Written by Pere Vila
CONTEXT
Ann Beattie was born in 1947 in Washington D.C. She is
an American novelist and short story writer. She has received an award for Excellence
from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the
PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the short story form.
Beattie reached adulthood during the transformative 1960s,
a period marked by the Vietnam War, the rise of drug culture, and the Civil
Rights Movement in the southern United States. Although Beattie’s stories aren’t
explicitly set in this decade, her characters are undeniably children of the
era, shaped by its cultural upheavals. The legacy of the 1960s is evident in
their struggles with identity and purpose in a rapidly changing world.
By the 1980s, many of Beattie’s contemporaries, often
identified as baby boomers, had established themselves in stable careers and
family lives. Despite their material comfort, they suffer emotional and moral
disconnection in a world that has yet been rather generous to them in material
ways. They now live in suburban and urban settings, and are engaged in
professions like finance, law and writing, having transitioned from the radical
thinkers of their youth to members of the establishment they once opposed.
Amidst the social evolution of the 1970s and 1980s,
minimalism emerged as a significant artistic movement. In art, minimalism
utilized small and simple spaces to focus on the subtleties of space and form.
In literature, minimalism took on a similar approach, emphasizing what was left
unsaid as much as what was articulated. Minimalist writers like Ann Beattie, Bobbie
Ann Mason and Raymond Carver cut down stories to their essential elements,
concentrating on the minutiae of daily life over grandiose moral issues, reinforcing
the notion that minimalism can convey profound truths through simplicity.
JANUS
Beattie’s story Janus, first published in The New
Yorker in 1985 and later included in the collection Where You’ll Find
Me, exemplifies her exploration of contemporary life’s vacuity. Janus
reflects the desires and disillusionments of the middle and upper-middle-classes,
the social groups that Beattie is often considered representing. In this short
story, the author expertly combines narrative technique and symbolism to
explore themes of longing, memory, and the subtle, pervasive influence that
objects can exert on our lives.
Janus, the two-headed ancient Roman divinity, was
considered to be the god of doorways, portals, gates, passageways, bridges, and
entrances and exits of temples. The people of ancient Rome believed that Janus,
with his two heads, witnessed the comings and the goings of people, the past,
and the future; but, in modern times, Janus is associated with hypocrisy and
being “two-faced”. Both these different connotations of the word “Janus” are
present in the Ann Beattie’s short story of the same name.
Janus is the story of a married real estate agent
named Andrea who possesses a decorative bowl to which she is greatly attached.
Andrea seems to have an obsession with the bowl. She leaves it in the houses
that she is engaged to sell and believes that the bowl brings her luck and is
responsible for the sale of the houses. She warns her husband against leaving
his keys in the bowl and is greatly disturbed by the idea that she might lose it.
Andrea believes that she has a ‘relationship’ with the bowl. It is revealed
that the bowl is a gift from a former lover. The lover asked her to leave her
husband and be only his, but she would not do so. He termed her “two faced”.
Andrea wanted a future with her lover, but was unwilling to give up her
husband, despite being unsatisfied with him.
Beattie uses the bowl to draw the readers’ attention
to deeper themes within the narrative. This object is meticulously placed in
various settings, subtly highlighting its significance. The bowl could be
interpreted as a reflection of Andrea’s own life: smooth and seemingly perfect,
yet fundamentally hollow. It may also signify the materialistic and emotionally
barren world experienced by Andrea’s generation as described in the phrase “the
world cut in half, deep and smoothly empty”. Furthermore, the bowl is a
poignant reminder of Andrea’s former lover, who remains a distant memory, a
“vanishing point on the horizon”. This object becomes the remaining relic of
her lost relationship, symbolizing her attachment to the past.
The concave shape of the bowl is symbolic of the
emptiness and lack of meaning in Andrea’s and her husband’s life. Though never
explicitly stated, the absence of children becomes a silent witness to the lack
of vitality in her relationship. Andrea consciously chooses not to have
children, what is expressed in her obsessive attention and affection for an
inanimate object.
As suggested by the tittle, Janus is a deeply
ambiguous work of short fiction, open to multiple interpretations, but on the whole,
it is a call to abandon banal life and embrace passion.
QUESTIONS
-What do you know about Bonnard and Biedermeier?
-Can you describe an object of yours and tell us its sentimental worth?
-The narrator wants her bowl always empty. What can be the meaning of this mania?
-"He had no more interest in the bowl than she had in his new Leica." Does that mean there were no love between them? What other hints can tell us that a couple are not anymore in love?
-What is a secret? Can a secret be constant / forever?
-"With a lover, there is no exact scenario of how matters would come to close." What things in our lives have a predictable end and what things don't?
-What kind of professions demand to be double-faced? To be double faced is the same as hypocrisy?
-What can be the meaning of the last sentence, "the eye moved toward one small flash of blue, a vanishing point on the horizon"?
VOCABULARY
mutt, batting, still life, flecks, lean, bids, dovetailed
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