The short
story you’re going to read is a bit different from the ones we have read until
now, but don’t get scared, because I’m going to help you.
The story
has two very different parts.
The first
part narrates the shipwreck, so it has a lot of naval vocabulary (there is a
glossary below), but don’t worry about it: to understand what happened you
don’t even it to look up these words in a dictionary: just go on reading. The
event is more or less like this: in the year 1816 a group of four French ships sailing
from a port near La Rochelle were heading south along the African coast. Due to
the incompetence of the commandments and/or adverse winds, the group of ships got
separated, and the last one got stuck in a reef and couldn’t go on sailing at
all; so the commandments ordered to leave the ship, but, as there were not
enough boats for all the passengers and crew, they decided to build a raft that
would be towed by the boats. But the raft couldn’t support so much weight, and
they had to throw away some food and drink; even so, when everybody was on board,
the raft was more than half a metre under water, and almost everybody on the
raft had their legs under water. But the worst was that the boats cut the ropes
that were tied to the raft to tow it, abandon it to their own fate and went
away. The situation on the raft was desperate: they didn’t have instruments to
navigate, neither rows nor a sail; they fight for better positions on the raft
and for food and water; during the night it was a storm; a lot of people died
or were murdered or committed suicide; there were cases of cannibalism… At the
end, only a few survived on the raft and were rescued by the ship Argus.
The survivals had decided to write down the events, and so now we know a lot of
details of the story.
The second
part narrates how Théodore Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa
(Medusa being the name of the stranded ship) and what was the public opinion
about the painting. This second part of the story doesn’t have vocabulary
problems (I think), but perhaps it isn't as moving as the first one, and it
demands an effort extra as it goes into art.
Julian
Barnes is very keen on art and has a book of essays about paintings and
painters called Keeping an Eye Open and the novel The Man in the RedCoat with a lot of art inside, or The Noise of the Timeabout the
Russian musician Shostakovich… So in his books we find a lot of history, art
and also politics.
This is the cover of the book I bought thirty
years ago. In it, you can see the Ark of Noah and a part of a spaceship
floating in a stormy sea in an intent to convey the contents of the book: the
history and the sea. The idea of the book is similar to another famous book by
Stefan Zweig: Decisive Moments in History: Twelve Historical Miniatures.
So, Barnes tells us about ten “and a half moment” in the History (real or literary)
of the world but under a fictional vision with a short story form.
QUESTIONS for the first part of the story
Tell us in your words what the bad omen was.
What happened in the Canary Islands?
Why was Senegal important for the French?
What do you know about famous rafts? What do you know
about the raft of Odysseus?
Do you remember other famous shipwrecks?
What do you know about the myth of Medusa?
When the raft was ready with all the people on it,
they shouted “Vive le Roi!” What political moment was France in?
Tell us about the sufferings of the shipwrecked
people.
What cruel or repugnant but necessary actions did the
shipwrecked do? What would you do in your case?
What happened to the people who didn’t want to abandon
the ship?
Who rescued the shipwrecked, and what did the survivors
do afterwards?
QUESTIONS about Scene of Shipwreck, by
Géricault
Do you remember any film or novel about catastrophes?
Why do you think we like this kind of films if we already know how they end?
What do you know about Géricault (not the biography,
but some curious or interesting fact)?
Géricault shaved his head in order not to see anyone
and be locked in his studio working. Do you know more cases of artists who had
to do something radical to keep on working?
What human resources did Géricault use to paint more realistically
his painting?
What can you tell us about Delacroix?
“You can tell more by showing less”: What does this
saying mean? Can you give some examples?
What do you think about the title “Scene of Shipwreck”?
What other title would you have given to the picture?
Who is Venus Anadyomene?
What differences do you remember between the painting
and the real facts? As we can see that cannibalism is taboo in most
societies, do you think eating meat would be so in some years?
(some) VOCABULARY (in context)
portent = augury porpoises = sea mammals similar to dolphins frigate, corvette, flute, brig = different kind of ships banian fig shallows = not deep water lead = heavy metal used to measure the depth ensign = junior lieutenant luffing = losing wind have a heel = incline to one side astern = behind pinnace = boat soundings = measuring (the depth of the water) billows = big waves tags = strips of (e.g.) metal pewter = metal mixture of tin and lead supernumerary = extra
Morley Callaghan was born in 1903, in Toronto, into an
Irish Roman Catholic family. He graduated from the University of Toronto in
1925. During his college years, Callaghan held a summer job as a reporter with
the Toronto Daily Star, where he met Ernest Hemingway. The two exchanged stories,
and Hemingway encouraged Callaghan in his writing. In 1925 Callaghan enrolled
in a law school at Osgoode Hall, in Toronto, and was admitted to the Ontario
Bar in 1928, but he did not practice law.
Callaghan’s career as a writer began in 1921, when he
sold a descriptive piece to the Toronto Star Weekly. In 1926 published his
first story in the Paris magazine, This Quarter and started on his first
novel Strange Fugitive, and his stories began to appear regularly in
American and European magazines. Callaghan married Loreta Dee in 1929 and went
to Paris for eight months. There he was part of the great gathering of writers
in Montparnasse that included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald or James
Joyce. He recalled this time in a memoir, That Summer in Paris, 1963; in
the book he discusses the famous boxing match between himself and Hemingway, and,
being Callaghan a better boxer, he knocked Hemingway to the floor.
The 1930s were an active and prolific period for
Callaghan. His work was strongly affected by the experiences of the Depression.
He published four novels, and he produced a second collection of stories, Now
that April’s Here and Other Stories. And wrote two plays in 1939.
During World War II, Callaghan was attached to the
Royal Canadian Navy and served on assignment for the National Film Board of Canada.
He also become a well-known radio figure.
Callaghan’s novels and short stories are marked by
Roman Catholicism, often focusing on individuals whose essential characteristic
is a strong but often weakened sense of self.
Callaghan was awarded the Royal Society of Canada's
Lorne Pierce Medal in 1960. In 1982, he was made a Companion of the Order of
Canada.
A long time Toronto resident, Callaghan remained
independent until the end of his life. He broke a hip in 1989 at the age of 86,
but still persisted in walking to his neighbourhood grocery store to do his
shopping. He died of natural causes in Toronto on August 25, 1990.
THE STORY
The protagonist in this story is an adolescent boy
named Michael. He is younger than some of his friends he is much bigger physically.
His life is divided between the pleasures of childhood, the problems at home
and the pangs of love. Michael's behaviour is affected for these tensions. It
is due to these tensions that at first jumps down on the sawdust and the same
tension disallows him to jump down the second time, while all other boys are
able to do, so he becomes a subject of jeer. Only to stablish his superiority,
he goes out to fight with a coloured boy, but then he makes friends with him
and finds several qualities in the opponent. He loves his father and also his
stepmother, he has a soft corner for his stepmother, but is unable to establish
a good relationship with her because she reprimands him, though for his own
good. What disturbs him more is that his father and stepmother quarrel all the time,
and that makes Michael feel unhappy and sorrowful. He is also ashamed that
their hot arguments can be heard by the passers-by and those living in the
neighbourhood.
Added to this tension is the fact that he is unable to
stablish communication with the girl he loves. He can’t find the right words to
talk to her. One of the major reasons for him to decide to escape is when he realizes
that she is in a relation with another boy.
He feels trapped in a society where everyone knows
everyone and a family where his father had constant arguments with his
stepmother. He wants to be with unknown
people, but then he is going to his uncle in the city. Thus, we see that he is
suffering from contradictory feelings all the time, unable to decide clearly
what he wants.
It is
then not a surprise that Michael feels the need to escape, to run away from
everybody and visit “places with beautiful names, places like Tia Juana,
Woodbine, Saratoga and Blue Bonnets.”
Michael, however, is not an irresponsible guy, he has
plans to settle with his uncle in the city he plans to write his agony to his
father from the city. The story ends with a wide-open future to the young boy.
CONCLUSION
Adolescence is the most difficult stage of life.
Teenagers are difficult to manage. They can be very sensitive, perhaps too
sensitive on some occasions. They are often contradictory. It is hard to
understand what they are going through; and due to this, they are likely to do
strange things, which are done by Michael in this story.
QUESTIONS
Talk about the main characters:
>Mike / Michael
>Father
>Mother / Stepmother
>Helen Murray
>Art
Teenagers:
>What characteristics define a teenager?
>What is the meaning of “adolescence”?
>Teenagers now, are they the same they were in “our
time”? Why?
>Doing something risky, or difficult, seems to be the typical
challenge for teenagers, like a rite of passage. Do you remember some anecdote
/ story related to it?
>Do you remember any other short stories or novels where
the teenagers are the stars, e.g., The Lord of the Flies?
>Do you think Mike’s feelings for his parents reflect
the typical teenager feelings for theirs?
Fighting: is it a way to make friends? (Remember The
Quiet Man and Women in Love)
Why was Mike worried when his father didn’t go out of
the shed?
Why do you think at a moment the narrator says “Heavy
clouds were sweeping up from the horizon” (384, 4)? And what about “The moonlight
shining on the hay” (390, 2)?
At the end, Mikes to look for the places he mentions
because of the beauty of the names: do you know something about the chapter in
Proust “Names of countries”?
John
Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. His father was the owner of
a shoe factory, which went bankrupt with the crash of 29, and the family fell
into relative poverty. After this fact, the father left the family, and the
young Cheever lived for a time in Boston with his brother. During that period
he survived by publishing articles and stories in various media. He
was expelled from the academy for smoking, which ended his education and this
was the core of his first short story, Expelled, which Malcom Cowley bought
for the New Republican newspaper. From that moment, Cheever devoted
himself entirely to writing short stories that progressively found space in
several magazines and newspapers, and finally in the famous magazine The New
Yorker, with which he maintained, until the end of these days, an intense
relationship. He
was called the Chekhov of the suburbs, because many of his stories occurred in
the middle class neighbourhoods that were born around New York during the
recovery of the economy after the Second World War. In
1957 he won The National Book Award for his first novel, and in 1971 he won the
Pulitzer Prize for his compilation of stories. He wrote primarily about the
decline of the American dream, alcoholism and homosexuality, and sometimes his
characters had dubious moral. A
movie was made from his short story The Swimmer in 1957, played by Burt
Lancaster. At the time it was unsuccessful, but now it is considered a cult
film by cinephiles. John
Cheever died in New York in 1982 at the age of 70.
The Swimmer
The Swimmer is a short story by John Cheever about a relatively young
and handsome man who decides to go back to his home, 8 miles from where he is
at the moment, swimming. For this he plans a tour along the pools of his
various friends and neighbours, a route that he will call “Lucinda River” in honour
to his wife. This wild idea will take him on a personal journey with surreal overtones.
As the journey progresses, the character’s disorientation, his temporary
alterations and the doubtfulness of his feat are revealed. At first his neighbours
are friendly and accommodating, but there comes a time when everything gets
worse, being forced to cross a public swimming pool, later when a neighbour
accuses him of being an intruder and in
the last pool he sees how an old lover looks at him with disdain, and she doesn’t
even offer him a drink. When he finally gets home, we do not know if a day, a
month or a year, later, he finds it closed and empty In my opinion, it is a metaphorical journey,
in which the protagonist wants to return home but cannot find the way to do so.
Alcoholism is always present, and the sinking in it (and not in the pools) is what
increasingly disorients him and prevents him from getting where he would like.
A journey on a magnificent sunny day, in which an attractive young man is about
to do something heroic, but instead he finishes as a defeated man who has lost
his home, family and even his memories.
It
is a dark and desperate story, but of great narrative force and with a
dreamlike and surreal component that makes it especially attractive.
QUESTIONS
Characters:
Neddy
Merrill
Mrs
Graham
Enid
Bunker
Grace
Biswagner
Shirley
Adams
Mr
and Mrs Halloran
Helen
and Eric Sachs
Places:
At
Westerhazy’s
At
Levys’s garden
At
Lindleys’s
At
Welchers’s
At
the Recreation Center
At
home
Can
you point out the hints the narrator give us along the story about the decline
and fall of the hero? What social class do the characters belong to? What
do they drink? What
is the National Audubon Society? Can
you find parallels between this story and the Odyssey or a Pilgrimage? What
season is the story situated in? What
is a point of no return? And what is the point of no return in the story? Greetings:
he kisses women and shakes hands to men. What do you think of this kind of
greetings, one for men and another for women? Where
do you prefer to swim: swimming pools, the sea, rivers, reservoirs?
VOCABULARY
golf
link, artesian well, cumulus cloud, dogleg, hurl, choppy, saddle, hoist,
portage, bony, de Haviland trainer, spigot, cordite, put sb out to board, tool
(v), bask, roughhouse, cerulean
Bernard Malamud, a New Yorker, was born in Brooklyn in
1914 and died in Manhattan in 1986. He is one of the main representatives of
the Jewish literature, although he was a declared agnostic. His parents were Russian
immigrants. Malamud lived his adolescence during the Great Depression and
watching Charlie Chaplin’s films to have some fun and explain them to his
friends. He graduated at Columbia University where he did his thesis about
Thomas Hardy. It seems it was an impulsive man since in 1948, he burned his
first manuscript entitled The Light Sleeper.
The topics he wrote about were social issues and above all the difficulties of
immigrants who arrived in America, and the hope in reaching their dreams
despite their poverty. He is not considered a prolific writer since he only wrote
8 novels. In 1967, he won the Pulitzer and the National Book Awards with the
novel The Fixer where he talks about anti-Semitism
in the Russian Empire. He was also known for the 55 short stories collected and
published after his death in the book Complete
Stories.
The story
The Last Mohican happens in Rome and has two men as protagonists.
Fidelman is a middle-aged man who’s just arrived in Italy to spend a year to write
a critical work about the painter and architect Giotto. He planned to stay in
Rome for one week and then travel to Florence, Assisi and Padua, but this was
completely disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious Jewish man. Their first meeting
was when Fidelman was leaving the rail station, Susskind, keeps his eyes on him;
Fidelman was good-looking and well-dressed, the perfect prey for Susskind who was
looking for someone to finance their “street business”. He was a Jewish refugee
from Israel who had lived in Germany and now was trying to survive in Rome
cheating tourists. He offered Fidelman as a guide, to help him to find an
hotel, in fact all of them were things to get some money. After this first
meeting, the story tells us how a very organised man with a well-planned stay
in Rome, changed completely when Susskind got into his life. In order to escape
from this, Fidelman decided to go to Florence some days before expected, but
his plans were broken when he arrived at the hotel room and his briefcase, and
in addition the first chapter of the manuscript about Giotto, disappeared. From
the beginning, he suspected of Susskind, and started a searching that supposed for
him a decline, for during three months he quit the visits to the museums and got
obsessed about find Susskind, even though he got up on weight and his physical
aspect got worse. At the end of the story he finds Susskind but not his
manuscript.
Some things
Malamud starts with an accurate physical description
of Fidelman and his outfit. It is important that the reader imagine a good-looking
man but also emphasize with him, presenting him as a humble man who had worked
hard to save money and even borrowed some from his sister in order to make his
dream true, travel to Italy.
The reason that Fidelman decided to go to Italy was
Giotto. Giotto di Bondone was a painter and architect born in Vicchio in 1267.
Nowadays, we can contemplate his works at the Gallerie degli Uffici in
Florence, Louvre Museum in Paris or the National Gallery in London. He
contributed to the Italian Renaissance, and is known for representing emotions
in paintings and also for incorporate 3-dimentional vision. By the
incorporation of this changes it started a new way to express the religious
art. He has remarkable paintings in churches of Assisi and Padua. The writer
also wants to reflect that Fidelman is a curious person mentioning Trofimov as
his alter ego: “Call me Trofimov” he
said to Susskind. Trofimov was a role of the play The Cherry Orchard by Chekov where he express his ideas and
represents an eternal student; Fidelman said “If there’s something to learn I
want to learn it”.
The author describes the life that Fidelman dreamed at
his arrival in Rome, a curious person who had planned his stay with a lot of
activities: mornings at libraries searching for catalogues and archives, and
after lunch and a nap to recover, he visited churches and museums during the
afternoon. A perfect day for him finished with some relax, dinner with white
wine and a stroll in Trastevere quarter near the Tiber. The role of Susskind is
the stereotype of a person who takes profit on others, he asked for a suit, for
money, and had not enough with some dollars he received from Fidelman. Susskind
is a kind of survivor who lives illegally in Italy after quitting Germany; I’m
not sure if he really wants to find a real job or prefers to live this way.
When he begins to go after Fidelman, surely because he thinks that he is rich, he
becomes almost his shadow, and Fidelman gives him some money in order “to have
some peace of mind” as he said in the story. In my opinion, while the story
goes on you empathize with Fidelman and his feelings to get rid of Susskind and
really enjoy his stay in Rome, just until it became to an obsessive behaviour.
While reading the story you are someway transported
there, he reflects the art present in Italy and especially in Rome,
incorporating references of emblematic sites of the Eternal City: the
Diocletian Baths, which afterwards were reconverted in a church and convent by
Michelangelo. The Vatican, a paradise for art lovers, where Fidelman
experienced some kind of “ecstasy” staring at its walls and absorbing all that
beauty, and he also introduces a little reference to the statue of Romulo and
Remus, the twins from the legend of Rome’s origin.
Malamud chose that the two main characters of the
story were Jewish like him, although he was agnostic. The first time they met,
Susskind calls Fidelman asking if he was Jewish, this was the link he found to
explain him his own story as a refugee a connect with his solidarity.
The story had a change of direction when the briefcase
with the manuscript disappears, Fidelman was another man, he didn’t enjoy any
more his stay in Rome, and even he postponed his trip to Florence and the other
cities. The next months he started to visit places just to find Susskind, because
he suspected that he has stolen the briefcase, he didn’t answer his sister
calls, his appearance was not important anymore, he put on weight. The search
for Susskind had become an obsession.
The author added some irony in the narrative, mostly
when he explains his dreams, for instance the one where he was in the cemetery
reading the inscription; these situations always finished with the sentence:
“But not Susskind”. This particular sense of humour was also used to represent
in a visual way the freezing cold of the refugee’s room, he said: “this fish in the fishbowl is swimming around
in Arctic Seas”. When he goes in Susskind apartment furtively and don’t
find anything, he returned to the pension and had a dream where he found the
briefcase, “but not the manuscript!”
Some Giotto's paintings
On the day before our departure, we decided to go as far
afield as Padua where were to be found those Vices and Virtues of
which Swann had given me reproductions; after walking in the
glare of the sun across the garden of the Arena, I entered the
Giotto chapel the entire ceiling of which and the background of
the frescoes are so blue that it seems as though the radiant day
has crossed the threshold with the human visitor, and has come in
for a moment to stow away in the shade and coolness its pure sky,
of a slightly deeper blue now that it is rid of the sun's
gilding, as in those brief spells of respite that interrupt the
finest days, when, without our having noticed any cloud, the sun
having turned his gaze elsewhere for a moment, the azure, more
exquisite still, grows deeper. In this sky, upon the blue-washed
stone, angels were flying with so intense a celestial, or at
least an infantile ardour, that they seemed to be birds of a
peculiar species that had really existed, that must have figured
in the natural history of biblical and Apostolic times, birds
that never fail to fly before the saints when they walk abroad;
there are always some to be seen fluttering above them, and as
they are real creatures with a genuine power of flight, we see
them soar upwards, describe curves, 'loop the loop' without the
slightest difficulty, plunge towards the earth head downwards
with the aid of wings which enable them to support themselves in
positions that defy the law of gravitation, and they remind us
far more of a variety of bird or of young pupils of Garros
practising the vol-plané, than of the angels of the art of
the Renaissance and later periods whose wings have become nothing
more than emblems and whose attitude is generally the same as
that of heavenly beings who are not winged. (Marcel Proust: La prisionnière)
Navicella
San
Francesco dona le vesti al cavaliere povero.
TOPICS
Fidelman has a pigskin briefcase. What is the importance of this particular for the story? What are “oxblood shoes”? What do you know about the Diocletian Baths? Fidelman: describe very briefly his appearance and his personality. What is the meaning in context of “give a skeleton a couple of pounds”? What do you know about Romulus and Remus legend? There’s a film directed by Guy Richie (Madonna’s ex-husband) called “Lock, Stock and Two Barrels”. In the story we have the expression “lock, stock, barrel”; what does it mean? What is its origin? What is its relation with the title of the film? Have you seen it? What is the meaning of “knickers”, in context? Shimon Susskind: describe briefly his appearance and his personality. What can you say about Florence, Siena, Assisi and Padua? Who was Trofimov? What was Fidelman’s daily routine? There is the expression “remembrance of things unknown”. Doesn’t it remind you of a famous French literary work, a masterpiece? What’s its author and the exact title? Fidelman said “My God, I’ve got to stop using my eyes so much” when he was looking at some ceiling. Why does he say it? What do you know about the Stendhal syndrome? Why Susskind doesn’t go to Israel? What is the context for the sentence: “The Italians are human people”? What business does Susskind propose to Fidelman? At the police station, an officer draws a line on “valore del manuscritto”. What is the meaning of this? How did Fidelman try to recover the main ideas of his first chapter about Giotto? Where did Fidelman look for Susskind and where did he find him? What were Fidelman’s three different accommodations? What was Fidelman’s daily routine after losing his work about Giotto? They mention the Spanish painter Murillo. What do you know about him? What was Fidelman’s real vocation? Where did Susskind live? What is the meaning of Fidelman’s last dream (“San Francesco dona le vesti al cavaliere povero”)? Why did Susskind burn the chapter? What did Fidelman earn at the end? What is the relationship between the title and the story (remember there’s an adventures novel by James Fenimore Cooper called The Last of the Mohicans)?
BIOGRAPHY: Clarice
Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920 as Chaya Pinkhasivna
Lispector in a Jewish family. It was a time of chaos, famine, and racial war.
Her grandfather was murdered; her mother was raped; her father was exiled,
penniless, to the other side of the world. They fled first to Moldavia and
Romania and finally to Brazil in 1922, where they adapted their names to the
Portuguese. Since then, Chaya received the name Clarice. Her mother died when she was 10
years old. She continued her education and entered the Law School in Rio de
Janeiro, but she followed her dream in the newsrooms, where her beauty and her
brilliance made a dazzling impression. In 1940, she published her first novel
“The Triumph””. Three months later his father died at 55 years old. As a student she met her future
husband, the diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente, whom she married in 1943 and whom
she accompanied to many different countries, and she didn't only leave her family
and country, but her job as a journalist in which she already had a reputation.
For 15 years Clarice led a boring life as a perfect wife, but she never stopped
writing and always missed Brazil. On her first trip to Europe, in
Naples in 1944, during the Second World War, she was a volunteer in the
infirmary assisting Brazilian soldiers. There she confessed “I don't really
know how to write travel letters, I really don't even know how to travel”. In 1946, she published her second
novel “O Lustre” before they settled in Bern where her first child Paulo was
born. Back to Rio de Janeiro in 1949 she
returned to her journalistic activity under the pseudonym of Tereza Quadros,
but in 1952 she left Brazil again moving with her husband to Washington D.C.,
where her second son Pedro was born. In 1954, she published the translation of
her book “Near to the wild heart” into French, with a cover by Henri Matisse. In 1959, she separated from her
husband and returned to Rio de Janeiro. There she resumed her journalistic
activity in order to get the necessary money to become independent. A year
after, she published “Lazos de familia”, which had some success, and the next
year “La manzana en la oscuridad”; in 1963 she published “The Passion according
G.H.”, which is considered her masterpiece. In 1966, the writer fell asleep with
a lit cigarette, which started a fire in her room and burned much of her body.
She spent months in hospital. Her right hand would never regain its mobility.
This had a big impact on his state of mind and caused frequent depressions. Clarice made many translations due
to her command of Portuguese, English, French and Spanish, and Hebrew
and Yiddish with some fluency. The only translation into Spanish was “Historia
de los dos que soñaron” de Jorge Luís Borges in the Jornal do Brazil. Between the late sixties and the
early seventies she published children’s books, translations and adaptations of
foreign works, getting great recognition. She died in 1977, victim of ovarian
cancer in Rio de Janeiro, some months after the publication of her last novel
“La hora de la estrella”, at the age of 56.
STYLE: Clarice
developed a unique literary style marked by singularities and linguistic
innovations. She does not adopt the normative grammar standard, the sentences
are not made with coherent rigour, but with a chaotic syntactic structure.
Nevertheless, they are full of beauty and freshness of artistic expression. Her fiction focuses on the deepest
regions of the unconscious, she centres her work on the individual and her most
intimate afflictions, reproducing the thoughts of the characters. In this way
she tried to make the readers to analyse her works on their own. Therefore, the
common denominator of her texts is the idea of knowledge in itself. So, it is
the spontaneity of the representation of thought of the characters what
characterizes the chaos of such a literary mark. Currently, the work of Clarice
Lispector continues arousing interest, which leads her to be considered one of
the most widely read and recognized Latin-American authors in the world.
THE
SMALLEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD: This
story is part of a collection of thirteen short stories called “Family Ties”.
It was published in 1960 after the Lispector’s permanent return to Brazil from
the United States. This short story begins in the
depths of Equatorial Africa. The French explorer and hunter, Marcel Pretre,
comes across a tribe of surprising small pygmies. He was even more surprised
when, among the smallest of these, in the Eastern Congo, Marcel found himself
facing a woman no more than forty-five centimetres tall, adult, black, silent
and pregnant. “Black as a monkey” he informed the press. He called her “Little Flower”. Her race will soon be exterminated.
Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, the
great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes that hunt them with nets
and eat them. For strategic defence they live in
the highest trees. The Likoualas use only a very limited language and their members communicate primarily by gestures. The explorer is amazed by this
unique creature, considering her the rarest and most extraordinary creature on
the earth because of her minute size. A photograph of Little Flower was
published in the colour supplement of the Sunday papers, life-size. She was
wrapped in a cloth, her belly already very big. She had a flat nose, a black
face, splay feet. She looked like a dog. When readers of the Sunday newspaper
see the photograph, they react in different ways: A woman said “It gives me the
creeps”.
A lady was upset all day, almost if
she was missing something. Little Flower made a little girl
feel that “Sorrow is endless”. A mother said to her daughter “Poor
little thing! How sad she is! It’s the sadness of an animal. It isn't human
sadness”. A clever little boy had a clever
idea: “She would be our toy!”
In another house they imagined her
serving their table, with her big little belly! In the meanwhile, in Africa,
methodically the explorer studied the little belly of the smallest human being.
It was at this moment that the smallest woman in the world began laughing warm,
warm. Little Flower was enjoying life. She was experiencing the sensation of
not having been eaten yet. So she was laughing. The rare thing herself felt in
her breast a warmth that might be called love. She loved that sallow explorer
and also the explorer’s ring and the explorer’s boots. In the jungle, love is
not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange colour
of a man who isn’t black, love is to laugh for love of a shiny ring. The explorer tried to smile back,
and then he was embarrassed. He coloured, prudishly. He was undoubtedly sour. The explorer getting control of
himself, severely recaptured the discipline of his work, and went on with his
note-taking. He had learned how to understand some of the tribe’s few
articulate words, and to interpret their signs. By now he could ask questions. Little Flower answered “Yes. It’s
very nice to have a tree of her own to live in.” Marcel Pretre had some difficult
moments with himself. But at least he kept busy taking notes. “Well”, declared an old lady,
folding up the newspaper decisively, “Well, as I always say: God knows what He's
doing”.
COMMENTS: In
my opinion, Clarice Lispector tells the reader a beautiful story, which serves
as an excuse for us to reflect on some topics. One of them is how people around the
world react to the image of “Little Flower”. Without knowledge or cause, these
people express fear of what the “civilized world” doesn’t know. This image
evokes highly emotional responses. Lispector calls attention to many individual
reactions. In two cases she noted the emptiness
of love and silence of Little Flower. In a home, a girl about to be married
felt an ecstasy of pity: “Mamma, look at her little picture, poor little thing!
Look how sad she is!” “But”, said the mother, “It’s the sadness of an animal.
It isn’t human sadness”. Here we can see the sympathy and subsequent
dehumanization of Little Flower. In another house, a boy asked his
mother if Little Flower would howl and if she would be their toy. Her child’s reaction makes her have
a lot of thoughts about her own feelings and the superficiality of their life. In another house, in each member of
the family was born the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for
itself. “Imagine her serving our table”. Meanwhile, in Africa, the explorer studied
the little belly of the smallest woman in the world, and for the first time he
felt sick, because for the first time she was laughing. She was enjoying life
because she wasn’t being devoured. This is the secret goal of a whole life. The
explorer was baffled. She loved that sallow explorer and
his ring and his boots too. The explorer had some thoughts about
the difference of the meaning of love in his world and in the humidity of the
forest where love is not to be eaten. The explorer tried to smile back,
and then he was embarrassed; he coloured prudishly. He was undoubtedly sour. Severely he recaptures the discipline
of his work. He has learned how understand some of the tribe’s few articulate
words. By now he could ask questions. Little Flower's answer “Yes. That is
very nice to have a tree of her own to live in” maybe could be interpreted as
an invitation from her to the explorer… At the end of the story, there is a
lady who declared “God knows what He’s doing”. In my opinion, with this end,
Lispector wanted to express that everything in our life can serve to reflect
and to improve in our feelings.
In the story, there
is the expression “a box within a box”. It’s something like the Russian dolls
called matryoshkas. There are some stories like matryoshkas, e.g., The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John
Fowles, where the story situated in the 19th century gets mixed with
the story of the two protagonists situated in the 20thcentury. In
our case, there is a big story, a “container story”, and then some smaller
stories inside the big one.
👉Do you remember other novels or narratives
with a similar struture?
*
👉How much is it, in centimetres, seventeen and
three-quarters inches?
*
The story is about a
pigmy woman. Pigmies exist now, and they live in the Congo basin. But some
years ago an ancient race of small people was discovered in Indonesia, in Flores
Island. They don’t exist anymore, but this people coexisted for a long period
of time with the humans as we know them now. Some people say some specimens of
this race were hiding in the jungle of their island... in the last century! But
our question is the “otherness”, the fact that, when we meet someone different
from us, we become some more aware of our identity. And there is a debate about
what is better for us people: to try to avoid or reject what is different from
us, or to try to get mixed with this alterity.
👉What is your opinion about this?
*
The explorer called
the woman “Little Flower”. This is a kind of compliment, but it’s also a evidence
that somebody have power upon another somebody. The explorer acts as if he was God: he gives
names to unknown things.
👉Why didn’t he ask her name? Why didn’t he introduce
himself?
*
In the story, two
tribes are mentioned, the Likoualas, whom Little Flower belongs to, and the
Bahundes, that hunt, kill and eat Likoualas.
👉But, which is the worst danger for the
Likoualas, the Bahundes or the explorer? That is: is the ecosystem as good as
we usually think for some species?
*
The Bahundes are
cannibals. Do you think that when we eat meat we are a kind of cannibals? There’s
a sentence in the story that begins “The sadness of an animal...” Can an animal
be sad as a human being? Animalists say animals have feelings, and so we cannot
kill or eat them.
👉But, when in a documentary you see a frog
being eaten by a snake, can you see horror on the frog's face?
*
The story talks about
a woman belonging to a tribe, but no other member of the tribe appears in the
tale, not a man, not even the woman’s child’s father, not even the chief of the
tribe.
👉Why do you think is that?
*
In “The Smallest...”
we have again (remember Conrad) a western man that compares the non western
being with a dog.
👉Do you think this comparison is a good one
(the dog is the man’s best friend) or, the other way round, a negative one (it
compares a person with an animal)?
*
Another topic we mentioned
when we talked about Zweig (his novel The
Heart’s Impatience) is the “perverted tenderness”, the confusion between love and pity. I think it happens something similar with philanthropy.
👉Is philanthropy a positive useful thing or
a perverted one?
*
“The woman [the one
who saw the picture in the paper] was upset all day, almost as she was missing
something. Besides, it was spring and there was a dangerous leniency in the
air.”
“And she had a horror
of her own soul that, more than her body, had engendered that being, adept at
life and happiness. [...] ‘I’m going to buy him a new suit’, she decided.”
You can see here a
mixture of deep thoughts combined with ordinary observations or common desires.
This is a reminiscence of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialism:
we are transcendental beings, but, notwithstanding this, we have to eat,
breathe, walk..., the commonest of actions, because we live in the material world.
We are free spirits in a world that isn’t free, that is compact. They say Clarice Lispector was an existentialist
writer.
👉Can you tell us a bit
more about this existentialist thinking?
*
The woman loved the explorer, loved his boots, his ring..., and because these material objects, she loved him from head to toes, body and soul.
👉What is love, real love? Can we say "love = love + its circumstances"?
