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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 3
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 4
“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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 5
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 6
“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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 7
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.”
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 8
“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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 9
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 10
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 11
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 12
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 13
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 14
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 15
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 16
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 17
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 18
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?”
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 19
“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!
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 20
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 21
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:
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 22
“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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 23
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 24
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 25
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,
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 26
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,
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 27
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;
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 28
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,
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 29
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 30
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 31
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 33
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 34
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 35
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 36
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,
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 37
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 38
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 39
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 40
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 41
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 42
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 43
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 44
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 45
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 46
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?
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 47
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)?
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 48
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:
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 49
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 50
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,
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 51
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 52
(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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 53
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 54
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
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 55
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.)
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 56
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.
Unit 2 Readings Mr. Donn English II Pre-AP and GT 57
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.