steed your vigour try'd,

Nor cou'd the mare the yellow Goddess hide.

Next, to a fowl transform'd, you won by force

The snake-hair'd mother of the winged horse;

And, in a dolphin's fishy form, subdu'd

Melantho sweet beneath the oozy flood.

All these the maid with lively features drew,

And open'd proper landskips to the view.

There Phoebus, roving like a country swain,

Attunes his jolly pipe along the plain;

For lovely Isse's sake in shepherd's weeds,

O'er pastures green his bleating flock he feeds,

There Bacchus, imag'd like the clust'ring grape,

Melting bedrops Erigone's fair lap;

And there old Saturn, stung with youthful heat,

Form'd like a stallion, rushes to the feat.

Fresh flow'rs, which twists of ivy intertwine,

Mingling a running foliage, close the neat design.


This the bright Goddess passionately mov'd,

With envy saw, yet inwardly approv'd.

The scene of heav'nly guilt with haste she tore,

Nor longer the affront with patience bore;

A boxen shuttle in her hand she took,

And more than once Arachne's forehead struck.

Th' unhappy maid, impatient of the wrong,

Down from a beam her injur'd person hung;

When Pallas, pitying her wretched state,

At once prevented, and pronounc'd her fate:

Live; but depend, vile wretch, the Goddess cry'd,

Doom'd in suspence for ever to be ty'd;

That all your race, to utmost date of time,

May feel the vengeance, and detest the crime.

Then, going off, she sprinkled her with juice,

Which leaves of baneful aconite produce.

Touch'd with the pois'nous drug, her flowing hair

Fell to the ground, and left her temples bare;

Her usual features vanish'd from their place,

Her body lessen'd all, but most her face.

Her slender fingers, hanging on each side

With many joynts, the use of legs supply'd:

A spider's bag the rest, from which she gives

A thread, and still by constant weaving lives.



http://faculty.washington.edu/rmcnamar/383/bishop.html

Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop

September rain falls on the house.

In the failing light, the old grandmother

sits in the kitchen with the child

beside the Little Marvel Stove,

reading the jokes from the almanac,

laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears

and the rain that beats on the roof of the house

were both foretold by the almanac,

but only known to a grandmother.

The iron kettle sings on the stove.

She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child

is watching the teakettle's small hard tears

dance like mad on the hot black stove,

the way the rain must dance on the house.

Tidying up, the old grandmother

hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac

hovers half open above the child,

hovers above the old grandmother

and her teacup full of dark brown tears.

She shivers and says she thinks the house

feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.

I know what I know, says the almanac.

With crayons the child draws a rigid house

and a winding pathway. Then the child

puts in a man with buttons like tears

and shows it proudly to the grandmother.


But secretly, while the grandmother

busies herself about the stove,

the little moons fall down like tears

from between the pages of the almanac

into the flower bed the child

has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove

and the child draws another inscrutable house.


Source: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/nothing-death

Nothing But

Death Pablo Neruda, 1904 – 1973

There are cemeteries that are lonely,

graves full of bones that do not make a sound,

the heart moving through a tunnel,

in it darkness, darkness, darkness,

like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,

as though we were drowning inside our hearts,

as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,

feet made of cold and sticky clay,

death is inside the bones,

like a barking where there are no dogs,

coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,

growing in the damp air like tears of rain.


Sometimes I see alone

coffins under sail,

embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,

with bakers who are as white as angels,

and pensive young girls married to notary publics,

caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,

the river of dark purple,

moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,

filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound

like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,

comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no

finger in it,

comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no

throat.

Nevertheless its steps can be heard

and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I’m not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,

but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,


of violets that are at home in the earth,

because the face of death is green,

and the look death gives is green,

with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf

and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,

lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,

death is inside the broom,

the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,

it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:

it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,

in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:

it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,

and the beds go sailing toward a port

where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.

By Pablo Neruda, translated and edited by Robert Bly, and published by Beacon Press in Neruda & Vallejo: Selected Poems. © 1993 by Robert

Bly. Used with permission. All rights reserved.


Source: http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/margin/nonficCowan.html

P O I N T ~ C O U N T E R P O I N T

A NECESSARY CONFUSION: MAGICAL REALISM

b y b a i n a r d c o w a n

CONTROVERSY HAS dogged magical realism since it first drew the attention of the world

literary community through Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude and other

works of the Latin American “Boom” in the 1960s. Recognized by some as a significant

international movement in fictional style, by others rejected as an irresponsible evasion of reality

and even as a conversion of third-world suffering to entertainment, magical realism has

constituted a special scandal to conventional literary history, which, no matter how demystified

and post-Hegelian it may claim to be, generally assumes what Hegel assumed: that “art, for us, is

a thing of the past,” that the progress of spirit (for what else is postmodernism with its ironic

superiority to semiotic codes) has relegated art to a more primitive era of human expression and

that only modes of the philosophical and political remain to be explored.

Erich Auerbach saw all of literary history from Homer to Proust as progressively defining a

realistic mode of narrative; in this he extended Matthew Arnold’s claim that the effort of modern

thought was to “see the object as in itself it really is.” In contrast, Lois Parkinson Zamora’s

survey [PDF]of twentieth-century art in this issue finds one of its greatest concerns to be the

finding or awakening of creative power in the real. Since the groundbreaking study Magical

Realism: Theory, History, Community edited by Zamora and Wendy Faris, magical realism’s

influences may be traced throughout the twentieth century and especially in German and Spanish

modernism. In deeper currents, it draws on the return of the banished supernatural, the uncanny

and fabulous in Hoffmann and Kleist (the title of whose short tale “Improbable Verities” serves

as an eponym for all his tales), the unexpected pertinence of the archetypal unconscious (in Poe)

or the theocratic cosmos (in Hawthorne), and most especially the absurd in city and country alike

as seen in Gogol, the subject of James D. Hardy, Jr. and Leonard Stanton[PDF] in this issue.

Magical realism is most readily recognized in the work of the major Latin American fiction

writers Borges, García Márquez, and Cortázar and in the dialogue with their style taken up by

Elena Garro, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, and Ana Castillo. Some think it most likely to crop

up throughout the Americas—Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Robert Kroetsch—where a world

system and a mental world collided with a reality in place already some five hundred years ago.

As an international (or interregional) style magical realism has characterized the work of

novelists writing about nations in transition to modernization, such as Ngugi wa Th’iongo,

Abdelkebir Khatibi, Ben Okri; Salman Rushdie, the most prominent of these, has called them “

'half-made' societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new.” Most

broadly, it responds to the sense of displacement and discursive impoverishment extended

everywhere by the world system, perhaps nowhere more than in the centers rather than the

http://www.janushead.org/5-2/zamora.pdf

http://www.janushead.org/5-2/zamora.pdf

http://www.janushead.org/5-2/hardystanton.pdf


peripheries; and thus, as Anne Hegerfeldt [PDF] shows in this issue, more than a few British

authors carry on this mode.

Wendy Faris [PDF] in this issue examines the cultural politics of the “battle between two

oppositional systems,” with all-too-real historical and economic scars, that is often the matrix of

magical realism. The “struggle” identified by Rushdie is inevitably a battle for subjective as well

as physical and economic survival. It therefore leads to encounters with ancestral cultural

systems that have now become what Toni Morrison, in referring to African and African

American lore as a source for Black American fiction, has called “discredited knowledge.” The

fight for recognition involves a collective recognition that a people cannot be defined

completely, and is thus fragmented, by the economic system. Yet this encounter with the

dreamed past is not controlled or mediated: the “return of the repressed” may be a collective as

well as a private phenomenon. Trinidadian poet Kamau Brathwaite has given an inimitable

definition in a recent issue of Annals of Scholarship:

Magical realism (MR) is simply a legba or lemba or limbo xperience: the sudden or apparently

sudden discovery of threshold or watergate into what seems “new” because it is very

ancient…where the “real,” since it has entered continuum, holding within its great wheel all the

“tenses”— past present & future— no longer in so-call chronological tension, but, like the

computer, w/”random” access memory form all or any of the time-compass, becomes “magical”

because, w / this access of what I repeat is a kind of blindness, we find ourselves in a capacity of

trans-limitness, erasure of expectant boundaries into mineral or plant or zemi or lwa or angel or

Other.

The legba, the angel, and so on, are part of a cultural

memory which Brathwaite so aptly calls “ 'random'

access.” Michael Wood[PDF] in this issue renders the

concept of cultural memory more concrete in calling it

“already narrated reality” and sees magical realism as

faithful “to the stories people tell,” while from this

point of view “the older realism, in this interpretation,

is already enacting a form of censorship.”

Ironically, the older, “responsible” realism may be outflanked by the most advanced scientific

knowledge as well as by the “discredited.” Magical realism responds to disclosures of reality

now current in physics and the natural sciences and to the changing condition of our

understanding of “reality.” Several of the contributors to this issue point out that magical realism

often operates in both directions, presenting fantastic events as ordinary and continuous with the

everyday world and singling out certain aspects of the everyday as fantastic and unbelievable,

either outrageous or a source of wonder or both. In both cases what emerges is a sense that the

commonsense view of the world is a constructed view. Based on a faith in mechanistic science,

this view has now been effectively dismantled by science itself and brought before the everyday

eye by electronic engineering. Quantum reality, still so little understood even by scientists

themselves, is nonetheless fully formulated and is the indispensable basis of both the worldwide

http://www.janushead.org/5-2/hegerfeldt.pdf

http://www.janushead.org/5-2/faris.pdf

http://www.janushead.org/5-2/wood.pdf


web of electronic information transfer analysis and the cracking of the genomic code. As

scientists often observe, quantum mechanics provides the most accurate equations the human

race has ever devised, even though it is poorly understood by even the most insightful minds in

physics.

Imaginative descriptions of the quantum world by science writers resemble the “instantaneous”

world suggested by much magical realist writing. This paradox serves as a witness that the

modern world is in transition to the possibility of a new mode of understanding reality. It is

however a possibility that can be realized only through the aid of imagination, which opens the

framework within which understanding operates. In a sense, then, technology (which is often

seen as the product or, alternatively, as the enabler of imagination) is the opposite of

imagination, for whereas the latter annuls space and time for the envisioning mind, the former

overcomes space and time for the practical reason, which can operate perfectly well without the

imagination, carrying out the dictates of the social will. Technology looms as a simulacrum of

imagination.

What looms for the technologized reality of the globalized citizen as a consequence is thus an

unprecedented numbness in which everyday discourse remains stubbornly in a ruling mode of

mechanistic insistence, reinforced by the persistence of economic bottom-line thinking, while the

transformations of reality in which it traffics so familiarly become steadily more fantastic. In

such a situation the truly alienated psyches are those of the most privileged users of this

technology, and the only hope for maintaining some contact with reality is through geopolitical

and economic alienation from modernity—or, alternatively, through a dialogue between the

hypermodern and the traditional that refuses to submit to the prestige of the electronically

privileged world and instead submits it to the critique of pre-modern tradition, imagination,

history, and irony such as magical realism carries out.

The authors in this issue all engage in this dialogue. They are particularly aware of the danger of

a “counterfeited” magical realism offered in the name of exoticism, for in the economy of

literary style bad currency tends to drive out good. Yet they offer spirited defenses of a

movement that they see as alive and growing; that relate its poetics to earlier movements in art

and to classic authors; and they aver its insights to be on the whole more revealing than evasive

of the real world, a world in which commonsense realism has always been only a narrow part

and whose cosmic dimensions, the presence of the past, dare to be envisioned once again. --BC

This article originally appeared inJanus Head in Fall 2002 athttp://www.janushead.org/5-

2/index.cfm

http://www.janushead.org/5-2/index.cfm

http://www.janushead.org/5-2/index.cfm


Source https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WD0f_YhxqZO8avsfAmPtA2ngivbyqwJxY17XdBk2iyY/edit?pli=1

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings:

A Tale For Children

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to

cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a

temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since

Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March

nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light

was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the

crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the

courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down

in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous

wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting

compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at

the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded

hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a

drenched great-grandfather took away and sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge

buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so

long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end

found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible

dialect with a strong sailor's voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the

wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship

wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life

and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

"He's an angel," she told them. "He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow

is so old that the rain knocked him down."

On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in

Pelayo's house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those

times were the fugitive survivors of a spiritual conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him

to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff's club,

and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the

wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were

still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to

eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and

provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when they went out into

the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the


chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat

through the openings in the wire as if weren't a supernatural creature but a circus animal.

Father Gonzaga arrived before

seven o'clock, alarmed at the strange

news. By that time onlookers less

frivolous than those at dawn had already

arrived and they were making all kinds

of conjectures concerning the captive's

future. The simplest among them

thought that he should be named mayor

of the world. Others of sterner mind felt

that he should be promoted to the rank

of five-star general in order to win all

wars. Some visionaries hoped that he

could be put to stud in order to implant

the earth a race of winged wise men

who could take charge of the universe.

But Father Gonzaga, before becoming a

priest, had been a robust woodcutter.

Standing by the wire, he reviewed his

catechism in an instant and asked them

to open the door so that he could take a

close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated

chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels

and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the

world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father

Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest

had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of

God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too

human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with

parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him

measured up to the proud dignity of angels. The he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief

sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil

had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that

if wings were not the essential element in determining the different between a hawk and an

airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a

letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the

Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts.

His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity

that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops

with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her

spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the

yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who

buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings


were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on

earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her

heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise

of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done

while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder

that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week

they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter

still reached beyond the horizon.

The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get

comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental

candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs,

which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for

angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinents

brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he

was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue

seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching

for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch

their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to

rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when

they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many

hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and

with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind

of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world.

Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they

were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of

a her taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.

Father Gonzaga held back the crowd's

frivolity with formulas of maidservant

inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a

final judgment on the nature of the captive.

But the mail from Rome showed no sense

of urgency. They spent their time finding

out in the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect

had any connection with Aramaic, how

many times he could fit on the head of a

pin, or whether he wasn't just a Norwegian

with wings. Those meager letters might

have come and gone until the end of time if

a providential event had not put and end to

the priest's tribulations.

It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there

arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for

having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to

see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state

and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was


a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most

heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she

recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had sneaked out of her

parents' house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having

danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in tow and through the

crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment

came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that,

full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even

trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles

attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn't recover

his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn't get to walk but almost won the

lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were

more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel's reputation when the woman who had been

changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured

forever of his insomnia and Pelayo's courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it

had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms.

The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a

two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn't get in

during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn't get in. Pelayo also

set up a rabbit warren close to town and have up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda

bought some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on

Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that

didn't receive any attention. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside

it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that

still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old one. At first, when

the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But

then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his second

teeth he'd gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart. The angel

was no less standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious

infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the chicken

pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn't resist the temptation to

listen to the angel's heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his

kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was

the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he

couldn't understand why other men didn't have them too.

When the child began school it had been

some time since the sun and rain had caused

the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel

went dragging himself about here and there

like a stray dying man. They would drive him

out of the bedroom with a broom and a

moment later find him in the kitchen. He

seemed to be in so many places at the same

time that they grew to think that he'd be

duplicated, that he was reproducing himself

all through the house, and the exasperated


and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could

scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into

posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him

and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and only then did they notice that

he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian.

That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not

even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels.

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but

seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained

motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the

courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning

of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his

wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like

another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known

the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no

one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea

chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One

morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for

lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas

blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and

caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a

furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the

ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn't get a grip on the air. But he did manage

to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him

pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile

vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on

watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an

annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.


Close Reading: Rules of Notice

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: A Tale For Children

Directions: Perform a close read on these excerpts. Use your close reading strategies to mark the text

that provides evidence in support of an answer to the questions. Then provide discussion notes that

explore what the evidence has to say. Make connections to other places in the story where similar

ideas are expressed, themes and symbols are repeated, or where you see meaningful connections of any

kind (foreshadowing, irony, repeated images, and so on).

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

What is significant about the title? At the beginning, what is the atmosphere like? What does the reader expect, considering the events that take place? Connection Across the Text:

The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the penitents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his

What is the purpose of the extended descriptions of the angel? How does it develop his character? Focus on theme: How does Marquez explore dualities in the story?


wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world.

Connection Across the Text:

It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents' house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in tow and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn't recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn't get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel's reputation when the woman who had been

Compare the roles of the Angel and the Spider Woman in the story. What would you consider the climax of the story (it may not be in this passage)?


changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayo's courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms.

Connection Across the Text:

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn't get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.

How does Marquez explore ambiguity in the story? The Villagers’: The readers’: What would you consider to be the THEME of this story? What do you believe the author wants you to understand about our world? Connection Across the Text:


ROOTS by Frida Kahlo

In this painting, Roots, 1943, Frida stated her faith that all life can join in a single flow. In this painting,

Frida is depicted as her torso opens up like a window and gives birth to a vine. It's her dream of being

able to give birth as a childless woman. Frida's blood circulates the vine and reach beyond the leaves'

veins and feed the parched earth. She is dreaming to be a tree of life with her elbow supporting her

head on a pillow. Also with her Cathloc religion background it's possible she is trying to mimic Christ's

sacrifice by having her blood flowing to the grape vine. This implication of a sacrificial victim is also

reflected in a few of her other paintings.

In May of 2006, this painting was auctioned at Sotheby's in New York and sold for $5,616,000....setting a

new record for the artist. It was sold to an anonymous phone bidder. Rumors within the art world say

that the anonymous buyer was the pop star "Madonna" who owns other Kahlo originals.

Source: http://www.kafka.org/index.php?id=191,209,0,0,1,0

http://www.kafka.org/index.php?id=191,209,0,0,1,0


Lecture on "The Metamorphosis" by Vladimir Nabokov

INTRODUCTION

Of course, no matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of

music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that

remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. "To take upon us the

mystery of things"—what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and

for Cordelia—this is also my suggestion for everyone who takes art

seriously. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat (Gogol's "The

Greatcoat," or more correctly "The Carrick"); another poor fellow is

turned into a beetle (Kafka's "The Metamorphosis)—so what? There is

no rational answer to "so what." We can take the story apart, we can

find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the

other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ

that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor

dismiss. Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition

of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that

beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter,

the world dies with the individual. If Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"

strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then

I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great

readers.

I want to discuss fantasy and reality, and their mutual relationship. If we consider the "Dr. Jekyll

and Mr. Hyde" story as an allegory—the struggle between Good and Evil within every man—

then this allegory is tasteless and childish. To the type of mind that would see an allegory here,

its shadow play would also postulate physical happenings which common sense knows to be

impossible; but actually in the setting of the story, as viewed by a commonsensical mind, nothing

at first sight seems to run counter to general human experience. I want to suggest, however, that

a second look shows that the setting of the story does run counter to general human experience,

and that Utterson and the other men around Jekyll are, in a sense, as fantastic as Mr. Hyde.

Unless we see them in a fantastic light, there is no enchantment. And if the enchanter leaves and

the storyteller and the teacher remain alone together, they make poor company.

The story of Jekyll and Hyde is beautifully constructed, but it is an old one. Its moral is

preposterous since neither good nor evil is actually depicted: on the whole, they are taken for

granted, and the struggle goes on between two empty outlines. The enchantment lies in the art of

Stevenson's fancywork; but I want to suggest that since art and thought, manner and matter, are

inseparable, there must be something of the same kind about the structure of the story, too. Let us

be cautious, however. I still think that there is a flaw in the artistic realization of the story—if we

consider form and content separately—a flaw which is missing in Gogol's "The Carrick" and in

Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." The fantastic side of the setting—Utterson, Enfield, Poole,


Lanyon, and their London—is not of the same quality as the fantastic side of Jekyll's hydization.

There is a crack in the picture, a lack of unity.

"The Carrick," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and "The

Metamorphosis": all three are commonly called fantasies. From

my point of view, any outstanding work of art is a fantasy

insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual.

But when people call the se three stories fantasies, they merely

imply that the stories depart in their subject matter from what is

commonly called reality. Let us therefore examine what reality

is, in order to discover in what manner and to what extent so-

called fantasies depart from so-called reality.

Let us take three types of men walking through the same

landscape. Number One is a city man on a well-deserved vacation. Number Two is a

professional botanist. Number Three is a local farmer. Number One, the city man, is what is

called a realistic, commonsensical, matter-of-fact type: he sees trees as trees and knows from his

map that the road he is following is a nice new road leading to Newton, where there is a nice

eating place recommended to him by a friend in his office. The botanist looks around and sees

his environment in the very exact terms of plant life, precise biological and classified units such

as specific trees and grasses, flowers and ferns, and for him, this is reality; to him the world of

the stolid tourist (who cannot distinguish an oak from an elm) seems a fantastic, vague, dreamy,

never-never world. Finally the world of the local farmer differs from the two others in that his

world is intensely emotional and personal since he has been born and bred there, and knows

every trail and individual tree, and every shadow from every tree across every trail, all in warm

connection with his everyday work, and his childhood, and a thousand small things and patterns

which the other two—the humdrum tourist and the botanical taxonomist—simply cannot know

in the given place at the given time. Our farmer will not know the relation of the surrounding

vegetation to a botanical conception of the world, and the botanist will know nothing of any

importance to him about that barn or that old field or that old house under its cottonwoods, which

are afloat, as it were, in a medium of personal memories for one who was born there.

So here we have three different worlds—three men, ordinary men who have different realities—

and, of course, we could bring in a number of other beings: a blind man with a dog, a hunter with

a dog, a dog with his man, a painter cruising in quest of a sunset, a girl out of gas— In every case

it would be a world completely different from the rest since the most objective words tree, road,

flower, sky, barn, thumb, rain have, in each, totally different subjective connotations. Indeed, this

subjective life is so strong that it makes an empty and broken shell of the so-called objective

existence. The only way back to objective reality is the following one: we can take these several

individual worlds, mix them thoroughly together, scoop up a drop of that mixture, and call it

objective reality. We may taste in it a particle of madness if a lunatic passed through that

locality, or a particle of complete and beautiful nonsense if a man has been looking at a lovely

field and imagining upon it a lovely factory producing buttons or bombs; but on the whole these

mad particles would be diluted in the drop of objective reality that we hold up to the light in our

test tube. Moreover, this objective reality will contain something that transcends optical illusions

and laboratory tests. It will have elements of poetry, of lofty emotion, of energy and endeavor


(and even here the button king may find his rightful place), of pity, pride, passion—and the

craving for a thick steak at the recommended roadside eating place.

So when we say reality, we are really thinking of all this—in one drop—an average sample of a

mixture of a million individual realities. And it is in this sense (of human reality) that I use the

term reality when placing it against a backdrop, such as the worlds of "The Carrick," "Dr. Jekyll

and Mr. Hyde," and "The Metamorphosis," which are specific fantasies.

In The Carrick" and in "The Metamorphosis" there is a central figure endowed with a certain

amount of human pathos among grotesque, heartless characters, figures of fun or figures of

horror, asses parading as zebras, or hybrids between rabbits and rats. In "The Carrick" the human

quality of the central figure is of a different type from Gregor in Kafka's story, but this human

pathetic quality is present in both. In "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" there is no such human pathos,

no throb in the throat of the story, none of that intonation of "'I cannot get out, I cannot get out,'

said the starling" (so heartrending in Sterne's fantasy A Sentimental Journey). True, Stevenson

devotes many pages to the horror of Jekyll's plight, but the thing, after all, is only a superb

Punch-and-Judy show. The beauty of Kafka's and Gogol's private nightmares is that their central

human characters belong to the same private fantastic world as the inhuman characters around

them, but the central one tries to get out of that world, to cast off the mask, to transcend the cloak

or the carapace. But in Stevenson's story there is none of that unity and none of that contrast. The

Uttersons, and Pooles, and Enfields are meant to be commonplace, everyday characters; actually

they are characters derived from Dickens, and thus they constitute phantasms that do not quite

belong to Stevenson's own artistic reality, just as Stevenson's fog comes from a Dickensian

studio to envelop a conventional London. I suggest, in fact, that Jekyll's magic drug is more real

than Utterson's life. The fantastic Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, on the other hand, is supposed to be in

contrast to this conventional London, but it is really the difference between a Gothic medieval

theme and a Dickensian one. It is not the same kind of difference as that between an absurd

world and pathetically absurd Bashmachkin, or between an absurd world and tragically absurd

Gregor.

The Jekyll-and-Hyde theme does not quite form a unity with

its setting because its fantasy is of a different type from the

fantasy of the setting. There is really nothing especially

pathetic or tragic about Jekyll. We enjoy every detail of the

marvelous juggling, of the beautiful trick, but there is no

artistic emotional throb involved, and whether it is Jekyll or

Hyde who gets the upper hand remains of supreme

indifference to the good reader. I am speaking of rather nice

distinctions, and it is difficult to put them in simple form.

When a certain clear-thinking but somewhat superficial

French philosopher asked the profound but obscure German

philosopher Hegel to state his views in a concise form, Hegel

answered him harshly, "These things can be discussed neither

concisely nor in French." We shall ignore the question

whether Hegel was right or not, and still try to put into a

nutshell the difference between the Gogol-Kafka kind of story


and Stevenson's kind.

In Gogol and Kafka the absurd central character belongs to the absurd world around him but,

pathetically and tragically, attempts to struggle out of it into the world of humans—and dies in

despair. In Stevenson the unreal central character belongs to a brand of unreality different from

that of the world around him. He is a Gothic character in a Dickensian setting, and when he

struggles and then dies, his fate possesses only conventional pathos. I do not at all mean that

Stevenson's story is a failure. No, it is a minor masterpiece in its own conventional terms, but it

has only two dimensions, whereas the Gogol-Kafka stories have five or six.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Born in 1883, Franz Kafka came from a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague,

Czechoslovakia. He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such

novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him. He read for law at

the German university in Prague and from 1908 on he worked as a petty clerk, a small employee,

in a very Gogolian office for an insurance company. Hardly any of his now famous works, such

as his novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) were published in his lifetime. His greatest

short story "The Metamorphosis," in German "Die Verwandlung," was written in the fall of 1912

and published in Leipzig in October 1915. In 1917 he coughed blood, and the rest of his life, a

period of seven years, was punctuated by sojourns in Central European sanatoriums. In those last

years of his short life (he died at the age of forty), he had a happy love affair and lived with his

mistress in Berlin, in 1923, not far from me. In the spring of 1924 he went to a sanatorium near

Vienna where he died on 3 June, of tuberculosis of the larynx. He was buried in the Jewish

cemetery in Prague. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn everything he had written, even

published material. Fortunately Brod did not comply with his friend's wish.

Before starting to talk of "The Metamorphosis," I want to dismiss two points of view. I want to

dismiss completely Max Brod's opinion that the category of sainthood, not that of literature, is

the only one that can be applied to the understanding of Kafka's writings. Kafka was first of all

an artist, and although it may be maintained that every artist is a manner of saint (I feel that very

clearly myself), I do not think that any religious implications can be read into Kafka's genius.

The other matter that I want to dismiss is the Freudian point of view. His Freudian biographers,

like Neider in The Frozen Sea (1948), contend, for example, that "The Metamorphosis" has a

basis in Kafka's complex relationship with

his father and his lifelong sense of guilt; they

contend further that in mythical symbolism

children are represented by vermin—which I

doubt—and then go on to say that Kafka uses

the symbol of the bug to represent the son

according to these Freudian postulates. The

bug, they say, aptly characterizes his sense of

worthlessness before his father. I am

interested here in bugs, not in humbugs, and I

reject this nonsense. Kafka himself was

extremely critical of Freudian ideas. He

considered psychoanalysis (I quote) as "a


helpless error," and he regarded Freud's theories as very approximate, very rough pictures, which

did not do justice to details or, what is more, to the essence of the matter. This is another reason

why I should like to dismiss the Freudian approach and concentrate, instead, upon the artistic

moment.

The greatest literary influence upon Kafka was Flaubert's. Flaubert who loathed pretty-pretty

prose would have applauded Kafka's attitude towards his tool. Kafka liked to draw his terms

from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, with no intrusion of

the author's private sentiments; this was exactly what Flaubert's method through which he

achieved a singular poetic effect.

The hero of "The Metamorphosis" is Gregor Samsa (pronounced Zamza), who is the son of

middle-class parents in Prague, Flaubertian philistines, people interested only in the material side

of life and vulgarians in their tastes. Some five years before, old Samsa lost most of his money,

whereupon his son Gregor took a job with one of his father's creditors and became a traveling

salesman in cloth. His father then stopped working altogether, his sister Grete was too young to

work, his mother was ill with asthma; thus young Gregor not only supported the whole family

but also found for them the apartment they are now living in. This apartment, a flat in an

apartment house, in Charlotte Street to be exact, is divided into segments as he will be divided

himself. We are in Prague, central Europe, in the year 1912; servants are cheap so the Samsas

can afford a servant maid, Anna, aged sixteen (one year younger than Grete), and a cook. Gregor

is mostly away traveling, but when the story starts he is spending a night at home between two

business trips, and it is then that the dreadful thing happened. "As Gregor Samsa awoke one

morning from a troubled dream he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.

He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back

and when he lifted his head a little he could see his

dome-like brown belly divided into corrugated

segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly

keep in position and was about to slide off completely.

His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared

to the rest of his bulk, flimmered [flicker + shimmer]

helplessly before his eyes.

"What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream....

"Gregor's eyes turned next to the window—one could hear rain drops beating on the tin of the

windowsill's outer edge and the dull weather made him quite melancholy. What about sleeping a

little longer and forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be done, for he was

accustomed to sleep on his right side and in his present condition he could not turn himself over.

However violently he tried to hurl himself on his right side he always swung back to the supine

position. He tried it at least a hundred times, shutting his eyes* to keep from seeing his wriggly

legs, and only desisted when he began to feel in his side a faint dull ache he had never

experienced before.

"Ach Gott, he thought, what an exhausting job I've picked on! Traveling about day in, day out.

Many more anxieties on the road than in the office, the plague of worrying about train

connections, the bad and irregular meals, casual acquaintances never to be seen again, never to


become intimate friends. The hell with it all! He felt a slight itching on the skin of his belly;

slowly pushed himself on his back nearer the top of the bed so that he could lift his head more

easily; identified the itching place which was covered with small white dots the nature of which

he could not understand and tried to touch it with a leg, but drew the leg back immediately, for

the contact made a cold shiver run through him."

Now what exactly is the "vermin" into which poor Gregor, the seedy commercial traveler, is so

suddenly transformed? It obviously belongs to the branch of "jointed leggers" (Arthropoda), to

which insects, and spiders, and centipedes, and crustaceans belong. If the "numerous little legs"

mentioned in the beginning mean more than six legs, then Gregor would not be an insect from a

zoological point of view. But I suggest that a man awakening on his back and finding he has as

many as six legs vibrating in the air might feel that six was sufficient to be called numerous. We

shall therefore assume that Gregor has six legs, that he is an insect.

*Nabokov’s notes in his annotated copy: “A regular beetle has no eyelids and cannot close its eyes—a beetle with human eyes.” About the passage in general he has the note: “In the original German there is a wonderful flowing rhythm here in this dreamy sequence of sentences. He his half-awake—he realizes his plight without surprise, with a childish acceptance of it, and at the same time he still clings to human memories, human experience. The metamorphosis is not quite complete as yet.”

Next question: what insect? Commentators say cockroach, which of course does not make sense.

A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is

convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only

one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex

belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these

cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles

and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had

wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be

treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.)

Further, he has strong mandibles. He uses these organs to turn the key in a lock while standing

erect on his hind legs, on his third pair of legs (a

strong little pair), and this gives us the length of

his body, which is about three feet long. In the

course of the story he gets gradually accustomed

to using his new appendages—his feet, his

feelers. This brown, convex, dog-sized beetle is

very broad. I should imagine him to look like

this:

In the original German text the old charwoman calls

him Mistkäfer, a "dung beetle." It is obvious that the

good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly.

He is not, technically, a dung beetle. He is merely a

big beetle. (I must add that neither Gregor nor Kafka

saw that beetle any too clearly.)


Let us look closer at the transformation. The change, though shocking and striking, is not quite

so odd as might be assumed at first glance. A commonsensical commentator (Paul L. Landsberg

in The Kafka Problem [1946], ed. Angel Flores) notes that "When we go to bed in unfamiliar

surroundings, we are apt to have a moment of bewilderment upon awakening, a sudden sense of

unreality, and this experience must occur over and over again in the life of a commercial traveler,

a manner of living that renders impossible any sense of continuity." The sense of reality depends

upon continuity, upon duration. After all, awakening as an insect is not much different from

awakening as Napoleon or George Washington. (I knew a man who awoke as the Emperor of

Brazil.) On the other hand, the isolation, and the strangeness, of so-called reality—this is, after

all, something which constantly characterizes the artist, the genius, the discoverer. The Samsa

family around the fantastic insect is nothing else than mediocrity surrounding genius.


TEXT CONNECT: Links to theme and style in The Metamorphosis:

Directions: Find at least FOUR connections between

“Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and The

Metamorphosis.

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl&imgrefurl=http://techbotol.net/angel-wings-on-wrist-by-scandalouscombo-on-deviantart/&h=0&w=0&sz=1&tbnid=7_CHynCtxsrfXM&tbnh=190&tbnw=266&zoom=1&docid=kLZk9aizM-9uHM&ei=luaQUv8GhY-QB-y6gbAP&ved=0CAEQsCU


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