Windchimes

Fish and premises

So, I did get the dishes done, anyway, and made some chicken salad, which is now all gone. Other than that, I can't say I've been very productive à l'extérieur.

I read some stuff I'd written about a Scott Bradfield novel I read last semester (I think it was last semester, sometimes they all blur on me) called The History of Luminous Motion. It's a wicky wierd novel, and I'm thinking about writing a long paper about it from an ecocritical perspective. There are ways in which it lends itself to such a critical lens, I think, including the fact that the characters in this novel are all children (8, 12 & 13 years old) but all speak with PhD vocabularies. How does that have anything to do with ecocriticism? I think I could argue that the ages of the children have historically been connected with innocence (especially the 8 year old) and unspoiled tabula rasa.

Compare that to the planet's current situation. So many of us want and seek out unspoiled (read undeveloped) environments. Evidence: Carrot Island in North Carolina, and many other barrier islands off the Carolina coast. But I specify Carrot Island because environmental protectionist laws keep it full of wild horses. How did the horses get there in the first place? Were they on Carrot Island from time immemorial? No, those horses (and they are breathtaking if you can catch a glimpse of them from a boat motoring close by) descended from horses who swam away from shipwrecks. The ships were bringing domesticated horses from somewhere else. I think it was Europe. Now, wild horses run free on the island and nothing manmade has been built or is being built there. It appears completely wild, completely natural, one might say, completely innocent. But the horses did not get there without human manipulation, and the health of the wild herd is not maintained without human manipulation. Some horses have to be taken from the island from time to time in order to maintain the overall health of the whole herd. Just with the fact that humans must step into the maintenance process belies all the claims for the island's "natural" condition. If it were left up to how things happen without human interference, the horses would eventually overcrowd the island and ... well, I don't know how nature would compensate. We don't get to see how nature would compensate. We're too emotionally invested in making sure the beautiful horses stay what we imagine to be happy and free. We see happiness and freedom when we look at them. They embody those abstractions for us.

What does all that have to do with three kids in a postmodern novel? The three kids with the PhD vocabularies are anything but innocent, but they get away with so much because of that very appearance. No one would believe the paperboy uses his paper route to scope out houses to burgle when that paperboy is 8 years old.

Of course the readers would never know that the narrator of this novel is 8 years old except for the few times it becomes part of the storytelling. His discourse seems entirely unnatural, if always very imaginative. Thing is, the precocious kid with the college vocab and the wide-open imagination ends up trying to murder his father, and that's after he murders his mother's lover as revenge because that lover and his mother tried to domesticate the 8 year old. Oh yeah, it's a wacky story. He doesn't want to be domesticated (even goes to the lengths of describing how a puppy would gaze at him with those trusting eyes while he choked it to death, or killed it in whatever fashion, and you get the feeling he's narrating the moment) because his mother, it seems, has never lived a settled down, domesticated kinda life. They've always just rambled around the country, his mom ripping off men while they sleep after she's had sex with them, everything packed in their car (I think it's a Rambler, would have to look that up) like postmodern nomads in California. I think all postmodern novels take place in California, and L.A. in particular, for some reason.

I don't know if I can find the loose ends and tie them together, but it seems to me I could do an ecocritical reading of some aspect of that novel.

The other "text" I'm considering is the movie "Big Fish." Just got finished watching the last hour or so of it. I'd watched the first part about a week ago. If I decide to use the movie as my big writing project of the senior seminar semester, I'll be watching it many more times. But I felt like I really got some things out of it this afternoon, and wanted to try to catch them by typing. This time viewing the movie, the scene that opens on Edward's face underwater in the bathtub really struck me. He tells Sandra, his wife (played by Jessica Lange) that he was "drying out" by way of explanation when he notices her gazing down into the water at him and smiling. She tells him she thinks they ought to get a "mister" and water him like a fern to keep him from drying out. There is, in this scene, the innuendo or suggestion that Edward Bloom is the big fish about whom he tells his most oft-repeated story, which is one of many, many stories. Just happens that the fish story is the one that annoys Will, his son and main narrator of the film, or at least the frame narrator of the film, the most. But back to how it ties into, or maybe ties into, ecocriticism ... the human character in this case demonstrates a sense of oneness with a nonhuman co-inhabitant of the environment.

Of course, the fact that the fish in the movie evidently stands for the tradition of storytelling and the immortality through fame that can come if one can tell good enough stories in an interesting enough way would complicate any argument about this Edward Bloom character trying to identify with nature.

In another interesting scene, the doctor (played by Robert Guilliaume) tells Will the real story of the day he was born. In other words, the facts instead of the mythic fish story. Turns out to be a pretty run-of-the-mill kind of domestic tale, and the doctor tells Will he would have probably chosen the mythic fish story over the facts, himself, if he had a choice. I don't know how, but it seems that the doctor thinking of himself as not having a choice has to be important. Why does he not have a choice? Because he knows the facts? But Edward knows those facts as well as he does.

Maybe the scene that answers that question is the one where Will goes to find the girl from Spectre, the girl he suspects his father had an affair with. Everytime the film features the town of Spectre, you have to wonder if you're supposed to doubt the factualness or reality of it, simply starting with the name of the place. But Will is armed with an address on a deed and finds the girl, all grown up and giving piano lessons in a dilapidated old house now. By the time we get to see her again, the house and the girl remind us more of the house and the old witch in the beginning of the movie, the witch with the eye in which Edward and his friends see how they will meet their demises when the time comes. But back to the girl. She tells Will the story of what happened between her and Edward. The important bit of information, to Will, would seem to be that, no, Edward never had an affair with this woman. He did, however, repair and remodel her house that was literally slanted to one side, about to slant all the way flat, by all appearances. Edward's gigantesque buddy pushes it to standing straight again. She did, however, make an offer of the affair-having genre. Edward refused, she tells Will, because she (the girl from Specter) is a fairy-tale, because there are only two kinds of women in the world for Edward Bloom, Will's mother and all the rest, and because in contrast to her status of fairy-tale character, Will and his mother are real life, and Edward Bloom's real life is more important to him than his fairy-tales. The message I think I was supposed to get is that real life should never be sacrificed for fairytales or fiction, as enticing and exciting as fairytales and fiction always are.

Still, when it comes down to where everyone gathers to pay final respects, the man is celebrated because of his storytelling, and the storyteller in the movie is compared to the big fish that is often the main character in a classic type of story. I'm still not sure how that to tie that in with nature and the environment, except maybe to focus on the scene in the hospital, just before the funeral scene, where Edward asks Will to tell him the story of what he saw in the witch's eye, and Will who has obviously inherited the ability to fabricate on the basis of a few prompts, tells the story of how he carries his father out of the hospital to the river, where he lowers him into the water and he becomes that legendary catfish. Burton seems to be saying, especially with this scene, that our desire to connect with nature can be connected to our desire for immortality. That seems to run contrary to more traditional beliefs concerning immortality that have to do with leaving the earth behind.

Oh heck, I think I've rambled enough about all this for now. I'm going to make some pancakes.



J.H. Larrew
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