A BIT OF BIOGRAPHY
According to the Wikipedia, Adam Mars-Jones is a British novelist and film critic; he was born in 1954, so now is 70; his father was a judge and his mother a lawyer, people belonging to the high establishment (so, being gay, we have to suppose he didn’t have an easy life when he was young).
He studied English in Cambridge.
He had a polemic with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan about feminism, the false feminism and the patriarchal model. In his essay Venus Envy about this topic, he used anthropological concepts, so this science isn’t something unknown to him.
The most celebrated books of his are a series of novels (Pilcrow, Cedilla, Caret –all punctuation symbols) around a character, John Cromer, a gay teenager with mobility issues who describes the world around him; there isn’t much plot in the story, only little stories related to the hero, or witnessed by him. The author defines this series as semi-infinite, because he can go on with them without ending.
He has also short stories collections, as Lantern Lecture, and writes regularly in newspapers, as The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement.
SUMMARY
This is an atypical short story, because it’s written like an essay, not like a tale with characters and a plot. There’s an anecdote (a deceived wife drugs her adulterous husband and, while he’s asleep, she sticks with superglue his right hand round his penis), but the most part of the text is a pseudo-anthropological analysis of the anecdote that tries to discover the deep meaning of the wife’s doing and its relation with the human behaviour or the collective psychology. For this kind of analysis, the author uses the structuralist technique and concepts.
The structuralism is a method of linguistic analysis born in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, and basically says that you cannot discover the true essence/value/meaning/…whatever of an element without keeping in mind its relation with the other elements in the set. According to this idea, there’s no possible definition of “yellow” without keeping in mind the rest of the colours. The basic tools are pairs of opposites (cold/hot, singular/plural, etc.). Claude Levi-Strauss took advantage of this method for his anthropological studies of the South America tribes.
So the narrator pretends to use this method to study and understand the sociological and psychoanalytical pattern of the event (anecdote), and so he (or she) uses pairs of opposites to elucidate its signification. So the whole thing is a joke full of ironies at the expense of this method, nowadays already old-fashioned.
QUESTIONS
-What do you know about anthropology?
-When does an anecdote / story become a myth? Sure in your family there is a story which is repeated in the great meetings: this is a kind of myth. Don’t you have one?
-What do you know about the triangle Vulcan-Mars-Venus?
-What do you think it’s the main difference between culture and nature? Can you give some examples?
-When is food a drug? Do you follow a diet? Do you believe in diets?
-Has a wedding to be public? Give your reasons.
-According to your opinion, must a religion canvass people, or has it to restrict itself to the private sphere?
VOCABULARY
startling, tangle, retaliate, receding, binding, release, patterning, spurned, diminished, unstintingly, cleave, cleave