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Fiction/Short Stories
October 2003
192 pages
ISBN 0-88984-270-1
$18.95
Of Mice and Man
Barbara LoFaro
The existing species exhibit a hierarchy of status and so compose a great chain,
or ladder, of being, extending from the lowliest condition of the
merest existence up to God Himself. In this chain man occupies the
middle position between the animal kinds and the angels, or purely
spiritual beings. It could be said that `Words for the Winter' is a small
Greek tragedy with `small' being Blaise's adjective
of choice throughout the story to describe characters and events.
The nameless protagonist is the archetypal `hero' though
one of weak or inferior attributes, in other words a `small'
mythological hero yet a hero nonetheless by virtue of his Apollonian
qualities: tall and fair of skin and hair (German origins) and a
teacher, hence possessing a higher learning and, more notably, an
idealist, a dreamer, as is stated in the last sentence. `I who
live in dreams ... ' (page 37).
However, as a married man and the father of a young boy he is
manifestly connected to the physical realm. Descending from the
pristine paradise of the mountain top to the dirty, dangerous
Dionysian city below the hero is thrown into conflict by the opposing
worlds of reality and dreams. In keeping with this motif the
mythological hero displays a touch of hubris at the beginning `And
in this small way, I have succeeded' (page 25) and a touch of
smugness, a form of hubris, at the end `I am learning to
appreciate small favors: mail, mouselessness, the stirrings of
spring' (page 35) and both occasions herald a fall.
This essay is a close reading focusing on two aspects of the story:
firstly, the small things; children and mice and how these seemingly
disparate and harmless beings seem to collude to destroy the hero's
dream of an idyllic world leading him to regard them in equal parts
as victim and vermin. The children as mice conceit is created by
repeated references to their smallness and vulnerability, the
furtiveness and mystery of their movements and intentions and
striking similarities in the imagery. Secondly, an analysis of the
`smallness' of the hero vis-à-vis his life's
struggles as it applies to the theme that the man who loses himself
in dreams and does not temper his idealism will fail to adequately
survive in the material world. The opening line `September,
month of the winding down' (page 25) sets the tone of impending
doom suggesting the beginning of the end: the end of a season, a
vacation, a marriage, of idealism.
The first mention
of children is on page 27 `In the single basement flat lives an
extended family of Jamaicans with uncountable children all roughly
the same age. Our four-year-old son plays with two of theirs;
rugged, gentle boys of five and seven' (page 28). The hero's
detachment is apparent in his description of the children as a
homogenous, faceless, nameless group which includes his own son.
`Ours plays with theirs' serves merely to delineate
ownership.
The line
`Christopher suffers his nosebleeds and hasn't been out
in twenty days. The mice have left us alone. The Jamaican children
come up to play, riding tricycles through our endless flat' (page
28) is the first connection between children and mice as naturally
co-existing on the same plane.
The destruction
of his mail is the first violation of private and personal space and
the hero blames Irene, the `Greek girl across the hall' (page
28) who, as the diminutive antagonist, is both precocious and a
victim. `She will go to stores for you. She will play with
your boy when she finds him alone. And she will steal his toys and
kick the smaller Jamaican girls when she finds them alone' (page
28). These lines introduce the duality of the child's nature
which baffles and torments the hero. `I wanted to protect her,
for whatever she'd done, that bruised furtive little thing with
the Anne Frank face. That cheat, that thief, that cunning wretched
child' (page 29). This stream of thought expresses wildly
opposing sentiments; he wants to protect her although he feels she is
undeserving of his protection. Figurative language in `bruised
furtive little thing' creates a fusion of child and mouse. The
children's curiosity and lack of revulsion is evident in their
removal of the dead mice to retrieve the traps and garbage bags. The
hero's son is fascinated and `leaves peanuts for them in
old jar lids' (page 29) as if they are pets rather than pests
whereas the hero is secretly afraid and repulsed by the vermin.
When he discovers
mice inside his wife's `old belted bag from Germany' (page
30) the use of personification gives the bag life though the addition
of `an embolism' (page 30) connotes death. The
`mouse-nests of shredded paper' (page 30) is repeated with
a similar mention made on page 34 in the line `Our letters, as
usual, lay shredded on the steps' and reinforces the idea of a
complete and willful destruction.
The second violation of a personal, private space occurs when mice
penetrate into Erika's bag `the one she kept her secrets
in, everything portable and priceless from her first twenty years'
(page 30). The bag as a quasi sacred possession is defiled. The
clearest insight into the couple's relationship comes on page
30 in the lines `For a moment I allowed myself to think exactly
what it meant about us, about me. I have stained her with the froth
of mice, their birth and death, in all my dreams and failures.'
The mice/children imagery hints at the birth and death of children
by abortion or miscarriage and explains the couple's
separateness as is suggested on page 28 in the line `Erika
sleeps late, turns in early, and admits to constant headaches'
the latter being a timeworn but effective excuse for avoiding
physical closeness. Particularly disturbing are the lines ` ... about
me. I have stained her ... ' (page 30) because they are
charged with guilt for his role in these births and deaths. The
dialogue echoes of unholy, unspoken truths and the lines are
`pregnant' with double-entendres. The writing is
suffused with guilt, despair and the fear of abandonment.
When the hero
cradles the suitcase like a baby in his arms it is a protective
gesture bound to a murderous intent. `Did you kill it?'
(page 30) is a question wrapped in an imperative. Pursuing with this
line of analysis the wife's words create the impression of
someone inured to killing and death. His response `There may
be more inside' (page 30) might refer to the potential for
other births. The connotations here are especially ambiguous; is the
husband wary of his wife's desire for more children and is
assuring her he will not let this happen or is the wife averse to
more births and insists he `do' something to stop this
from happening? Likely it is the latter interpretation that is
nearer the truth due to the wife's emphasis on the verb `do'
as stated above.
The couple manages
to embellish a single room, the front room, the one people are most
likely to see. It is an attractive prop and like their marriage it
is only a façade, `But the rest of the flat has defeated
us' (page 30). As for the innermost areas, those that are not
immediately apparent both in the flat and in their union, they are in
a shambles.
The mouse
darts into the dining room, under the radiator where the linoleum has
lifted and there must be a hole. I've spoken to Laflamme about
it-he refused to act without the landlord's directive, and gave
me a box of steel wool instead. `Stuff it under there,'
he said, `it's mouseproof.'' (page 31). This
passage contains tropes: the metaphor `hole' for female
genitalia and `mouseproof' for means of contraception.
The killing of the mouse is described in a lengthy passage signifying
the intense psychological impression this makes on the hero. `If
I had the man's Florida address, I'd send him this' (page
32) expresses his deep resentment and anger at what he has been
compelled to do. ` ... then wash' (page 32). The act
of washing is a metonymy for purification.
The line `She
snaps the locks, tightens the belts' has deliberately jarring,
harsh sounds to strengthen the sense of a hermetic physical and
emotional shut-down. Following are the lines `If there'd
been mice in there I would have left you' and `There are
some things that would kill me' (page 31) - the first is a
threat and the second is an accusation for the hardships she has
endured and where she draws the line.
So terrified by his wife's increasing emotional distance the
hero is reduced to silent servitude. `Best not to speak.
Better indeed to kill ... ' (page 32). The mouse killing
scene zooms with morbidly graphic detail on the creature's
death. It is as if all the ugliness in the world is captured in this
seemingly insignificant event and leaves a psychic scar on the
idealistic hero.
Spring is a time of renewal, a time of rebirth but here it begins
with the death of a child and immediately follows the mouse killing
episode. Children are analogous to renewal and yet another `small
creature' has perished. And as was the case with the mouse the
hero is `the only witness' (page 33) and is afraid to
touch the body and the boy's spasms recreate those of the dying
mouse. The `street slowly bristled to life' (page 33) is
personification and the screaming Greek women as dark and squat, `who
never came out opened their doors and ran toward me ... ' (page
33) is reminiscent of the roaches and creates a nightmarish vision of
the world as a hideous, dangerous place crawling with senseless yet
powerful vermin. The hero is overwhelmed by the vehemence of the
women's attack and frustrated by his failure to be understood.
`Oh, God, I had dreamed of loving the Greeks ... ' (page
33) Confronted by ignorance and violence his idealized version of
Greeks as a people of culture and beauty is shattered but more
notably he is shocked by his own dark nature. `I wished to
annihilate them' (page 33) and `I was consumed with hatred
for them all, a desire to use my size and my innocence, my strength
and good intentions, to trample them, to will them back to Greece and
their piggish lives in the dark'(p 33) are expressions of the
conflict between the dual sides of his nature: On the one hand he
hates them, on the other he is innocent, he has good intentions but
wishes to destroy them. `I felt a pity for us all that I had
never felt before' (page 34). In this moment of catharsis the
hero admits to being lessened or reduced in some profound way. He
fears and pities the others in an attitude of `They know not
what they do' and fears and pities himself for falling to a
`lower moral ground.'
The dialogue on
page 34 creates a sense of the tension and strange rapport between
Irene and the hero in the line ` ... a father and daughter
to anyone passing' (page 34). They are opposites; he, the
innocent dreamer, she, streetwise and corrupt yet it remains that in
some ambivalent way he perceives their connectedness. The dialogue
between them illuminates the depth of his naiveté. As a child
of abuse and neglect, her arsenal of survival techniques includes
cunning and deceit as well as a certain level of maturity and she
does not let the deluded hero patronize her. The Anne Frank
resemblance twice mentioned in the story conceals her duplicitous
nature which is the opposite of the good, innocent, forgiving child
martyr locked in a world she cannot control. `She kept up with
me. I was almost running' (page 34). She is like his shadow
from which he cannot escape. That having been said the `shadow'
is often interpreted to represent rejected elements of masculine
potential as in the capacity to fight, for example. In effect, the
hero fails to defend himself in `manly' fashion against
the women by pushing one of them to the ground so overcome is he by
the ferocity of their attack. He makes no move to protect Irene from
her father's violence and his `overkill' of the
mouse demonstrates a degree of cruelty commingled with cowardice.
These repeated failures to act nobly or heroically add up to produce
an almost palpable sense of the gradual and unrelenting erosion of
his `heroism' or coping mechanisms versus the real world.
Irene seems genuinely indifferent to her own cousin's death and
goes so far as to call him `a dumb kid anyway' and
`stupid' and a `crybaby' (page 34). At each
turn the hero defends the boy and Irene's cruel remarks provoke
the re-emergence of the hero's nastier side. `For a
moment, in my hatred, I thought she'd done it; shades of The
Bad Seed, she'd been up there all along taking his toys and
making his morning miserable' (page 34). The `Bad Seed'
is a reference to a 1950's horror film about a pretty little
girl who is a serial killer, remorselessly causing the death of
neighbors etc. to obtain what she wants. In a flash of paranoia the
hero momentarily imagines Irene as having brought about the boy's
death and her attempts to enlighten the hero to the boy's
misdeeds falls on deaf ears. He cannot or will not imagine the
broken little boy as capable of committing acts of malice and
aforethought. With the Greek women's attack still fresh in his
mind he openly accuses her. `And with that she extracted a key
from her purse ... ' (page 35). The key is an implicit
metaphor, the vehicle is the key, the unstated tenor is control, and
plays a `key' role because the loss of his keys results
in his ultimate loss of control. In addition, the key Irene holds is
a metaphor for the psychological control she holds over him.
Our mail has been left alone. I am learning to appreciate
small favors: mail, mouselessness, the stirrings of spring' (page
35). These lines are introduced to lull and warn and with the
subsequent small mishap of the theft of his keys the hero comes
apart.
His descent into the basement apartment is a metonymy for his final
fall to Hell. The children are like so many mice in this horrible
environment and his son's eating of a peanut butter sandwich
brings to mind the peanuts fed to the mice. A struggle between
father and son ensues. The hero asks his son, as he did the screaming
women, to `understand' but tragically, again he is not
understood. `Limp in my arms he belches, and part of his
sandwich comes heaving out' (page 36) closely resembles `One
got trapped with a peanut half-expelled' (page 29) and this
sight inflicts too great a psychic wound for the hero to bear.
`At this
moment, Irene must be in the flat. There is much to steal that we
will never miss' (page 37). The sudden and monstrous
realization that Irene has possession of his keys and is invading his
most private place, his home, as in the incident with the mouse in
his wife's bag, destroys the hero's illusions of the
world as a place of beauty, harmony and coherence. Completely
alienated and vulnerable he is like a man screaming behind a plate
glass window - he is seen but not heard or, more precisely, not
understood.
The front of my shirt is stained ... ' (page 37). The
stain is another implicit metaphor, the vehicle is the stain and the
unstated tenor is the loss of innocence. An Italian adage is a
propos and says: `I gran dolori sono muti' (Great sorrows
are silent) and the hero is so keenly aware of and aggrieved by this
terrible and irreversible change he cannot effectively explain it.
`Something infinitely small but infinitely complicated has
happened to our lives, and I don't know how to present it-in
its smallness, in its complication- without breaking down' (page
37). The cause of his plight is his unbridled idealism and the `twin
halves' of his torn coat a metaphor for the irrevocably
splintered halves of his nature. With his ideals in tatters, he
takes flight from the brutal, brutish world determined to regain his
world of dreams.
Blaise has created a diminished Apollo greatly reduced in status as
befits the common world of today. Apollo, god of archery, prophecy,
medicine, poetry and music and protector of the Muses is always
represented as the highest type of masculine beauty and grace [Webster's
New Twentieth Century Dictionary]
whereas Blaise arms his hero with a can of insecticidal spray and
deprives him of insight or foresight and of any genuine capacity to
heal or to protect. Mythological heroes undergo trials and perform
great feats and so it is with Blaise's hero albeit on a
miniscule scale. However, due to this hero's lack of resilience
and fortitude in the face of adversity he is doomed to failure. He
is alone, despised and misunderstood in his desire to transcend the
ugliness of the world with its inherent violence and chaos and his
lofty ideals and artistic temperament render him incapable of
effectively dealing with ignorance and savagery.
The understanding is that the dreamer is a highly sensitive being, a
seeker of beauty and harmony and that his world is fragile and
ephemeral as opposed to the material world which is a hard, harsh,
heartless place inhabited by uncivilized creatures whose sole
interest is in their physical survival.
In this most poignant story Blaise has fashioned a stripped-down
hero for today. He has stripped him of nobility of purpose and of
the gift to enlighten and, what's more he has stripped him of
any illusions in his potential for either. The very antithesis of
glorious Apollo returning triumphant to sacred Parnassus Blaise's
hero is an anguished, disillusioned man whose refusal to adjust to
the tangible world sends him scurrying back to his mountain refuge in
shame.
-- A.O. Lovejoy's `The Great Chain of Being'