The door opens after a considerable amount of force. It’s
been a while, but everything is familiar. Joan pushes through into the
apartment. Everything is exactly as it always was, although something didn’t
seem quite right – something in the air had changed.
‘I’ve got some whisky, darling,’ she said, allowing her
voice to project through the rooms. The sweetness was discordant with the dank
air. Did Jack ever open windows anymore? Joan moved towards the view of the
apartment, watching the city alive in the darkness. The click of heels and hum
of traffic was only audible after the window had creaked from its hinges. The
fresh night air would do some good, she thought.
A bang turned her attention to the bedroom. It sounded quite
heavy.
‘Jack,’ Joan called. There was no reply. For some reason,
she wasn’t disheartened. Pushing the door to, not much was visible in the dark,
but one thing was for certain. With the curtains closed, the light of the moon
and the streetlights created dim visibility, but it was enough. Her heart
dropped and she walked over to him. Some sort of confirmation was needed. She
kicked something out the way, a bottle of unknown origin.
No pulse. His slender skin was underneath her delicate hand,
so warm, still so full of life. Joan reached over his body and embraced him.
From deep within her something stirred. It’s not weird until he’s cold. The more
she thought about it, the more it made sense.
A writer may make their characters suffer for a number of reasons. The first
most notably is probably because the story would otherwise be quite dull. A
character who cannot overcome any obstacles or be affected by any situation
would not make for an interesting read. In 'Don't Look Now', for example, the
main character John suffers because he does not believe a word the two psychic
sisters say and gets protective over his wife. Later on he thinks he sees his
wife when she's actually gone back to England and this makes him suffer because
he thinks everyone is covering up the fact that she's there. Ultimately because
he doesn't listen he suffers the consequences and gets killed, but imagine if
John never suffered in this story. How dull would it be then?
Likewise in Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings, how could the story be so appealing if no one suffered in the
slightest? Would the elves be able to tell a story of the suffering of the free
peoples of Middle-Earth and the great division between dwarves and men, for
example? If not, that would totally undermine the significance of Legolas and
Gimli’s friendship created by the end of the tale. If the Fellowship of the Ring
was never broken apart and Boromir and Gandalf never got killed, the story
would be considerably less dangerous and just a bit boring. Suffering creates
interest amongst danger and insight. Suffering is necessary in characters for a
good, engaging story.
In a way, I agree that writers should be invisible, to an extent at least.
When J. K. Rowling wrote The Cuckoo's Calling under the pseudonym Robert
Galbraith, she said, "It has been wonderful to publish without hype or
expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name." In
a way, I believe it is good for critically-acclaimed authors to do this so then
we can see how the readers react to different authors instead of authors as
industry. There would have been a much bigger reaction had Rowling not used an
alias, but by being invisible, you can test how decent your writing actually
is.
Likewise, with Lee Child (which is really his pen name), he is able to lead
a relatively quiet life outside of literary fiction with his real name being
Jim Grant. Unless people in the street recognised his face, there's no reason
why he should have hoards of people coming up to him and praising his skill and
endeavours. By being invisible, as it were, in the public eye, Grant can go
about quite happily, normal life in one hand and a semi-celebrity life in the
other.
Equally, if I mention Daniel Handler, you wouldn’t
necessarily know to whom I was referring to. Maybe an old school acquaintance or
something; however, Daniel Handler is none other than our very own Lemony
Snicket, who has an entire life as a fictional character, giving Handler
privacy under this fanciful façade. I believe writers should be invisible if
they can do so.
Because this is a text message to me, I don't think making it into a poem can really be considered a letter to the world. Some things are private and are closed off from the world for a reason - it isn't an invitation to take anything and turn it into a piece of work.
As we have seen in ‘The Swimmer’, we can draw up some pretty incredibly similarities
between the protagonist and John Cheever. For one, they both turned to alcohol
as some form of escapism from something in their lives that was offering them
deep internal conflict; however, is this really a bad thing? In the case of
writing from experience, then there should be no problem because it makes the
story all the more believable, adding validity to the character’s life. ‘He
needed a drink’, comes up again and again after an obstacle of some sort
arises.
If Cheever’s alcoholism wasn’t known to us as the reader, then would that
affect our reading? Some critics, like Barthes believe that the author doesn’t
exist after he has written something. The death of the author happens, making
the story something to be explained in any other means by the reader – the
possibilities are endless. By linking an author to a text, he says, you limit
your reading of it, and I do think some people are in danger of doing this.
In The Canterbury Tales, for
example, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ employs a protagonist of a rapist knight, on
a quest to discover what women really desire. There is an episode within
Chaucer’s life which still remains unclear as to whether he was a rapist in one
instance, but does this undermine the tale and take us away from the narrative,
even though it’s a female voice? ‘By verray force he rafte her maidenhed’ –
this knight raped a maid and yet to put Chaucer’s life into the tale would take
away from it.
We will remember them, as we always will. We will remember the life that we
once had; a life of familiarity, kindness and long-preserved happiness. A life
that changed after one day. One day and everything was different. That familiar
comfort so warming to the soul, gone forever.
Looking around at all the faces, the turmoil is clear. There are those who
will not move on, refusal within their eyes; faces streaming with tears days on
end, wanting to relive the past. Look at Gatsby: you can't do that, however
incredulously you seem to thinks so. There are also those who have incredibly already
moved on, realising with a gracious smile that they had their time and it was
good while it lasted. Lingering is not worth the pain.
There are also faces like mine; those who don't know what to do with
themselves. The ones who have experienced both possibilities and ended up back
in the comfort of square one. Familiarity is a beautiful thing and it will
always be attractive, and yet at the same time oddly repellent.
The kettle was whistling on the hob and the waft of cake met
Howard as he stared at the empty wall on the other side of the room. He had
decided to put up some shelving units to give the room a little something. If
not just for storage then Howard would know if he could accomplish something at
his age.
Mary came through with a cup of tea.
“I know that look,” she said, handing him his mug and taking
a precarious sip of her overly-full tea. “What is going through your head?”
So he told her and took a large gulp of his brew. It was
delightfully refreshing to his throat. He thought that maybe his voice was
going.
“I’m going to take a hammer and start in a minute.”
In half an hour, Howard found himself rummaging for supplies
in the garage. There was plenty of old bits and pieces of debris, for the
garage had lost its initial purpose and was instead serving as a basis for
where items go to die. The toolbox was readily accessible, had been for years,
and Howard armed himself with a hammer. Like being reunited with an old friend,
it was comfortable in his hand.
Back in the living room, Mary had moved the furniture to the
other side of the room. She helped to bring Howard items from the garage as he
needed them. The hammer proved effective as together they constructed the
shelves. The overall slant was somehow endearing.
I wrote these few paragraphs
based upon John Cheever’s writing style that we looked at in class. Having to
choose a main character and an item, a setting, an objective, something that went
both right and wrong and an overall theme, we started free-writing our way on
this little episode.
Such a style is indicative
of Cheever and it was said that he has been described as “uniquely American”,
although what I found was quite the comparison to Roald Dahl’s short stories. In
particular, ‘The Way up to Heaven’, where the religiously punctual Mrs. Foster
leaves her husband stuck in their home lift for six weeks.
‘her whole body arrested
right in the middle of all this hurry to turn the key and get into the house,
and she waited--five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten seconds, she waited. The way
she was standing there, with her head in the air and the body so tense, it
seemed as though she were listening for the repetition of some sound that she
had heard a moment before from a place far away inside the house. Yes--quite
obviously she was listening.’
Here she is listening out
for her husband, making sure she has a chance to escape from him because she
can hear he is trapped in the lift.
The character of Mrs. Foster
reminded me very much of Irene in Cheever’s ‘The Enormous Radio’. Her fixation
upon the radio, even though she describes it as ‘“. . . so horrible . . . so
dreadful . . .”’ when she can hear other families and their imperfections serves
as one of the underlying messages for the short story. In my own version, I
decided to have a sense of hope running through it in the form of the
companionship and teamwork that Mary and Howard have for one another. Even
though their shelving units don’t end up exactly perfect, there is still that
element of hope that they have achieved something and maybe will achieve more
together.
