de desconversa em desconversa. onde: o universo de gente que nos rodeia deverá ser multifacetado e colorido para que alguém possa falar de alguém e ter nisso imenso prazer. não conheço os meus vizinhos mas tenho amigos que os conhecem e lhes sabem horas de entrada saída e profissões, estado na vida, amigos que fazem crescer maçãs em quintarolas. agora cortamos todos com o passado e seguimos na ilusão de uma vita nuova. no início de Dictionnaire amoureux de Venise está:
"Cent solitudes profondes conçoivent ensemble
l'image de la ville de Venise - c'est son charme.
Une image pour les hommes de l'avenir."
Nietzsche citado por Heidegger numa carta a Karl Jaspers de 12 de Agosto de 1949
e, mais tarde no papel, começa a entrada Aragon com "Voici une ténébreuse affaire."
e, tão depois, Elsa. (esta de Agnès Varda)
Elsa la Rose
Enviado por Lorelieke. - Descubra mais vídeos criativos.
de repente lembrou-me Irène, que cabe bem neste ninho de deambulações, quer pela frase primeira, quer pela Vita Nuova.
Monday, January 31, 2011
maçãs
Friday, January 28, 2011
que
incrivelmente infinita essa ideia de visitar uma zona depois de anos de bela adormecida.
um pouco como as ghost towns, afinal.
"Naufragar!"
para quem passa, a terra da pedra é uma rua só, ladeada por toda a categoria de edifícios, das mais díspares formas e idades, o caos que odiava tanto. algumas empresas viram para a estrada os seus enormes produtos. os apelidos são familiares, como dentro de paredes se escondem grutas preciosas. nada é o que parece ao estrangeiro, tudo é exactamente o que se vê para quem cresceu a ouvir essa linguagem. ainda em pedras, adiada a visita ao Museu Geológico por clareza indisputável de argumento: o Tron para a semana já não está lá e o museu está. arrumado o diálogo. Tron será.
em breve será perturbado o santuário caseiro. enquanto isso, viaja-se de papel.
"Nous sommes dans le superbe et imposant Teatro Olimpico de Vicence (Palladio), en juin 1998. Cecilia, dans sa belle robe rouge, s'avance devant les musiciens. Elle tape un peu du pied, elle les lance. Elle chante un extrait de Griselda (texte d'Apostolo Zeno, adapté par Goldoni). Je le donne aussi en français, mais il fault l'écouter en italien:
Agitata da due venti
freme l'onda in mar turbato
e'l nocchiero spaventato
già s'aspetta a naufragar.
Dal dovere da l'amore
combattuto questo core
non resiste e par che ceda
e incominci a desperar.
«Agitée par deux vents
l'onde frémit sur la mer troublée
et le marin épouvanté
se voit déjà faire naufrage
ce coeur combattu
par le devoir et par l'amour
ne résiste plues et semble céder
et commence à désespérer.»
Tempête, donc? Désespoir? Ce n'est pas ce qu'on va entendre. Attendez Cecilia sur le mot naufragar. Elle le module avec une joie sauvage, elle est ravie de sombrer, l'amour triomphe du devoir (dolore, amore). NAUFRAGAR!
no Dictionnarire amoureux de Venise de Philippe Sollers.
com sorte, aqui mesmo em Vicenza.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
void-filler
...*+*`)($/&#"/&$"=)$/(""2834899><>>>>..:.:;,;;;,))))[[[[[[[[09908=)(=)(/%$&%$-----------------------------------------------------------
ao capitão Salgari,
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
intertextuality
"Where intertextuality is broadly defined as a synonym for literature conceived as an endless process of recontextualization, rewriting and dissemination - the dialogic interconnectivity among all texts beyong singular acts of artistic intention.", nota de rodapé no artigo Kafka, Nabokov... Sebald, de R.J.A. Kilbourn. (estabelecendo que na minha ilha estariam todos os de Sebald em língua legível).
"Summary of all the arguments for and against my marriage:"
1. Inability to endure life alone, which does not imply inability to live, quite the contrary, it is even improbable that I know how to live with anyone, but I am incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person, the attacks of time and old age, the vague pressure of the desire to write, sleeplessness, the nearness of insanity—I cannot bear all this alone. I naturally add a “perhaps” to this. The connection with F. will give my existence more strength to resist.
2. Everything immediately gives me pause. Every joke in the comic paper, what I remember about Flaubert and Grillparzer, the sight of the nightshirts on my parents' beds, laid out for the night, Max’s marriage. Yesterday my sister said, “All the married people (that we know) are happy, I don't understand it,” this remark too gave me pause, I became afraid again.
3. I must be alone a great deal. What I accomplished was only the result of being alone.
4. I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversations take the importance, the seriousness, the truth of everything I think.
5. The fear of the connection, of passing into the other. Then I'll never be alone again.
6. In the past, especially, the person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write. If through the intermediation of my wife I could be like that in the presence of everyone! But then would it not be at the expense of my writing? Not that, not that!
7. Alone, I could perhaps some day really give up my job. Married, it will never be possible.
- -
Kafka, 21 de Julho de 1913, no Diário. daqui, remarkable site.
Philip Pullman
"Market fundamentalism, this madness that’s infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days.
In the world I know about, the world of books and publishing and bookselling, it used to be the case that a publisher would read a book and like it and publish it. They’d back their judgement on the quality of the book and their feeling about whether the author had more books in him or in her, and sometimes the book would sell lots of copies and sometimes it wouldn’t, but that didn’t much matter because they knew it took three or four books before an author really found his or her voice and got the attention of the public. And there were several successful publishers who knew that some of their authors would never sell a lot of copies, but they kept publishing them because they liked their work. It was a human occupation run by human beings. It was about books, and people were in publishing or bookselling because they believed that books were the expression of the human spirit, vessels of delight or of consolation or enlightenment.
Not any more, because the greedy ghost of market madness has got into the controlling heights of publishing. Publishers are run by money people now, not book people. The greedy ghost whispers into their ears: Why are you publishing that man? He doesn’t sell enough. Stop publishing him. Look at this list of last year’s books: over half of them weren’t bestsellers. This year you must only publish bestsellers. Why are you publishing this woman? She’ll only appeal to a small minority. Minorities are no good to us. We want to double the return we get on each book we publish.
So decisions are made for the wrong reasons. The human joy and pleasure goes out of it; books are published not because they’re good books but because they’re just like the books that are in the bestseller lists now, because the only measure is profit.
The greedy ghost is everywhere. That office block isn’t making enough money: tear it down and put up a block of flats. The flats aren’t making enough money: rip them apart and put up a hotel. The hotel isn’t making enough money: smash it to the ground and put up a multiplex cinema. The cinema isn’t making enough money: demolish it and put up a shopping mall.
The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all he understands. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn’t understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for library cards? Why don’t you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books – you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there – what’s on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.
That’s all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for."
--
Philip Pullman, daqui
"La lugubre gondola", Liszt
o túmulo de Ezra Pound está na ilha dos mortos, San Michele. Wagner morreu no Palazzo Vendramin, dando para o Grand Canal, de ataque cardíaco, depois de se irritar com a mulher Cosima. foi em 13 de Fevereiro de 1883. a cidade preparou-se para grandes cerimónias, frustradas pela vontade da família de levar o corpo o mais rápido possível para Bayreuth. o cortejo fúnebre foi curto, de Vendramin até à estação de comboio. a ideia de gôndolas funerárias, morte na água, cidade da morte, águas escuras, imagens espectrais - faz parte de La Lugubre Gondola, de Liszt. diz-se que a compôs (e re-escreveu) como uma premonição da morte do genro, o que muito convém à literatura. hoje, o Museu Wagner fica neste mesmo Palazzo, de onde saíu a sua lúgubre gôndola, local que partilha com um casino. em Maio de 1911, Thomas Mann chega à cidade com a sua mulher, Katia.
depois
de ver, quero um assim mesmo.
foto e dedos de Débora Figueiredo (tue-tue). a lã é Beiroa e vem da Retrosaria.
o réu
afinal estava pedrado. ainda gostava de saber que percentagem da população anda pedrada on any given day. e depois comparar esse número com outros números.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
pelo mesmo caminho
Pictures from Italy, de Charles Dickens.
"I was awakened after some time (as I thought) by the stopping of
the coach. It was now quite night, and we were at the waterside.
There lay here, a black boat, with a little house or cabin in it of
the same mournful colour. When I had taken my seat in this, the
boat was paddled, by two men, towards a great light, lying in the
distance on the sea.
Ever and again, there was a dismal sigh of wind. It ruffled the
water, and rocked the boat, and sent the dark clouds flying before
the stars. I could not but think how strange it was, to be
floating away at that hour: leaving the land behind, and going on,
towards this light upon the sea. It soon began to burn brighter;
and from being one light became a cluster of tapers, twinkling and
shining out of the water, as the boat approached towards them by a
dreamy kind of track, marked out upon the sea by posts and piles.
We had floated on, five miles or so, over the dark water, when I
heard it rippling in my dream, against some obstruction near at
hand. Looking out attentively, I saw, through the gloom, a
something black and massive--like a shore, but lying close and flat
upon the water, like a raft--which we were gliding past. The chief
of the two rowers said it was a burial-place.
Full of the interest and wonder which a cemetery lying out there,
in the lonely sea, inspired, I turned to gaze upon it as it should
recede in our path, when it was quickly shut out from my view.
Before I knew by what, or how, I found that we were gliding up a
street--a phantom street; the houses rising on both sides, from the
water, and the black boat gliding on beneath their windows. Lights
were shining from some of these casements, plumbing the depth of
the black stream with their reflected rays, but all was profoundly
silent.
So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to hold our
course through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and flowing
with water. Some of the corners where our way branched off, were
so acute and narrow, that it seemed impossible for the long slender
boat to turn them; but the rowers, with a low melodious cry of
warning, sent it skimming on without a pause. Sometimes, the
rowers of another black boat like our own, echoed the cry, and
slackening their speed (as I thought we did ours) would come
flitting past us like a dark shadow. Other boats, of the same
sombre hue, were lying moored, I thought, to painted pillars, near
to dark mysterious doors that opened straight upon the water. Some
of these were empty; in some, the rowers lay asleep; towards one, I
saw some figures coming down a gloomy archway from the interior of
a palace: gaily dressed, and attended by torch-bearers. It was
but a glimpse I had of them; for a bridge, so low and close upon
the boat that it seemed ready to fall down and crush us: one of
the many bridges that perplexed the Dream: blotted them out,
instantly. On we went, floating towards the heart of this strange
place--with water all about us where never water was elsewhere--
clusters of houses, churches, heaps of stately buildings growing
out of it--and, everywhere, the same extraordinary silence.
Presently, we shot across a broad and open stream; and passing, as
I thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps
with which it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and
pillars, of ponderous construction and great strength, but as light
to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or gossamer--and where, for the
first time, I saw people walking--arrived at a flight of steps
leading from the water to a large mansion, where, having passed
through corridors and galleries innumerable, I lay down to rest;
listening to the black boats stealing up and down below the window
on the rippling water, till I fell asleep.
The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream; its
freshness, motion, buoyancy; its sparkles of the sun in water; its
clear blue sky and rustling air; no waking words can tell. But,
from my window, I looked down on boats and barks; on masts, sails,
cordage, flags; on groups of busy sailors, working at the cargoes
of these vessels; on wide quays, strewn with bales, casks,
merchandise of many kinds; on great ships, lying near at hand in
stately indolence; on islands, crowned with gorgeous domes and
turrets: and where golden crosses glittered in the light, atop of
wondrous churches, springing from the sea! Going down upon the
margin of the green sea, rolling on before the door, and filling
all the streets, I came upon a place of such surpassing beauty, and
such grandeur, that all the rest was poor and faded, in comparison
with its absorbing loveliness.
It was a great Piazza, as I thought; anchored, like all the rest,
in the deep ocean."
no capítulo 7.
o observador
"The fond appeal of the observer concerned is all to aspects and appearances—above all to the interesting face of things as it mainly used to be.", podia ter sido dito por Sebald, embora tenda a não ser tão directo, mas foi dito por Henry James na sua introdução às Italian Hours. [livro que talvez coubesse na colecção de Carlos Vaz Marques]
Gore Vidal in Venice
"One has the eeriest sense that they are real, we are the ghosts, from future time", Gore Vidal na parte sete, em que se visita a Villa Barbaro.
Monday, January 24, 2011
livros de tudo
com paladar
Sergi Tort. Librería Know Food from Canal-L televisión on Vimeo.
o site, para ficar à espera: Know Food. (e de certo modo relacionado com o post anterior)
confissão
ler um ou dois parágrafos de Sebald dá-me mais prazer do que quase toda a literatura americana contemporânea junta e o quase foi para deixar alguma margem de manobra.
"Em Kritzendorf as casas nunca mais acabavam. Habitantes, não se viam. Estavam todos a almoçar, entretidos com pratos e talheres. Um cão atirava-se contra um portão de ferro pintado de verde, completamente fora de si, como se tivesse enlouquecido. Era um grande terra-nova preto cuja mansidão congénita tinha sido alterada por maus-tratos, solidão prolongada ou pela claridade cristalina da atmosfera. Na vivenda atrás do gradeamento nada mexia. Não veio ninguém à janela, nenhuma cortina se moveu. O animal tomava balanço uma e outra vez e atacava as grades. Só de vez em quando parava e olhava para nós que tínhamos parado ali, fascinados. Eu deitei na caixa do correio de folha presa ao portão do jardim um xelim pelas almas. Quando seguimos caminho, sentia nas pernas o frio do medo. Ernst parou ainda e voltou-se para o cão preto que entretanto se tinha calado e estava imóvel ao sol do meio-dia. Talvez devêssemos tê-lo deixado sair. Provavelmente, ter-nos-ia acompanhado, bem comportado, e o seu espírito maligno teria partido em busca de uma nova morada em Kritzendorf, teria até assombrado todos os habitantes de tal modo que nunca mais um deles seria capaz de pegar num garfo ou numa colher."
Sebald em Vertigens.Impressões.
diários
na exposição, também online, da Morgan Library: The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
listas catalãs
"Las quince mejores obras en catalán, seleccionadas de entre ochocientos años de literatura", daqui, enquanto aguardo a tradução da Cotovia do Quadern Gris.
Los 50 más votados
1. Poesies, de Ausiàs March (92 votos).
2. Tirant lo Blanc, de Joanot Martorell (92).
3. El quadern gris, de Josep Pla (84).
4. Bearn o la casa de les nines, de Llorenç Villalonga (69).
5. La plaça del Diamant, de Merçè Rodoreda (63).
6. Solitud, de Victor Català (57).
7. Blanquerna, de Ramon Llull (53).
8. Elegies de Bierville, de Carles Riba (48).
9. Incerta glòria, de Joan Sales (46).
10. Les dones i els dies, de Gabriel Ferrater (45).
11. Sol, i de dol, de J. V. Foix (43).
12. Mirall trencat, de Mercè Rodoreda (40).
13. Primera història d'Esther, de Salvador Espriu (40).
14. Memòries, de Josep Maria de Sagarra (40).
15. Canigó, de Jacint Verdaguer (39).
16. Vida privada, de Josep Maria de Sagarra (36). 17. Vuitanta-sis contes, de Quim Monzó (33). 18. Llibre de meravelles, de Ramon Llull (28). 19. Camí de Sirga, de Jesús Moncada (28). 20. L'Atlàntida, de Jacint Verdaguer (26). 21. Nabí, de Josep Carner (25). 22. Glossari, d'Eugeni D'Ors (24). 23. Poesia (1957), de Josep Carner (23). 24. Cròniques de la veritat oculta, de Pere Calders (23). 25. Terra baixa, de Àngel Guimerà (22). 26. La pell de brau, de Salvador Espriu (17). 27. Lo somni, de Bernat Mege (17). 28. Visions i cants, de Joan Maragall (15). 29. Crònica, de Ramon Muntaner (15). 30. L'auca del senyor Esteve, de Santiago Rusiñol (13). 31. La febre de l'or, de Narcís Oller (13). 32. Salvatge cor, de Carles Riba (12). 33. L'irradiador del port i de les gavines, de Joan Salvat-Papasseit (12). 34. Tots els camins duen a Roma, de Gaziel (12). 35. El mar, de Blai Bonet (11). 36. Nosaltres els valencians, de Joan Fuster (10). 37. Cavalls cap a la fosca, de Baltasar Porcel (10). 38. Cementiri de Sinera, de Salvador Espriu (9). 39. Poema de la rosa als llavis, de Joan Salvat-Papasseit (9). 40. Poesia rasa, de Joan Brossa (8). 41. Cap al tard, de J. Alcover (8). 42. Curial e Güelfa. Anónimo (8). 43. Laura a la ciutat dels sants, de Miquel Llor (8). 44. Imitació del foc, de Bartomeu Rosselló-Porcel (8). 45. Ariadna al laberint grotesc, de Salvador Espriu (7). 46. El caminant i el mur, de Salvador Espriu (7). 47. Les irreals omegues, de J. V. Foix (7). 48. El perquè de tot plegat, de Quim Monzó (7). 49. Diccionari per a ociosos, de Joan Fuster (7). 50. Mirall, espai, aparicions, de Pere Gimferrer (7).
esta
manhã, uma entrevista com Manoel de Oliveira em Gente que Conta na TSF. apesar das constantes interrupções do entrevistador, as ideias claras de quem ainda procura realizar-se.
a virgem (Copie Conforme)
uma história recontada nas Metamorfoses de Ovídio, livro quatro, muito por alto: a de Danae, virgem presa na torre de cobre onde, apesar de tudo, Zeus faz entrar a sua chuva dourada gerando Perseus. a rapariga instrumento da profecia, objecto de desejo, vítima das vontades contraditórias que a cercam. ou uma fábula de destino. Tiziano pintou a primeira e a sensualidade da rapariga nua causou grande comoção. o molde foi retirado e voltou a pintar Danae pelo menos cinco vezes.
Tiziano Vecellio, Danae (1545) - Napoli, Museo di Capodimonte
Tiziano Vecellio, Danae (1553 ca) - Madrid, Museo del Prado
Tiziano Vecellio, Danae (1554 ca) - Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum
Tiziano Vecellio, Danae (1554 ca) - San Pietroburgo, Ermitage
na wiki. agora, outros o fazem por ele.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
cena
"Quem penetra no interior desta cidade não sabe o que vai ver a seguir nem quem o vai ver no momento seguinte. Mal alguém entra em cena, logo desaparece por outra saída. Estas breves exibições são quase obscenidades teatrais e ao mesmo tempo têm algo de uma conspiração em que somos implicados sem o sabermos e sem o querermos. Se vamos atrás de alguém por uma rua deserta, basta apressar um pouco o passo e logo a pessoa que seguimos sente a nuca eriçada de medo. E nós também facilmente nos sentimos seguidos. Alternam a confusão e o pavor gélido. Foi portanto com algum alívio que, depois de ter caminhado uma hora entre as casas altas do gueto, avistei de novo o Gran Canale junto a San Marcuola."
W. G. Sebald em "All'Estero" no livro Vertigens.Impressões.
Sebald descreve a sua chegada a Veneza, saído do comboio. mas ao seu lado vai Dirk Bogarde e as imagens poderosas de Visconti. não sei se acompanho Sebald e o eco dos seus passos, enquanto o autor segue Bogarde pelas ruas estreitas de Veneza, a cidade da morte.
esta
para além de muita complicação tem, pelo menos, a opção criança na qual deposito grandes esperanças. opções adicionais necessárias: criança calma / criança que não pára quieta.
Friday, January 21, 2011
aula de literatura americana contemporânea (2)
que diz quase o mesmo de maneira diferente ou user-friendly. o resto das lectures, aqui.
Trends in Contemporary Literature
Ann Warren
In Graham Swift's novel, Waterland, his character, Tom Crick, asks his students, "What do you do when reality is an empty space?" His answer is, "You can tell stories."
This is the dilemma and the solution of most contemporary writers.*
In the early 20th century, when the idea that God is dead was first introduced into the general culture, it caused infinite anguish and a great sense of loss. Writers and artists, and then people in general, began to question the very meaning of life, and finally arrived at the conclusion that, if there is no God, life is inherently meaningless. Objective truth does not exist; all we have to rely on is our own perspective--our own truth--since that is all we can see. Most of the literature written before World War II (most notably T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) dealt with the issue of how people could go on living with these realizations.
By the end of World War II, though, these ideas had been culturally (although not necessarily individually) assimilated. After the atrocities of the war, it wasn't so hard to accept the idea that there was no benevolent God watching over every little sparrow, and life had been thrown away on too large a scale for people to deceive themselves that it had any real meaning. Even in the midst of their joy and relief that the war was over, the predominant attitude was disillusionment: "Okay, so God is dead and life is meaningless. Now what?" In the aftermath of a war whose actions and results were almost incomprehensible, writers found themselves with new dilemmas: the pre-war world was gone, and a whole new world had taken its place. Postwar writers concerned themselves not so much with moaning over the loss of God, but with how to find ways to cope with a world in which the only constant was change. And as life changed ever more and ever more rapidly, literature changed with it.
Contemporary literature is difficult to characterize because it reflects contemporary life and culture, which is rapidly changing and full of contradictions. But there are certain trends which stand out. (These are generalizations, remember; there are exceptions.)
First, contemporary literature is no longer "innocent," but ironic. It reflects our political, social, and personal disillusionment, and no longer dares to believe it can create anything new. It can only cast the old in new forms. In the postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco explains:
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony...But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.
Some writers (although not all), in fact, believe that innovation is no longer possible. There are only so many ideas and combinations of ideas, and they've all been used. All that's left is to imitate, in as fresh a way as possible, what the past has left us. As an example, critic Fredric Jameson points to Star Wars:
...One of the most important cultural experiences of the generations that grew up from the '30s to the '50s was the Saturday afternoon serial of the Buck Rogers type--alien villains, true American heroes, heroines in distress, the death ray or the doomsday box, and the cliffhanger at the end whose miraculous resolution was to be witnessed next Saturday afternoon. Star Wars reinvents this experience...[it] satisfies a deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them again: it is a complex object in which on some first level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artifacts through once again.
An increasing number of novels and plays are set in the past, but their events are seen with contemporary cynicism; notable examples are Margaret Atwood's novel, Alias Grace, and Charles Frazier's novel, Cold Mountain.
A second trend in contemporary literature is a new cynicism about the role of art and literature itself. For previous generations, literature and other arts were meant by their creators to be "anti-Establishment"--that is, to repudiate and subvert established values and traditions. In other words, Art set itself apart from Society, seeing the masses as people who needed to be enlightened, but who were so bound by social and religious tradition and apathy that they probably couldn't be. Many contemporary writers and artists still feel this way, but increasingly, the line between "High" and "Low" culture is hard to distinguish, since the mass media coopts art and images for its own so quickly, and since "serious" writers no longer limit themselves to the drawing rooms of Henry James and Jane Austen, but often set their novels in seedy, B-movie locations and surround their characters with the paraphernalia of the consumer culture. As Kirk Vardenoe and Adam Gopnik, the directors of High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, have written, "In the age of Joe Isuzu, a hardened knowingness about the value-emptied amorality of media culture was, far from being the preserve of a small cadre of vanguard thinkers, the sour, commonplace cynicism of the whole commercial culture."
In a third trend, contemporary literature accepts as given the idea, handed down from the early 20th century, that everything we know is dependent on our perspective. I see things one way, and you see them another. Thus, since there is no truly objective observer, there is no such thing as "Truth." There is only my truth and your truth, and those can change at any moment with the addition of more facts.
But contemporary literature takes this idea a step or two further, calling into question facts themselves, and arguing that "facts" are unreliable, influenced by culture, historical perspective, language games, and other undiscovered or deliberately omitted facts. Thus, contemporary literature argues, two contradictory "truths" can (and often do) exist side by side. (You'll see this clearly in Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, for example.)
Because of this ability to encompass contradictions, contemporary literature, like contemporary society, sometimes seems schizophrenic. Even as it questions and denigrates the use and value of language, it uses language carefully and precisely to illustrate its ideas. Even as it documents fragmentation and disintegration, it draws all the fragments into a cohesive whole. Even as it celebrates human diversity and laments human alienation, it reveals the universality of human character and emotion."
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que gostei de ler: "Another issue addressed by the short story--perhaps even more so than the novel--is the intrusion of mass culture into the characters' private psychological and spiritual lives. The main character of Thom Jones's "A White Horse," for example, is named Ad Magic (he can't remember his real name--only his nickname, which denotes his skill at his job); he smokes Marlboros; he takes Powell's Headache Tablets; he wears a Rolex; he thinks in advertising slogans.", na lecture Short Story.
os poetas
da Beat são para grande parte da minha geração o que eram os delicodoces do romantismo para a geração anterior e alinham em blogues com Michael Bubblé, Allen Poe e Jessica Simpson.
festivais online
dois franceses: My French Film Festival e Festival Point Doc, até ao final do mês.
uma festa, via Le Monde.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
"a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone"
os objectos de Carver.
On Writing
Raymond Carver
1981
Back in the mid-196Os, I found I was having trouble concentrating my attention on long narrative fiction. For a time I experienced difficulty in trying to read it as well as in attempting to write it. My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It’s an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on. It could be that I lost any great ambitions at about the same time, in my late twenties. If I did, I think it was good it happened. Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.
Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else. The
World Acconfing to Garp is, of course, the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O’Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K. Le Guin. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.
Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day without hope and without despair. Someday I’ll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now.
“Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.” Ezra Pound. It is not everything by ANY means, but if a writer has “fundamental accuracy of statement” going for him, he’s at least on the right track.
I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: “. . . and suddenly everything became clear to him.” I find these words filled with wonder and possibility I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that’s implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all - what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief - and anticipation.
I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say “No cheap tricks” to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I’d amend it a little to “No tricks.” Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a
gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe - in absolute and simple amazement.
Some months back, in the New York Times Book Review, John Barth said that ten years ago most of the students in his fiction writing seminar were interested in “formal innovation,” and this no longer seems to be the case. He’s a little worried that writers are going to start writing mom-and-pop novels in the 1980s. He worries that experimentation may be on the way out, along with liberalism. I get a little nervous if I find myself within earshot of somber discussions about “formal innovation” in fiction writing. Too often “experimentation” is a license to be careless, silly, or imitative in the writing. Even worse, a license to try to brutalize or alienate the reader. Too often such writing gives us no news of the world, or else describes a desert landscape and that’s all - a few dunes and lizards here and there, but no people; a place uninhabited by anything recognizably human, a place of interest only to a few scientific specialists.
It should be noted that real experiment in fiction is original, hard-earned and cause for rejoicing. But someone else’s way of looking at things - Barthelme’s, for instance - should not be chased after by other writers. It
won’t work. There is only one Barthelme, and for another writer to try to appropriate Barthelme’s peculiar sensibility or mise en scene under the rubric of innovation is for that writer to mess around with chaos and disaster and, worse, self-deception. The real experimenters have to Make It New, as Pound urged, and in the process have to find things out for themselves. But if writers haven’t taken leave of their senses, they also want to stay in touch with us, they want to carry news from their world to ours.
It’s possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine - the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me. I hate sloppy or haphazard writing whether it flies under the banner of experimentation or else is just clumsily rendered realism. In Isaac Babel's wonderful short story, ''Guy de Maupassant,'' the narrator has this to say about the writing of fiction: ''No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.'' This too ought to go on a three-by-five.
Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places.
I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason - if the words are in any way blurred - the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. The reader’s own artistic sense will simply not be engaged. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing “weak specification.”
I have friends who’ve told me they had to hurry a book because they needed the money, their editor or their wife was leaning on them or leaving them - something, some apology for the writing not being very good. “It
would have been better if I’d taken the time.” I was dumbfounded when I heard a novelist friend say this. I still am, if I think about it, which I don’t. It’s none of my business. But if the writing can’t be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, the satisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labor, is the one thing we can take into the grave. I wanted to say to my friend, for heaven’s sake go do something else. There have to be easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earn a living. Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don’t justify or make excuses. Don’t complain, don’t explain.
In an essay called, simply enough, “Writing Short Stories,” Flannery O’Connor talks about writing as an act of discovery. O’Connor says she most often did not know where she was going when she sat down to work on a short story She says she doubts that many writers know where they are going when they begin something. She uses “Good Country People” as an example of how she put together a short story whose ending she could not even guess at until she was nearly there:
When I started writing that story, I didn’t know there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized it was inevitable.
When I read this some years ago it came as a shock that she, or anyone for that matter, wrote stories in this fashion. I thought this was my uncomfortable secret, and I was a little uneasy with it. For sure I thought this way of working on a short story somehow revealed my own shortcomings. I remember being tremendously heartened by reading what she had to say on the subject.
I once sat down to write what turned out to be a pretty good story, though only the first sentence of the story had offered itself to me when I began it. For several days I’d been going around with this sentence in my
head: “He was running the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang.” I knew a story was there and that it wanted telling. I felt it in my bones, that a story belonged with that beginning, if I could just have the time to write it. I found the time, an entire day - twelve, fifteen hours even - if I wanted to make use of it. I did, and I sat down in the morning and wrote the first sentence, and other sentences promptly began to attach hemselves. I made the story just as I’d make a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I’d been wanting to write.
I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation. There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion, or else, most often, there simply won't be a story. What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it's also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things. [meu sublinhado]
V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is ''something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.'' Notice the ''glimpse'' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -that word again - have even further-ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things; of how things out there really are and how he sees those things - like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the notes.
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daqui, with a different name.
aula de literatura americana contemporânea
parecendo que não, só às vezes, é das coisas inúteis que mais aprecio.
Contemporary American Literature
Selected Critical Vocabulary – Hickman
Postmodernism – the term applied by some commentators since the early 1980s to
the ensemble of cultural features characteristic of Western societies in the aftermath
of artistic Modernism (post-1945). Some general literary features of the period have
been identified as tendencies to parody, pastiche, skepticism, irony, fatalism, the mixing
of “high” and “low” cultural allusions, and an indifference to the redemptive mission of
Art as conceived by the Modernist pioneers. Postmodernism thus favors random play
rather than purposeful action, surface rather than depth (OCEL).
Intertextuality – the sum of relationships between and among writings. This modern
critical term usually covers the range of ways in which one “text” may respond to, allude
to, derive from, mimic, or adapt another (OCEL). A term created by Julia Kristeva [born
Sliven, Bulgaria], who said, “Every text builds itself as a mosaic of quotations, every text
is absorption and transformation of another text” (trans. Jeanine Parisier Plottel, HL).
Metafiction – a work of fiction, a major concern of which is the nature of fiction itself
(HL). A work of fiction that openly draws attention to its own fictional status. Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is the classic English example (OCEL).
Master narrative (also referred to as “dominant ideology”) – the definition decided by
the particular group(s) who hold(s) power. They write the story or “narrative,” which
becomes the “ideology” by which people are forced to live. It is not so much a case any
more of what is true or what is false, for Postmodernism has all but given up the quest for
[this knowledge]; instead, the pathway to knowledge is more a case of uncovering what
the “culturally constructed” or “man-made” narrative is that is being espoused at any
given moment (adapted from LTMN). [see also “the conventional wisdom.”]
Metafiction—Metafiction is a style of writing that uses the act of writing as subject. A
metafiction story might feature the author as a character. A metafiction story might set
as its conflict an attempt to get the story published—the same story that is being read. In
metafiction, the craft, the intricacies, and the sources of writing are put on display.
Metanarrative – stories employed to legitimate the mechanisms of social control. Thus,
for example, when parents tell their children, “We only want to help you avoid our
mistakes,” they are constructing a meta-narrative that justifies the imposition of rules
of conduct they are unwilling to follow themselves. Jean-Francois Lyotard supposed
that the deliberate subversion of prominent meta-narratives is a significant tool of
postmodernism (FOLDOC).
Canon – more recently, the idea of a general literary canon has received attention from
a critical viewpoint, and the process of canon-formation has been interpreted as the work
of one part of society to make its own labors central and to reduce the work of others to
marginal or trivial status outside the canon (HL).
Deconstruction - a critical approach to the reading of literary and philosophical texts that
casts doubt upon the possibility of finding in them a definitive meaning and that traces
instead the multiplication (or “dissemination”) of possible meanings. A deconstructive
reading of a poem, for instance, will conclude not with the discovery of its essential
meaning but with an impass (aporia) at which there are no grounds for choosing between
two radically incompatible interpretations (OCEL).
Uncertainty Principle - Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot
simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a given object to
arbitrary precision. It furthermore precisely quantifies the imprecision. It is one of the
cornerstones of quantum mechanics and was discovered by Werner Heisenberg in 1927
(encyclopedia4u.com).
Many-Worlds Theory - the many-worlds (or multiverse) theory holds that as soon as
a potential exists for any object to be in any state, the universe of that object transmutes
into a series of parallel universes equal to the number of possible states in which that
the object can exist, with each universe containing a unique single possible state of
that object. Furthermore, there is a mechanism for interaction between these universes
that somehow permits all states to be accessible in some way and for all possible states
to be affected in some manner. Stephen Hawking and the late Richard Feynman are
among the scientists who have expressed a preference for the many-worlds theory
(whatis.techtarget.com).
Chaos Theory - In a scientific context, the word chaos has a slightly different meaning
than it does in its general usage as a state of confusion, lacking any order. Chaos, with
reference to chaos theory, refers to an apparent lack of order in a system that nevertheless
obeys particular laws or rules; this understanding of chaos is synonymous with dynamical
instability, a condition discovered by the physicist Henri Poincare in the early 20th
century that refers to an inherent lack of predictability in some physical systems. The two
main components of chaos theory are the ideas that systems - no matter how complex
they may be - rely upon an underlying order, and that very simple or small systems and
events can cause very complex behaviors or events. This latter idea is known as sensitive
dependence on initial conditions, a circumstance discovered by Edward Lorenz in the
early 1960s (whatis.techtarget.com).
Death of the Author – a slogan coined in 1968 by the French critic Roland Barthes in
an iconoclastic essay that also called for the “birth of the reader,” into whose hands the
determination of literary meaning (see intentional fallacy) should pass (OECL).
Post-structuralism – A term loosely applied to an array of critical and intellectual
movements, including deconstruction and radical forms of psychoanalytic, feminist, and
revisionist Marxist thinking, which are deemed to lie “beyond” Structuralism (HL). The
view that the signifier (a written word, for example) is not fixed to a particular “signified”
(a concept), and so all meanings are provisional (OECL). Language is thus a “construct”
of reality dependent upon a particular context for its meaning.
[Key to sources: OCEL = The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th ed.; HL =
A Handbook to Literature (Holman and Harmon), 6th ed.; LTMN = Love: the Master
Narrative (http://www.mrrena.com/master.shtml); FOLDOC = Free On-Line Dictionary
of Philosophy (http://www.swif.uniba.it/lei/foldop/foldoc.cgi?metanarrative).]
Feminist Criticism* – A criticism advocating equal rights for women in a political,
economic, social, psychological, personal, and aesthetic sense. On the thematic level, the
feminist reader should identify with female characters and their concerns. The object is
to provide a critique of phallocentric assumptions and an analysis of patriarchal visions
or ideologies inscribed in a literature that is male-centered and male-dominated. Such
a reader denounces the outrageously phallic visions of writers such as D. H. Lawrence,
Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, refusing to accept the cult of masculine virility and
superiority that reduces woman to a sex object, a second sex, a submissive other. As
Judith Fetterley puts it, "Feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to
interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read
and their relation to what they read. . . [The first act of the feminist critic is] to become a
resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process
of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us." On the thematic level, then,
the reader rejects stereotypes and examines woman as a theme in literary works.
On the ideological level, the reader seeks to learn not to accept the hegemonic [dominant]
perspective of the male and refuses to be co-opted by a gender-biased criticism. Gender
is largely a cultural construct, as are the stereotypes that go along with it: that the male
is active, dominating, and rational, whereas the female is passive, submissive, and
emotional. Gynocritics strive to define a particularly feminine content and to extend
the canon so that it might include works by lesbians, feminists, and women writers in
general. According to Elaine Showalter, gynocriticism is concerned with "woman as the
producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature
by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and
the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female
literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works."
On the deconstructionist level, the aim is to dismantle and subvert the logocentric
assumptions of male discourse -- its valorization of being, meaning, truth, reason,
and logic, its metaphysics of presence. Logocentrism is phallocentric (hence the
neologism "phallogocentrism"); it systematically privileges paternal over maternal
power, the intelligible over the sensible. Patriarchal authority demands unity of
meaning and is obsessed with certainty of origin. The French feminists in particular
construe "woman" as any radical force that subverts the concepts, assumptions,
and structures of traditional male discourse -- the realism, rationality, mastery, and
explanation that undergird it. By contrast, the American and British feminists mainly
engage in empirical and thematic studies of writings by and about women.
*Text adapted from Glossary of Literary Theory by Greig E. Henderson and Christopher
Brown http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/headerindex.html
MAGIC REALISM*: In 1925, Franz Roh first applied the term “magic realism”
(magischer Realismus in German) to a group of neue Sachlichkeit painters in Munich
(Cuddon 531). These painters blended realistic, smoothly painted, sharply defined figures
and objects—but in a surrealistic setting or backdrop, giving them an outlandish, odd, or
even dream-like qualilty. In the 1940s and 1950s, the term migrated to the prose fiction
of various writers including Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, Gabriel Garcia Márquez in
Colombia, and Alejo Carpentier in Cuba. The influence later spread to Günter Grass in
Germany and John Fowles in England (Abrams 135). These postmodern writers mingle
and juxtapose realistic events with fantastic ones, or they experiment with shifts in time
and setting, “labyrinthine narratives and plots” and “arcane erudition” (135), and often
they combine myths and fairy stories with gritty Hemingway-esque detail. This mixture
creates truly dreamlike and bizarre effects in their prose.
An example of magic realism . . . would be Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s short story, “A
Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” a narrative in which a fisherman discovers a
filthy, lice-ridden old man trapped face-down in the muddy shore of the beach, weighed
down by enormous buzzard wings attached to his back. A neighbor identifies the old
man as an angel who had come down to claim the fisherman's sick and feverish child but
who had been knocked out the sky by storm winds during the previous night. Not having
the heart to club the sickly angel to death, the protagonist decides instead to keep the
supernatural being captive in a chicken coop. The very premise of the story reveals much
of the flavor of magic realism.
*Text adapted from http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_G.html
UNRELIABLE NARRATOR – one who gives his or her own understanding of a story,
instead of the explanation and interpretation the author wishes the audience to discern
for themselves. This type of manipulation tends to revise the audience’s opinion of the
conclusion. An author famous for using unreliable narrators is Henry James. James is
said to make himself an inconsistent and distorting “center of consciousness” in his work,
because of his frequent use of deluding or deranged narrators. Examples may be found
in his novella The Turn of the Screw and his short story, “The Aspern Papers.” The Turn
of the Screw is a story told from the perspective of a Governess who may or may not be
delusional. See A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory.
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM – In the reader-response critical approach, the
primary focus falls on the reader and the process of reading rather than on the author or
the text. Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance, analogous
to playing/singing a musical work, enacting a drama, etc. Literature exists only when it
is read; meaning is an event (versus the New Critical concept of the “affective fallacy”).
The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value; there is no one “correct”
meaning. Literary meaning and value are “transactional,” “dialogic,” created by the
interaction of the reader and the text. According to Louise Rosenblatt, a poem is “what
the reader lives through under the guidance of the text.” http://www2.cnr.edu/home/
bmcmanus/readercrit.html.
Uses of the term “postmodern”*
1. after modernism (subsumes, assumes, extends the modern or tendencies already
present in modernism, not necessarily in strict chronological succession)
2. contra modernism (subverting, resisting, opposing, or countering features of
modernism)
3. equivalent to “late capitalism” (post-industrial, consumerist, and multi- and
trans-national capitalism)
4. the historical era following the modern (an historical time-period marker)
5. artistic and stylistic eclecticism (hybridization of forms and genres, mixing
styles of different cultures or time periods, de- and re-contextualizing styles in
architecture, visual arts, literature)
6. “global village” phenomena: globalization of cultures, races, images, capital,
products (“information age” redefinition of nation-state identities, which were
the foundation of the modern era; dissemination of images and information across
national boundaries, a sense of erosion or breakdown of national, linguistic,
ethnic, and cultural identities; a sense of a global mixing of cultures on a scale
unknown to pre-information era societies)
Concerns of Postmodernist Criticism include:
•
Postmodern historians and philosophers question the representation of history and
cultural identities: history as “what ‘really’ happened” (external to representation
or mediation) vs. history as a “narrative of what happened” with a point of view
and cultural/ideological interests.
•
Fredric Jameson: “history is only accessible to us in narrative form.” History
requires representation, mediation, in narrative, a story-form encoded as
historical.
•
Dissolution of the transparency of history and tradition: Can we get to the
(unmediated) referents of history?
•
Multiculturalism, competing views of history and tradition.
•
Shift from universal histories, to local and explicitly contingent histories. History
and identity politics: who can write? for whom? from what standpoint?
*Material adapted from The Po-Mo Page: Postmodern, Postmodernism, and
Postmodernity (http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/technoculture/pomo.html).
[Link appears to be no longer active]
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retirado na íntegra daqui, em formato .doc.
de que gosto: master narrative. que já me aborrece de morte: o cânone (morte ao cânone!)
feminist criticism, segunda pele. reader-response, o início da liberdade e do caos.
storyteller
Storyteller
Leslie Marmon Silko
Everyday the sun came up a little lower on the horizon, moving more slowly until one day she got excited and started calling the jailer. She realized she had been sitting there for many hours, yet the sun had not moved from the center of the sky. The color of the sky had not been good lately; it had been pale blue, almost white, even when there were no clouds. She told herself it wasn't a good sign for the sky to be indistinguishable from the river ice, frozen solid and white against the earth. The tundra rose up behing the river but all the boundaries between the river and hills and sky were lost in the density of the pale ice.
She yelled again, this time some English words which came randomly into her mouth, probably swear words she'd heard from the oil drilling crew last winter. The jailer was an Eskimo, but he would not speak Yupik to her. She had watched people in the other cells; when they spoke to him in Yupik he ignored them until they spoke English.
He came and stared at her. She didn't know if he understood what she was telling him until he glanced behind her at the small high window. He looked at the sun, and turned and walked away. She could hear the buckles on his heavy snowmobile boots jingle as he walked to the front of the building.
It was like the other buildings that white people, the Gussucks, brought with them: BIA and school buildings, portable buildings that arrived sliced in halves, on barges coming up the river. Squares of metal panelling bulged out with the layers of insulation stuffed inside. She had asked once what it was and someone told her it was to keep out the cold. She had not laughed then, but she did now. She walked over to the small double-pane window and she laughed out loud. They thought they could keep out the cold with stringy yellow wadding. Look at the sun. It wasn't moving; it was frozen, caught in the middle of the sky. Look at the sky, solid as the river with ice which had trapped the sun. It had not moved for a long time; in a few more hours it would be weak, and heavy frost would begin to appear on the edges and spread across the face of the sun like a mask. Its light was pale yellow, worn thin by the winter.
She could see people walking down the snow-packed roads, their breath steaming out from their parka hoofs, faces hidden and protected by deep ruffs of furs. There were no cars or snowmobiles that day so she calculated it was fifty below zero, the temperature which silenced their machines. The metal froze; it split and shattered. Oil hardened and moving parts jammed solidly. She had seen it happen to their big yellow machines and the giant drill last winter when they came to drill their test holes. The cold stopped them, and they were helpless against it.
Her village was many miles upriver from this town, but in her mind she could see it clearly. Their house was not near the village houses. It stood alone in the bank upriver from the village. Snow had drifted to the eaves on the roof on the north side, but on the west side, by the door, the path was almost clear. She had nailed scraps of red tin over the logs last summer. She had done it for the bright red color, not for added warmth the way the village people had done. This final winter had been coming down even then; there had been signs of its approach for many years.
II
"She went because she was curious about the big school where the Government sent all the other girls and boys. She had not played much with the village children while she was growing up because they were afraid of the old man, and they ran when her grandmother came. She went because she was tired of being alone with the old woman whose body had been stiffening for as long as the girl could remember. Her knees and knuckles were swollen grotesquely, and the pain had squeezed the brown skin of her face tight against the bones; it left her eyes hard like river stone. The girl asked once, what it was that did this to her body, and the old woman had raised up from sewing a sealskin boot, and stared at her.
"The joints," the old woman said in a low voice, whispering like wind across the rood, "the joints are swollen with anger."
Sometimes she did not answer and only stared at the girl. Each year she spoke less and less, but the old man talked more - all night sometimes, not to anyone but himself; in a soft deliberate voice, he told stories, moving his smooth brown hands above the blankets. He had not fished or hunted with the other men for many years although he was not crippled or sick. He stayed in his bed, smelling like dried fish and urine, telling stories all winter; and when warm weather came, he went to his place on the river bank. He sat with a long willow stick, poking at the smouldering moss he burned against the insects while he continued with the stories.
The trouble was that she had not recognized the warnings in time. She did not see what the Gussuck school would do to her until she walked into the dormitory and realized that the old man had not been lying about the place. She thought she had been trying to scare her as he used to when she was very small and her grandmother was outside cutting up fish. She hadn't believed what he told her about the school because she knew he wanted to keep her there in the log house with him. She knew what he wanted.
The dormitory matron pulled down her underpants and whipped her with a leather belt because she refused to speak English.
"Those backwards village people," the matron said, because she was an Eskimo who had worked for the BIA a long time, "they kept this one until she was too big to learn." The other girls whispered in English. They knew how to work the showers, and they washed and curled their hair at night. They ate Gussuck food. She laid on her bed and imagined what her grandmother might be sewing, and what the old man was eating in his bed. When summer came, they sent her home.
The way her grandmother had hugged her before she left for school had been a warning too, because the old woman had not hugged her or touched her for many years. Not like the old man, whose hands were always hunting, like ravens circling lazily in the sky, ready to touch her. She was not surprised when the priest and the old man met her at the landing strip, to say that the old lady was gone. The priest asked her where she would like to stay. He referred to the old man as her grandfather, but she did not bother to correct him. She had already been thinking about it; if she went with the priest, we would send her away to a school. But the old man was different. She knew he wouldn't send her back to school. She knew he wanted to keep her.
III
He told her one time, that she would get too old for him faster than he got too old for her; but again she had not believed him because sometimes he lied. He had lied about what he would do with her if she came into his bed. But as the years passed, she realized what he said was true. She was restless and strong. She had no patience with the old man who had never changed his slow smooth motions under the blankets.
The old man was in his bed for the winter, he did not leave it except to use the slop bucket in the corner. He was dozing with his mouth open slightly; his lips quivered and sometimes they moved like he was telling a story even while he dreamed. She pulled on the sealskin boots, the mukluks with the bright red flannel linings her grandmother had sewn for her, and she tied the braided red yarn tassels around her ankles over the gray wool pants. She zipped the wolfskin parka. Her grandmother had worn it for many years, but the old man said that before she died, she instructed him to bury her in an old black sweater, and to give the parka to the girl. The wolf pelts were creamy colored and silver, almost white in some places, and when the old lady had walked across the tundra in the winter, she disappeared into the snow.
She walked toward the village, breaking her own path throught the deep snow. A team of sled dogs tied outside a house at the edge of the village leaped against their chains to bark at her. She kept walking, watching the dusky sky for the first evening stars. It was warm and the dogs were alert. When it got cold again, the dogs would lie curled and still, too drowsy from the cold to bark or pull at the chains. She laughed loudly because it made them howl and snarl. Once the old man had seen her tease the dogs and he shook his head. "So that's the kind of woman you are," he said, "in the wintertime the two of us are no different from those dogs. We wait in the cold for someone to bring is a few dry fish."
She laughed out loud again, and kept walking. She was thinking about the Gussuck oil drillers. They were strange, they watched her when she walked near their machines. She wondered what they looked like under their quilted goosedown trousers; she wanted to know how they moved. They would be something different from the old man.
The old man screamed at her. He shook her shoulders so violently that her head bumped against the log wall. "I smelled it!" he yelled, "as soon as I woke up! I'm sure of it now. You can't fool me!" His thin legs were shaking inside the baggy wool trousers; he stumbled over her boots in his bare feet. His toe nails were long and yellow like bird claws; she had seen a gray crane last summer fighting another in the shallow water on the edge of the river. She laughed out loud and pulled her shoulder out of his grip. He stood in front of her. He was breathing hard and shaking; he looked weak. He would probably die next winter.
"I'm warning you," he said, "I'm warning you." He crawled back into his bunk then, and reached under the old soiled feather pillow for a piece of dry fish. He lay back on the pillow, stared at the ceiling and chewed dry strips of salmon. "I don't know what the old woman told you," he said, "but there will be trouble." He looked over to see if she was listening. His face suddenly relaxed into a smile, his dark slanty eyes were lost in wrinkles of brown skin. "I could tell you, but you are too good for warnings now. I can smell what you did all night with the Gussucks.
She did not understand why they came there, because the village was small and so far upriver that even some Eskimos who had been away to school would not come back. They stayed downriver in the town. They said the village was too quiet. They were used to the town where the boarding school was located, with electric lighst and running water. After all those years away at school, they had forgotten how to set nets in the river and where to hunt seals in the fall. Those who left did not say it, but their confidence had been destroyed. When she asked the old man why the Gussucks bothered to come to the village, his narrow eyes got bright with excitement.
"They only come when there is something to steal. The fur animals are too difficult for them to get now, and the seals and fish are hard to find. Now they come for oil deep in the earth. But this is the last time for them." His breathing was wheezy and fast; his hands gestured at the sky. "It is approaching. As it comes, ice will push across the sky." His eyes were open wide and he stared at the low ceiling rafters for hours without blinking. She remembered all this clearly because he began the story that day, the story he told from that day on. It began with a giant bear which he described muscle by muscle, from the curve of the ivory claws to the whorls of hair at the top of the massive skull. And for eight days he did not sleep, but talked continuously of the giant bear whose color was pale blue glacier ice."
IV
The snow was dirty and worn down in a path to the door. On either side of the path, the snow was higher than her head. In front of the door there were jagged yellow stains melted into the snow where men had urinated. She stopped in the entry way and kicked the snow off her boots. The room was dim, a kerosene lantern by the cash register was burning low. The long wooden shelves were jammed with cans of beans and potted meats. On the bottom shelf a jar of mayonnaise was broken open, leaking oily white clots on the floor. There was no one in the room except the yellowish dog sleeping in front of the long glass display case. A reflection made it appear to be lying on the knives and ammunition inside the case. Gussucks kept dogs inside their houses with them; they did not seem to mind the odors which seeped out of the dogs. "They tell us we are dirty for the we eat - raw fish and fermented meat. But we do not live with dogs," the old man once said. She heard voices in the back room, and the sound of bottles set down hard on tables.
They were always confident. The first year they waited for the ice to break up on the river, and then they brought their big yellow machines up river on barges. They planned to drill their test holes during the summer to avoid the freezing. But the imprints and graves of their machines were still there, on the edge of the tundra above the river, where the summer mud had swallowed them before they ever left sight of the river. The village people had gathered to watch the white men, and to laugh as they drove the giant machines, one by one, off the steel ramp into the bogs; as if sheer numbers of vehicles would somehow make the tundra solid. But the old man said they behaved like desperate people, and they would come back again. When the tundra was frozen solid, they returned.
Village women did not even look through the door to the back room. The priest had warned them. The storeman was watching her because he didn't let Eskimos or Indians sit down at the tables in the back room. But she knew he coudn't throw her out if one of his Gussuck customers invited her to sit with him. She walked across the room. They stared at her, but she had the feeling she was walking for someone else, not herself, so their eyes did not matter. The red-haired man pulled out a chair and motioned for her to sit down. She looked back at the storeman while the red-haired man poured her a glass of red sweet wine. She wanted to laugh at the storeman the way she laughed at the dogs, straining against their chains, howling at her.
The red-haired man kept talking to the other Gussucks sitting around the table, but he slid one hand off the top of the table to her thigh. She looked over at the storeman to see if he was still watching her. She laughed out loud at him and the red-haired man stopped talking and turned to her. He asked if she wanted to go. She nodded and stood up.
Someone in the village had been telling him things about her, he said as they walked down the road to his trailer. She understood that much of what he was saying, but the rest she did not hear. The whine of the big generators at the construction camp sucked away the sound of his words. But English was of no concern to her anymore, and neither was anything the Christians in the village might say about her or the old man. She smiled at the effect of the subzero air on the electric lights around the trailers; they did not shine. They left only flat yellow holes in the darkness.
It took him a long time to get ready, even after she had undressed for him. She waited in the bed with the blankets pulled close, watching him. He adjusted the thermostat and lit candles in the room, turning out the electric lights. He searched through a stack of record albums until he found the right one. She was not sure about the last thing he did: he taped something on the wall behind the bed where he could see it while he laid on top of her. He was shrivelled and white from the cold; he pushed against her body for warmth. He guided her hands to his thighs; he was shivering.
She had returned a last time because she wanted to know what it was he stuck on the wall above the bed. After he finished each time, he reached up and pulled it loose, folding it carefully so that she could not see it. But this time she was ready; she waited for his fast breathing and sudden collapse on top of her. She slid out from under him and stood up beside the bed. She looked at the picture while she got dressed. He did not raise his face from the pillow, and she thought she heard teeth rattling together as she left the room.
She heard the old man move when she came in. After the Gussuck's trailer, the log house felt cool. It smelled like dry fish and cured meat. The room was dark except for the blinking yellow flame in the mica window of the oil stove. She squatted in front of the stove and watched the flames for a long time before she walked to the bed where her grandmother had slept. The bed was covered with a mound of rags and fur scraps the old woman had saved. She reached into the mound until she felt something cold and solid wrapped in a wool blanket. She pushed her fingers around it until she felt smooth stone. Long ago, before the Gussucks came, they had burned whale oil in the big stone lamp which made light and heat as well. The old woman had saved everything they would need when the time came.
In the morning, the old man pulled a piece of dry caribou meat from under the blankets and offered it to her. While she was gone, men from the village had brought a bundle of dry meat. She chewed it slowly, thinking about the way they still came from the village to take care of the old man and his stories. But she had a story now, about the red-haired Gussuck. The old man knew what she was thinking, and his smile made his face seem more round than it was.
"Well," he said, "what was it?"
"A woman with a big dog on top of her."
He laughed softly to himself and walked over to the water barrel. He dipped the tin cup into the water.
"It doesn't surprise me," he said.
V
"Grandma," she said, "there was something red in the grass that morning. I remember." She had not asked her parents before. The old woman stopped splitting fish bellies open for the willow drying racks. Her jaw muscles pulled so tightly against her skull, the girl thought the old woman would not be able to speak.
"They bought a tin can full of it from the storeman. Late at night. He told them it was alcohol safe to drink. They traded a rifle for it." The old woman's voice sounded like each word stole strength from her. "It made no difference about the rifle. That year the Gussuck boats had come, firing big guns at the walrus and seals. There was nothing left to hunt after that anyway. So," the old lady said, in a low soft voice the girl had not heard for a long time, "I didn't say anything to them when they left that night."
"Right over there," she said, pointing at the fallen poles, half buried in the river sand and tall grass, "in the summer shelter. The sun was high half the night then. Early in the morning when it was still low, the policeman came around. I told the interpreter to tell him that the storeman had poisoned them." She made outlines in the air in front of her, showing how their bodies laid twisted on the sand; telling the story was like laboring to walk through deep snow; sweat shone in the white hair around her forehead. "I told the priest too, after he came. I told him the storeman lied." She turned away from the girl. She held her mouth even tighter, set solidly, not in sorrow or anger, but against the pain, which was all that remained. "I never believed," she said,"not much anyway. I wasn't surprised when the priest did nothing."
The wind came off the river and folded the tall grass into itself like river waves. She could feel the silence the story left, and she wanted to have the old woman go on.
"I heard the sounds that night, grandma. Sounds like someone was singing. It was light outside. I could see something red on the ground." The old woman did not answer her; she moved to the tub full of fish on the ground beside the work bench. She stabbed her knive into the belly of a whitefish and lifted it onto the bench. "The Gussuck storeman left the village right after that," the old woman said as she pulled the entrails from the fish, "otherwise, I could tell you more." The old woman's voice flowed with the wind blowing off the river; they never spoke of it again.
When the willows got their leaves and the grass grew tall along the river banks and around the sloughs, she walked early in the morning. While the sun was still low in the horizon, she listened to the wind off the river; its sound was like the voice that day long ago. In the distance, she could hear the engines of the machinery the oil drillers had left the winter before, but she did not go near the village or the store. The sun never left the sky and the summer became the same long day, with only the winds to fan the sun into brightness or allow it to slip into twilight.
She sat beside the old man at his place on the river bank. She poked the smoky fire for him, and felt herself growing wide and thin in the sun as if she had been split from belly to throat and strung on the willow pole in preparation for the winter to come. The old man did not speak anymore. When men from the village brought him fresh fish he hid them deep in the river grass where it was cool. After he went inside, she split the fish open and spread them to dry on the willow frame the way the old woman had done. Inside, he dozed and talked to himself. He had talked all winter, softly and incessantly about the giant polar bear stalking a lone man across the Bering Sea ice. After all the months the old man had been telling the story, the bear was within a hundred feet of the man; but the ice fog had closed in on them now and the man could only smell the sharp ammonia odor of the bear, and hear the edge of the snow crust crack under the giant paws.
One night she listened to the old man tell the story all night in his sleep, describing each crystal of ice and the slightly different sounds they made under each paw; first the left and then the right paw, then the hind feet. Her grandmother was there suddenly, a shadow around the stove. She spoke in her low wind voice and the girl was afraid to sit up to hear more clearly. Maybe what she said had been to the old man because he stopped telling the story and began to snore softly the way he had long ago when the old woman had scolded him for telling his stories while others in the house were trying to sleep. But the last words she heard clearly: “It will take a long time, but the story must be told. There must not be any lies.” She pulled the blankets up around her chin, slowly, so that her movements would not be seen. She tought her grandmother was talking about the old man’s bear story; she did not know about the other story then.
She left the old man wheezing and snoring in his bed. She walked through river grass glistening with frost; the bright green summer color was already fading. She watched the sun move across the sky, already lower on the horizon, already moving away from the village. She stopped by the fallen poles of the summer shelter where her parents had died. Frost glittered on the river sand too; in a few more weeks there would be snow. The predawn light would be the color of an old woman. An old woman sky full of snow. There had been something red lying on the ground the morning they died. She looked for it again, pushing aside the grass with her foot. She knelt in the sand and looked under the fallen structure for some trace of it. When she found it, she would know what the old woman had never told her. She squatted down close to the gray poles and leaned her back against them. The wind made her shiver.
The summer rain had washed the mud from between the logs; the sod blocks stacked as high as her belly next to the log walls had lost their square-cut shape and had grown into soft mounds of tundra moss and stiff-bladed grass bending with clusters of seed bristles. She looked at the northwest, in the direction of the Bering Sea. The cold would come down from there to find narrow slits in the mud, rainwater holes in the outer layer of sod which protected the log house. The dark green tundra stretched away flat and continuous. Somewhere the sea and the land met; she knew by their dark green colors there were no boundaries between them. That was how the cold would come: when the boundaries were gone the polar ice would range across the land into the sky. She watched the horizon for a long time. She would stand in that place on the north side of the house and she would keep watch on the northwest horizon, and eventually she would see it come. She would watch for its approach in the stars, and hear it come with the wind. These preparations were unfamiliar, but gradually she would recognize them as she did her own footprints on the snow.
She emptied the slop jar beside his bed twice a day and kept the barrel full of water melted from the river ice. He did not recognize her anymore, and when he spoke to her, he called by her grandmother’s name and talked about people and events from long ago, before he went back to telling the story. The giant bear was creeping across the new snow on its belly, close enough now that the man could hear the rasp of its breathing. On and on in a soft singing voice, the old man caressed the story, repeating the words again and again like gentle strokes.
The sky was gray like a river crane’s egg; its density curved into the thin crust of frost already covering the land. She looked at the bright red color of the tin against the ground and the sky and she told the village men to bring the pieces for the old man and her. To drill the test holes in the tundra, the Gussucks had used hundreds of barrels of fuel. The village people split open the empty barrels that were abandoned on the river bank, and pounded the red tin into flat sheets. The village people were using the strips of tin to mend walls and roofs for winter. But she nailed it on the log walls for its color. When she finished, she walked away with the hammer in her hand, not turning around until she was far away, on the ridge above the river banks, and then she looked back. She felt a chill when she saw how the sky and the land were already losing their boundaries, already becoming lost in each other. But the red tin penetrated the thick white color of earth and sky; it defined the boundaries like a wound revealing the ribs and heart of a great caribou about to bolt and be lost to the hunter forever. That night the wind howled and when she scratched a hole through the heavy the heavy frost on the inside of the window, she could see nothing but the impenetrable white; whether it was blowing snow or snow that had drifted as high as the house, she did not know.
It had come down suddenly, and she stood with her back to the wind looking at the river, its smoky water clotted with ice. The wind had blown the snow over the frozen river, hiding thin blue streaks where fast water ran under ice translucent and fragile as memory. But she could see shadows of boundaries, outlines of paths which were slender branches of solidity reaching out from the earth. She spent days walking on the river, watching the colors of ice that would safely hold her, kicking the heel of her boot into the snow crust, listening for a solid sound. When she could feel the paths throught the soles of her feet, she went to the middle of the river where the fast gray water churned under a thin pane of ice. She looked back. On the river bank in the distance she could see the red thin nailed to the log house, something not swallowed up by the heavy white belly of the sky or caught in the folds of the frozen earth. It was time.
The wolverine fur around the hood of her parka was white with the frost from her breathing. The warmth inside the store melted it, and she felt tiny drops of water on her face. The storeman came in from the back room. She unzipped the parka and stood by the oil stove. She didn’t look at him, but stared instead at the yellowish dog, covered with scabs of matted hair, sleeping in front of the stove. She thought of the Gussuk’s picture, taped on the wall above the bed and she laughed out loud. The sound of her laughter was piercing; the yellow dog jumped to its feet and the hair bristled down its back. The storeman was watching her. She wanted to laugh again because he didn’t know about the ice. He did not know that it was prowling the earth, or that it had already pushed its way into the sky to seize the sun. She sat down in the chair by the stove and shook her long hair loose. He was like a dog tied up all winter, watching while the others got fed. He remembered hwo she had gone with the oil drillers, and his blue eyes moved like flies crawling over her body. He held his thin pale lips like he wanted to spit on her. He hated the people because they had something of value, the old man said, something which the Gussucks could never have. They thought they could take it, suck it out of the earth or cut it from the mountains; but they were fools.
There was a matted hunk of dog hair on the floor by her foot. She thought of the yellow insulation coming unstuffed: their deffense against the freezing going to pieces as it advanced on them. The ice was crouching on the northwest horizon like the old man’s bear. She laughed out loud again. The sun would be down now; it was time.
The first time he spoke to her, she did not hear what she said, so she did not answer or even look up at him. He spoke to her again but his words were only noises coming from his pale mouth, trembling now as his anger began to unravel. He jerked her up and the chair fell over behind her. His arms were shaking and she could feel his hands tense up, pulling the edges of the parka tighter. He raised his fists to hit her, his thin body quivering with rage; but the fist collapsed with the desire he had for the valuable things, which, the old man had rightly said, was the only reason they came. She could hear his heart pounding as he held her close and arched his hips against her, groaning and breahting in spasms. She twisted away from him and ducked under his arms.
She ran with a mitten over her mouth, breathing through the fur to protect her lungs from the freezing air. She could hear him running behind her, his heavy breathing, the occasional sound of metal jingling against metal. But he ran without his parka or mittens, breathing the frozen air; its fire squeezed the lungs against the ribs and it was enough that he could that he could not catch her near his store. On the river bank he realized how far he was from his stove, and the wads of yellow stuffing that held off the cold. But the girl was not able to run very fast through the deep drifts at the edge of the river. The twilight was luminous and he could still see clearly for a long distance; he knew he could catch her so he kept running.
When she neared the middle of the river she looked over her shoulder. He was not following her tracks; he went straight across the ice, running the shortest distance to reach her. He was close then; his face was twisted and scarlet from the exertion and the cold. There was satisfaction in his eyes; he was sure he could outrun her.
She was familiar with the river, down to the instant ice flexed into hairline fractures, and the cracking bone-silver sounds gathered momentum with the opening ice until the churning gray water was set free. She stopped and turned to the sound of the river and the rattle of swirling ice fragments where he fell through. She pulled off a mitten and zipped the parka to her throat. She was conscious then of her own rapid breathing.
She moved slowly, kicking the ice ahead with the heel of her boot, looking for sinews of ice to hold her. She looked ahead and all aroud herself; in the twilight, the dense white sky had merged into the flat snow-covered tundra. In the frantic running she had lost her place on the river. She stood still. The east bank of the river was lost in the sky; the boundaries had been swallowed by the freezing white. But then, in the distance, she saw something red, and suddenly it was as she had remembered it all those years.
She sat on her bed and while she waited, she listened to the old man. The hunter had found a small jagged knoll on the ice. He pulled his beaver fur cap off his head; the fur inside it steamed with his body heat and sweat. He left it upside down on the ice for the great bear to stalk, and he waited downwind on top of the ice knoll; he was holding the jade knife.
She though she could see the end of this story in the way he wheezed out the words; but still he reached into his cache of dry fish and dribbled water into his mouth from the tin cup. All night she listened to him describe each breath the man took, each motion of the bear’s head as it tried to catch the sound of the man’s breathing, and tested the wind for his scent.
The state trooper asked her questions, and the woman who cleaned house for the priest translated them into Yupik. They wanted to know what happened to the storeman, the Gussuck who had been seen running after her down the road onto the river later last evening. He had not come back, and the Gussuck boss in Anchorage was concerned about him. She did not answer for a long time because the old man suddenly sat up in his bed and began to talk excitedly, looking at all of them – the trooper in his dark glasses and the housekeeper in her corduroy parka. He kept saying, “The story! The story! Eh-ya! The great bear! The hunter!”
They asked her again, what happened to the man from the Northern Commercial store. “He lied to them. He told them it was safe to drink. But I will not lie.” She stood up and put on the gray wolfskin parka. “I killed him,” she said, “but I don’t lie.”
The attorney came back again, and the jailer slid open the steel doors and opened the cell to let him in. He motioned for the jailer to stay to translate for him. She laughed when she saw how the jailer would be forced by this Gussuck to speak Yupik to her. She liked the Gussuck attorney for that, and for the thinning hair on his head. He was very tall, and she liked to think about the exposure of his head to the freezing; she wondered if he would feel the ice descending from the sky before the others did. He wanted to know why she told the state trooper she had killed the storeman. Some village children had seen it happen, he said, and it was an accident. “That’s all you have to say to the judge: it was an accident.” He kept repeating it over and over again to her, slowly in a loud but gentle voice: “It was an accident. He was running after you and he fell through the ice. That’s all you have to say in court. That’s all. And they will let you go home. Back to your village.” The jailer translated the words sullenly, staring down at the floor. She shook her head. “I will not change the story, not even to escape this place and go home. I intended that he die. The story must be told as it is.” The attorney exhaled loudly; his eyes looked tired. “Tell her that she could not have killed him that way. He was a white man. He ran after her without a parka or mittens. She could not have planned that.” He paused and turned toward the cell door. “Tell her I will do all I can for her. I will explain to the judge that her mind is confused.” She laughed out loud when the jailer translated what the attorney said. The Gussucks did not understand the story; they could not see the way it must be told, year after year as the old man had done, without lapse or silence.
She looked out the window at the frozen white sky. The sun had finally broken loose from the ice but it moved like a wounded caribou running on strength which only dying animals find, leaping and running on bullet-shattered lungs. Its light was weak and pale; it pushed dimly through the clouds. She turned and face the Gussuck attorney.
“It began a long time ago,” she intoned steadily, “in the summertime. Early in the morning, I remember, something red in the tall river grass...”
The day after the old man died, men from the village came. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, across from the woman the trooper hired to watch her. They came into the room slowly and listened to her. At the foot of her bed they left a king salmon that had been slit open and dried last summer. But she did not pause or hesitate; she went on with the story, and she never stopped, not even when the woman got up to close the door behind the village men.
The old man would not change the story even when he knew the end was approaching. Lies could not stop what was coming. He thrashed around on the bed, pulling the blankets loose, knocking bundles of dried fish and meat on the floor. The hunter had been on the ice for many hours. The freezing winds on the ice knoll had numbed his hands in the mittens, and the cold had exhausted him. He felt a single muscle tremor in his hand that he could not stop, and the jade knife fell; it shattered on the ice, and the blue glacier bear turned slowly to face him.
- - -
Storyteller de Silko, um dos contos do livro do mesmo nome que reúne contos, fotografias, poemas. no final do conto, uma foto da sua avó, de quem herdou a função: a mulher dona da continuidade da ficção, da identidade social e da história do grupo. preciso de o ler, mas tenho muitas reservas em relação à discriminação positiva.
["No wonder that in old tales storytellers are very often women, witches, and prophets. The African griot and griotte are well known for being poet, storyteller, historian, musician, and magician—all at once.", em Woman, Native, Other - Writing Post-Coloniality and Feminism, aqui em .pdf]
