Hills Like White Elephants

Hills Like White Elephants is interesting in that it is told almost entirely through dialogue, within which the topic of conversation is never actually named. Since our discussion last week, I have been much more consciously aware of the presence of authors in their writing, particularly fiction writing. In this story, I sense Hemingway's presence very strongly in the way that he manipulates the our perceptions of the events. The title in particular is a beautiful and striking line, a simile that I expected to be revealed in Hemingway's narration of the setting. In fact, it is said by the woman, and turns out to be of little importance, on the surface.

"The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.

‘I’ve never seen one,’ the man drank his beer.

‘No, you wouldn’t have.’"

Coming after Hemingway's characteristically minimal description of the hills, the girl's observation seems like a comment on Hemingway's narration. In fact, "hills like white elephants" is obviously Hemingway's own simile that he situated in the mouth of this girl, almost it seems so that he did not have to accept responsibility for the self-conscious writerliness of the line. The girl is entirely self-conscious when she says this, as is revealed later in her indignation at the man's response, "‘All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?’

‘That was bright.’"

In the situation of this line, we sense Hemingway's presence, as well as in his very minimal descriptions that are just enough to set the scene. Hemingway's simple, low style, feels very mannered and unnatural, but allows the subtlety of the subject matter to come through.

By telling the story mainly through dialogue, Hemingway sets up a dynamic in which the reader is voyeur to the conversation between the couple. Giving us just enough evocative detail to set the scene, Hemingway places us in the middle of this overheard conversation and refuses to interpret it for us. This story is entirely about what is not said, both between the couple in the world of the story, and stylistically in the writing of it.

Rewriting of Hemingway in high style:

The girl narrowed her eyes against the haze of heat toward the hills, starkly white like starched sheets spread over tall humps of dry brown country.

"They look like white elephants," she said.

"I've never seen one," the man said swallowing his words with the cold and salty beer.

"No, you wouldn't have," she mused, to the battered edge of counter where her elbow trailed. She had never seen a white elephant either, but imagined they would be as anomalous in this landscape as a sensitive word from her manfriend. The licorice sweetness choked its way through her languid limbs, falling to the pit of her stomach, where it sucked at her until the air was gone.

Highs & Lows with Sister Mary Ignatius' Explanation

In Chapter 8, Lanham is trying to make a distinction that he admits is difficult to describe. While the distinction between high, middle and low styles seems quite subjective, it is more the type of thing that a good critique recognizes when she reads it. As we have discussed profusely in the course of the class so far, good stylists often ignore or purposefully break 'the rules,' and Lanham's description of high style is particularly difficult to nail down because as he explains that the qualities that are often present in the high style do not necessarily combine to form the high style. What I find particularly interesting is how Lanham analyzes the importance of the social situation or context in which the piece fits. This is especially apparent in his description of Churcill's wartime radio addresses, which brought a public speech into private livingrooms, "The front-stage/back-stage antithesis was potentially healed, the whole range spanned, before Churchill began to speak...As we now know, over and over again he made the most of it, brought all Britain into a sublime unity where public and private worlds fused" (Lanham, 169). Lanham also disscusses the problem Hennesy has in reworking the carefully neutral historical tone of Marx in the Communist Manifesto into an angry feminist revolutionary cry, also a problem of situation.

Of the writers we have read so far, Baldwin would certainly be an example of high style. As we discussed, Baldwin's self-consciously scholarly and objective tone, with passive constructions and 'to be' verbs, is what makes his essay persuasive and his gross generalizations credible. While on the surface, Baldwin appears to be simply reporting the facts in a neutral, historical tone, Baldwin's subject matter is actually quite sublime, going to the heart of the experience of rage, fear and identity. As I analyzed in my post on Baldwin, his use of chiasmus throughout the essay is quite self-conscious and develops as a persuasive structure, as well as his metaphors, figurative language, and religious diction, that allow the essay to operate on multiple levels and depict a highly complicated and embedded situation. Baldwin also dissolves the antithetical framework of private/public by extending a personal experience into a universal experience for a group of people and reactionary experiences for other groups of people in different cultures.

For me, this is the most useful distinction that Lanham makes between high and low style:
"the style that has been discussed, analyzed, marveled at, has been the high style...Ornamented, emotional, spotlighted, it was the style you could see. And talk about. The transparent, neutral, unemotional style could be applauded but there wasn't much to say about it. Ideally it wasn't there at all. You looked right through it to the facts beyond" (Lanham, 165).
With Nabokov, the more you look, the more you find. You could read Nabokov for the rest of your life, and continue to discover new complexities, new twists of meaning. This is high style. As Lanham points out, low style can be quite self-conscious, quite literary, and quite entertaining, but it really only operates at one level, although it can incorporate multiple cultural reference points, as his example of car journalism does. It is the middle style that seems to be the most disappointing. Neither entertaining nor sublime, it can only be read as failing to attain the higher level to which it aspires. If it seems to aspire to nothing, it is drier than an elbow in winter.

Faulkner--Dry September

The horrifying subject matter of this short story is conveyed in Southern gothic high drama through a suspensive structure. The third sentence is fantastic for revealing the structure which is to inform the action: "Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened." The only two people in the story who should rightly feel "attacked, insulted, frightened" are Will Mayes and Minnie Cooper, if in fact she was attacked. However, the sentence begins by putting the emphasis on the men in the barber shop, who feel threatened by what they perceive as a racial threat against their women. We are never really told how Minnie Cooper feels. We can only infer through her bizarre behavior, trembling in public and laughing hysterically. This sentence is an unusual example of sentence pattern 3, compound sentence with explanatory statement, but because a series of mostly prepositional phrases interrupts the subject and verb, which should explain the three inflamatory feelings layed out at the beginning, the sentence explains more in the following clause than appears at the surface. By punctuating the sentence with a colon, Faulkner draws attention to the subsequent clause that seems to explain little, except to conjure the room in which the men heatedly ponder their action. In fact, the details about the stale and stationary air and the odors of the men serve to emphasize the gossip that is swirling, until the sentence comes to the disturbing conclusion that none of the men actually know the details of the supposed crime that they all are prepared to carry out justice in the name of. Throughout the story, air, speech and breath are referred to as "hissing" informing the gothic tone of the story and establishing the sinister nature of the gossip.

Leaving the reader perilously holding on to find out what is going to happen to Will Mayes, and without any power to stop the men, Faulkner jumps to describe Minnie Cooper in section II. Faulkner does an excellent job of characterizing Minnie Cooper, as he does in this breathless cumulative sentence, "When she was young she had had a slender, nervous body and a sort of hard vivacity which had enabled her for a time to ride upon the crest of the town's social life as exemplified by the high school party and church social period of her contemporaries while still children enough to be unclassconscious." Throughout the story, Faulkner makes up illuminating composite adjective such as unclassconscious, the mouthful of the word having a sort of illustrative onomatopoeic quality.

The beginning of the "white folks" violent confrontation with Will Mayes has the gothic suspense of a horror movie, simultaneously captivitating the reader and making her loathe to read on. "Below the cast the wan hemorrhage of the moon increased. It heaved above the ridge, silvering the air, the dust, so that they seemed to breathe, live, in a bowl of molten lead. There was no sound of nightbird nor insect, no sound save their breathing and a faint ticking of contracting metal about the cars." This is the moment in the horror movie when everything goes completely silent and you know something bad is about to happen; in fact, suddenly suspicious noises are heard creeping up the road! How predictable, and yet utterly new. Faulkner plays with the reader's sympathies. We want to be afraid for Will Mayes, but the narrative point of view tells us we should be afraid for the men who have ostensibly come to kill him. Faulkner takes the reader on a journey closer and closer to the awful conclusion, and then refuses to show it to us. The action does not play out as we expect; Will Mayes escapes, but we do not know for how long.

At the moment when the barber and Will Mayes both jump out of the car, Faulker unites the two of them in plural pronouns:

"The barber began to tug furiously at the door. "Look out, there!" the soldier said, but the barber had already kicked the door open and swung onto the running board. The soldier leaned across the Negro and grasped at him, but he had already jumped. The car went on without checking speed."
So, evidently, "the Negro" jumped out of the car after the barber. Straightforward enough.
"The impetus hurled him crashing through dust-sheathed weeds, into the ditch. Dust puffed about him, and in a thin, vicious crackling of sapless stems he lay choking and retching until the second car passed and died away. Then he rose and limped on until he reached the highroad and turned toward town, brushing at his clothes with his hands. The moon was higher, riding high and clear of the dust at last, and after a while the town began to glare beneath the dust. He went on, limping. Presently he heard cars and the glow of them grew in the dust behind him and he left the road and crouched again in the weeds until they passed. McLendon's car came last now. There were four people in it and Butch was not on the running board."
In this paragraph that follows, we take the unnamed "him" to be Will Mayes, since he jumped out of the car in the previous sentence. We wonder what happened to the barber. Then, Faulkner switches to "them." While the them is obviously standing for the two cars, it can also figuratively stand for both Will Mayes and the barber, since we have been lead to believe that they both jumped out of the car and don't know what happened to them.
"They went on; the dust swallowed them; the glare and the sound died away. The dust of them hung for a while, but soon the eternal dust absorbed it again. The barber climbed back onto the road and limped on toward town."
Finally, we find out that it is only the barber who continues on his way. All this elaborate suspensiveness leads us to the question, WHAT HAPPENED TO WILL MAYES? which is never directly answered.

Faulkner interrupts the naration again, leaving the reader to ponder what happened to Will Mayes and to the barber who pathetically stood up for him in section III, and moves on to narrate Miss Cooper's apparently traumatic trip to the movies in section IV. During Miss Cooper's trip in to town, we learn the only further bits of information to help answer the question through the nonchalant gossip of the men, "What did they do with the nigger? Did they--?" "Sure. He's all right." "All right, is he?" "Sure. He went on a little trip." While this statement could mean that Will Mayes fled, we are lead to infer that the man is referring to the sort of untimely trip that racist Southerners of this period would refer to in that way. We never know for sure. Faulkner's gothic descriptions contribute to the construction of the story as a sort of extended suspensive sentence.

The Chiasmic Baldwin

In discussing such a painful topic as race in America, particularly at the time he was writing, Baldwin carefully manages "Stranger in the Village" to draw attention to its logic and objectivity, even as he relates personal and difficult experiences. In one of the highest points of tension during the essay, Baldwin states, "There are, no doubt, as many ways of coping with the resulting complex of tensions as there are black men in the world, but no black man can hope ever to be entirely liberated from this internal warfare--rage, dissembling, and contempt having inevitably accompanied his first realization of the power of white men" (162). Yet the essay functions as more than simply a 'way of coping with the resulting complex of tensions' for Baldwin; Baldwin's ability to control his rage makes it all the more potent, and yet accessible and informative to a large audience. It is clear throughout the essay that Baldwin is not speaking only to black American men; he is also speaking to white men--"by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is"--as well as to Europeans (163). Baldwin's purpose is to tell his readers what a black man understands about white people through his experience that white people are too busy pretending to be innocent to know about themselves, as well as what an American knows about Europeans through the experience of their cultural inheritance. That the essay is rife with chiasmus is logical then, since Baldwin is illuminating the way structures have been transmuted from one group and imposed on another.

Some particularly potent examples of chiasmus from the essay:
"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them" (161).
"The villagers wonder less about the texture of my hair than they did then, and wonder rather more about me" (163).
"Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men" (166).
"At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself" (166-67).
"In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man's motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity" (167).
"The cathedral of Chartres, I have said, says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them" (167).
"But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth" (167).
These are instances of isolated chiasmus.

The essay also employs several brilliant paragraphs of extended chiasmus:
I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence. The astonishment with which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into my African village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced their hearts. But the astonishment with which they greet me today can only poison mine. (161)
In this selection, Baldwin compares the different baggage associated with a black stranger in a white village, vs. a white stranger in a black village, as a way of describing, eventually, his point about race relations in America, which is that black Americans can no longer be strangers in America. White men can never regain the "European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist" (167-8). Baldwin's very presence in the village is a reversal of the structure in which white men enter a village of brown men to colonize it, a figurative chiasmus which serves to heighten the altered power dynamic borne by the historical implications of this alternative encounter. While the scene he is relating is, figuratively speaking, a chiasmus, Baldwin also uses chiasmus to link his sentences together to give his essay an objective and logical flow. I have highlighted the chiasmus operating across sentences, and within sentences with many levels, in bold. In the cumulative sentence in particular, the alliteration of hard c-words is reflected across the levels of the sentences, their slight alteration serving to magnify the differences between the two experiences and make the conclusion of the sentence all the more affective when it breaks the pattern established by the previous clauses.

Plummeting into the gap

Plath utilizes several interesting rhetorical strategies to imply the impending nervous breakdown and increasing suicidal impulses of her main character, Esther. Throughout the chapter, Plath implies that Esther is at war with herself by deliberately describing her in contradictory ways. The first sentence, "The face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian" is jarring, if only because it seems dated and strikingly un-PC (Plath, 112). But it is referenced later in the passage when Esther blurts out absentmindedly, "'Pollyanna Cowgirl.'" Esther describes herself both as a "sick Indian" and as a cowgirl who is so generous as to be taken advantage of by her 'friend.' Plath calls to mind the opposition of cowboy/Indian, and the qualification of the Indian as sick and the Cowgirl as Pollyanna calls to mind an inward sickness paired with a social dysfunction, generosity without agency.

Throughout the chapter, Plath emphasizes Esther's alienation from herself and others by disembodying her actions. It is not Esther that looked like a sick Indian, but her face. The phone, an instrument of social interaction, is described, "The black instrument on the hall table trilled its hysterical note over and over, like a nervous bird" (Plath, 117). Realizing that she should call Jody back and tell her that she would come to stay with her friends in Harvard Square, Esther seems unable to make the effort to pick up the phone and arrange for something positive to look forward to. "My hand advanced a few inches, then retreated and fell limp. I forced it toward the receiver again, but again it stopped short, as if it had collided with a pane of glass" (Plath, 118). Esther seems to be only capable of removing all future opportunities that might cause her to be happy, but even this she does as if not quite in control of herself. "I dialed the Admissions Office and listened to the zombie voice leave a message that Miss Esther Greenwood was canceling all arrangements to come to summer school" (Plath, 119). Esther is described as "zombie voiced" throughout the chapter, as if something has taken over her body and she is no longer in control of her life, an apt metaphor for depression. By including the excerpt from the beginnings of Esther's novel, Plath demonstrates one of the reasons for Esther's unhappiness: her inability to get outside of herself. Esther is only able to write about a fictional version of herself, and this fictionalizing of herself removes her more fully from embodying who she is and claiming agency in her illness.

The chapter is filled with foreshadowing of Esther's attempted suicide, beginning with the blouse she has traded her bathrobe to a friend for, with sleeves that are "floppy as the wings of a new angel." A few sentences later, Esther sees "A wan reflection of myself, white wings, brown ponytail and all, ghosted over the landscape" (Plath, 112). Esther is already dead to herself, as unrecognizable as the landscape outside the train window. When Esther gets off the train to meet her mother, "A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death" (Plath, 113). Esther's descent into depression begins with her rejection from the writing course she had applied to take during the summer. All through June the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of the summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, and a body in a white blouse and green skirt plummet into the gap." (Plath, 114). Without this comfortable plan to salvage her deteriorating life, Esther seems to decide to give up, watching herself fall into the unknown, as if in a dream. Later, "I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone" (Plath, 123). Esther cannot sleep, and yet dreams of death, of being crushed by sleep.

Esther is also alienated from her family and neighbors. Despite her interest in Dodo Conway, Esther sees her and thinks, "Her head tilted happily back, like a sparrow egg perched on a duck egg" (Plath, 116). This bizarre description serves to completely dehumanize Dodo Conway, and instead characterizes her as a fertility machine. As her mother lies sleeping next to her Esther, annoyed by her snoring, thinks "the only way to stop it would be to take the column of skin and sinew from which it rose and twist it to silence between my hands" (Plath, 123). The sounds of breathing irritate Esther; her violent relationship with herself extends now to others.

There is a great sense throughout the chapter of the passage of time. Through Plath's writing, the reader is able to experience the expansive oppression of free time and Esther's loneliness. This is partly through the use of isocolon, creating a buildup of small details. Then the buzz of the orange squeezer sounded from downstairs, and the smell of coffee and bacon filtered under my door. Then the sink water ran from the tap and dishes clinked as my mother dried them and put them back in the cupboard. Then the front door opened and shut. Then the car door opened and shut, and the motor went broom-broom and, edging off with a crunch of gravel, faded into the distance" (Plath, 115). Beginning the sentences with 'then' weights them at the front and deflates the action, reflecting the deflating of Esther's life. This is enhanced by the repetition of sounds when the sentences include 'then' and 'them' or the two sentences which use 'opened and shut'. There is a sense throughout the chapter that time is simultaneously opening and closing on Esther.

Belated Notes on Lanham Chs 1-3

In his introduction, The Domain of Style, Lanham discusses and then dismantles the predominating theory of prose writing which he calls, 'C-B-S' theory: clarity, brevity, and sincerity. We are taught that prose should be unnoticeable, simply a vehicle for conveying meaning clearly, without any remarkable style. After looking into the literal implications of the 'C-B-S' theory, however, it "seems to contradict all that we say is good in literature and so runs an enormous rift between 'literature' on the one hand and 'ordinary prose' on the other" (Lanham, 3). This is a very provocative statement: Must literature necessarily break the rules that attempt to enforce the clear transferral of information to readers? Lanham then opposes poetry and prose, as the 'C-B-S' theory implies, "Prose must be entirely transparent, poetry entirely opaque. Prose must be minimally self-conscious, poetry the reverse" (Lanham, 3). Clearly, there must be a happy medium, a sort of continuum of style between poetry and prose, high literature and mundane statements of fact, as Lanham argues. The study of rhetoric is the examination of this continuum.

Some terms:
Isocolon: arranging phrases and clauses in units of equal length and structure. (15)
Doublet: sentence with paired structure.
Tricolon: sentence with three items of equal length and structure.
Tetracolon: sentence with four items of equal length and structure.
*Tricolon and tetracolon could be written as isocolon by opening up the sentence into multiple sentences, each with one item of equal length and structure.
Parataxis: sentences that weigh phrases, clauses and/or subjects equally. "Syntactic democracy." Leaves ranking, ordering, or relating of the parts up to the reader. (29)
Hypotaxis: sentences that rank the components, making clear what derives from what. Ranking is done for the reader. Hypotaxis usually has pronounced syntactic patterns (29)
Asyndetic: style that uses few connectors. Narrator or writer's voice can seem detached. (33)
Polysyndetic: style that uses many connectors, within and across sentences. Asyndetic styles are often paratactic and use anaphora. (33-35)
Lanham mentions that hypotaxis and polysyndeton often go together, while parataxis can be both asyndetic and polysyndetic.
Epanaphora: similar ending pattern. ex. "The afternoon is rawest and the dense fog is densest and the muddy streets are muddiest" (36)
Homoioteleuton: similar word endings. ex. "rawest, densest, muddiest" (36)
Protasis/apodosis: if/then quality. Protactic clauses are uncertain and open-ended; apodosis provides resolution. (40)

Periodic style

• often hypotactic
• construction formed from syntax and sense
• suspension of syntax and sense until end; climax comes at end
  
• period can be one sentence or stretch over several

Lamming lists different styles that developed in reaction to the dramatic style of period as an effort to capture a natural human thought or expression, including running style, pointed style, plain style.
Zeugma: A sentence in which one verb or subject serves for a series of others.
Ellipsis: omission of subsequent verbs/nouns where it is assumed in the following constructions. Creates interaction with reader.