How to Read Literature Like a Professor

by Thomas C. Foster

  In her Beloved, Morrison makes even greater use of the symbolic implications of baptism and drowning. When Paul D. and the chain gang escape from the prison, they do so during a flood of biblical proportions by diving down under the mud below their cell doors and swimming, as one being, up through the muck and the mud, emerging into new lives. Later (chronologically, although it takes place previously in the narrative), when Beloved makes her appearance, she emerges from water. On this, more in a bit. When Sethe gives birth to Denver, she does so in a canoe, for heaven’s sake, and on the Ohio River no less. Now that particular body of water is significant in the novel, separating as it does slaveholding Kentucky from abolitionist Ohio. Ohio may not be much more hospitable to black folks in other ways, but at least they aren’t slaves there. So to enter the river on the south side and climb out on the p. 159 north, or even to cross it, is to emerge from a kind of death into a new life.

  So when writers baptize a character they mean death, rebirth, new identity?

  Generally, yes. But we need to be a little careful here. Baptism can mean a host of things, of which rebirth is only one. Literal rebirth—surviving a deadly situation—is certainly a part of it, just as symbolic rebirth is the point of the sacrament of baptism, in which taking the new believer completely underwater causes him to die out of his old self and to be reborn in his identity as a follower of Christ. It has always seemed to me that the whole business probably ties in with some cultural memory of Noah’s flood, of the whole world drowning and then this small remnant being set down on dry land to restore life to earth, cleansed of the sin and pollution that had marked human life right before the flood. Seen this way, baptism is a sort of reenactment on a very small scale of that drowning and restoration of life. Of course, I’m not a biblical scholar and may therefore be miles off base. Still, it’s certainly true that baptism is itself a symbolic act and that there’s nothing inherent in the act that makes a person more religious or causes God to take notice. It’s not as if this is an activity universally practiced among the world’s religions, or even among the big three Western religions.

  So in a literary work, does submersion in water always signify baptism?

  Well, it isn’t always anything. “Always” and “never” aren’t good words in literary studies. Take rebirth. Does it represent baptism? If you mean, Is it spiritual, then we can say, sometimes. Sometimes, though, it may just signify birth, a new start, largely stripped of spiritual significance.

  Let’s take my old standby D. H. Lawrence. (In a passage of Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom thinks of Shakespeare that he p. 160 has a quote for every day of the year. He could have added that Lawrence has a symbolic situation for all those days.) In “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” (1922), he has a young woman, Mabel, nearly drown, rescued at the last moment by the local doctor. Her family horse farm has been sold off after her father’s death, and although she’s been little more than a drudge in the family structure, she can’t bear to leave and go to the only place, a manor house, that will take her in. So she cleans the gravestone of her long-dead mother (clearly indicating her intent to join Mom) and walks into the nearby pond. When young Dr. Fergusson sees her go under, he races in to save her, nearly dying in the process as she pulls both of them under. He manages with some difficulty to get her above water again, to carry her to safety and generally to care for her, which is clearly a first for both of them. Here’s where things get messy, though. The doctor brings her forth from her watery bed. She is coated not with clean water but with slimy, smelly, rather disgusting fluid. When she awakens, she has been cleaned up and wrapped in a blanket, under which she’s as naked as, well, the day she was born. In fact, it is the day she is born. Or reborn. And if you’re going to be born, you may need a doctor in attendance (although he usually doesn’t have to dive in with you, to the relief of mothers everywhere), and there’s going to be all that amniotic fluid and afterbirth, and after that cleaning and a receiving blanket and the whole bit.

  So what does she do with this brand-new life of hers?

  Tell young Fergusson “I love you,” a thought which has never occurred to either of them until this moment. And his reborn self thinks it’s a satisfactory idea, even though he’s never found her attractive until this moment. But she’s a brand-new person, and so is he, and these new selves find something in each other the old ones, limited by their associations with the rest of her family, couldn’t possibly find. Is it spiritual? That probably depends on what you think about posp. 161sessing a brand-new self. It’s not overtly religious. On the other hand, almost nothing happens in Lawrence that doesn’t seem to me to be deeply spiritual, even if it’s in fairly mystifying ways.

  So when a character drowns, what does that mean?

  Oh, they die. Remember me mentioning Iris Murdoch earlier? Given half the chance, she’d drown the Seventh Fleet. If there’s water in one of her novels, somebody’s going to drown. In The Unicorn (1963), she has a character nearly drown in a bog, in order to have a cosmic vision, and then be saved only to have the vision fade before it can do him any good. Later, she has two characters drown in separate but related incidents, or at least one drown and the other fall over a cliff by the sea. And Flannery O’Connor, along the same lines only more peculiar, has a story called “The River” (1955) in which a little boy, having watched baptisms joining people to God on a Sunday, goes back to the river the next day to join God on his own. Yes, he does, sad to say. And Jane Hamilton, in A Map of the World (1994), has her main character allow a child to drown through negligence, then she has to deal with the consequences throughout the remainder of the novel. Not to mention John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), in which Rabbit Angstrom’s wife, Janice, drunkenly drowns their child while trying to bathe it. Each of these instances is particular. It’s a little like Tolstoy says at the beginning of Anna Karenina about families: All happy families are the same, but every unhappy one has its own story. The rebirths/baptisms have a lot of common threads, but every drowning is serving its own purpose: character revelation, thematic development of violence or failure or guilt, plot complication or denouement.

  To return to Morrison’s character Beloved rising from the water, back from the dead. On the personal level, the river may be the Styx, the river of the dead in the Greek underworld that the spirits crossed to enter Hades. And it certainly functions p. 162 that way: she has returned from the dead, literally. But the river stands for something else as well. In its small way, it is the middle passage, that watery sojourn that, one way and another, took the lives of millions, as Morrison says in the novel’s epigraph. Beloved has died when her mother kills her rather than allow her to be taken back across the river into slavery. The drowning imagery is not merely personal here but cultural and racial. Not every writer can pull that one off, but Morrison can.

  Like baptism, drowning has plenty to tell us in a story. So when your character goes underwater, you have to hold your breath. Just, you know, till you see her come back up.

  19 – Geography Matters . . .

  p. 163 LET’S GO ON VACATION. You say okay and then ask your first question, which is . . . Who’s paying? Which month? Can we get time off? No. None of those.

  Where?

  That’s the one. Mountains or beaches, St. Paul or St. Croix, canoeing or sailing, the Mall of America or the National Mall. You know you have to ask because otherwise I might take you to some little trout stream twenty-seven miles from a dirt road when you really want to watch the sun go down from a white sand beach.

  Writers have to ask that question, too, so we readers should consider its implications. In a sense, every story or poem is a vacation, and every writer has to ask, every time, Where is this p. 164 one taking place? For some, it’s not that tough. William Faulkner often said he set the majority of his work on his “little postage stamp of ground,” his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. After a few novels, he knew that ground so intimately he didn’t even have to think about it anymore. Thom
as Hardy did the same thing with his mythic Wessex, the southwest corner of England—Devon and Dorset and Wiltshire. And we feel that those novels and stories couldn’t be set anywhere but where they are, that those characters couldn’t say the things they say if they were uprooted and planted in, say, Minnesota or Scotland. They’d say different things and perform different acts. Most writers, though, are less tied to one place than Faulkner or Hardy, so they have to give it some thought.

  And we readers have to give their decisions some thought as well. What does it mean to the novel that its landscape is high or low, steep or shallow, flat or sunken? Why did this character die on a mountaintop, that one on the savanna? Why is this poem on the prairie? Why does Auden like limestone so much? What, in other words, does geography mean to a work of literature?

  Would everything be too much?

  Okay, not in every work, but frequently. In fact, more often than you think. Just think about the stories that really stay with you: where would they be without geography. The Old Man and the Sea can only take place in the Caribbean, of course, but more particularly in and around Cuba. The place brings with it history, interaction between American and Cuban culture, corruption, poverty, fishing, and of course baseball. Any boy and any older man might, I guess, take a raft trip down a river. It could happen. But a boy, Huck Finn, and an older man, the escaped slave Jim, and their raft could only make the story we know as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by being on that particular river, the Mississippi, traveling through that particup. 165lar landscape and those particular communities, at a given moment in history. It matters when they reach Cairo and the Ohio empties into the big river; it matters when they reach the Deep South, because Jim is running away in the worst possible direction. The great threat to a slave was that he might be sold down the river, where things got progressively worse the farther south you went, and he’s floating straight into the teeth of the monster.

  And that’s geography?

  Sure, what else?

  I don’t know. Economics? Politics? History?

  So what’s geography, then?

  I usually think of hills, creeks, deserts, beaches, degrees latitude. Stuff like that.

  Precisely. Geography: hills, etc. Stuff: economics, politics, history. Why didn’t Napoleon conquer Russia? Geography. He ran into two forces he couldn’t overcome: a ferocious Russian winter and a people whose toughness and tenacity in defending their homeland matched the merciless elements. And that savagery, like the weather, is a product of the place they come from. It takes a really tough people to overcome not merely one Russian winter but hundreds of them. Anthony Burgess has a novel about the Russian winter defeating the French emperor, Napoleon Symphony (1974), in which he brings to life, better than anyone, that geography and that weather: the vastness of it, the emptiness, the hostility to the invading (and then, retreating) troops, the total absence of any possibility of comfort or safety or solace.

  So what’s geography? Rivers, hills, valleys, buttes, steppes, glaciers, swamps, mountains, prairies, chasms, seas, islands, people. In poetry and fiction, it may be mostly people. Robert Frost routinely objected to being called a nature poet, since by his count he only had three or four poems without a person in them. Literary geography is typically about humans inhabiting p. 166 spaces, and at the same time the spaces that inhabit humans. Who can say how much of us comes from our physical surroundings? Writers can, at least in their own works, for their own purposes. When Huck meets the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords or sees the duke and the dauphin tarred and feathered by the townspeople, he sees geography in action. Geography is setting, but it’s also (or can be) psychology, attitude, finance, industry—anything that place can forge in the people who live there.

  Geography in literature can also be more. It can be revelatory of virtually any element in the work. Theme? Sure. Symbol? No problem. Plot? Without a doubt.

  In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator spends the opening pages describing a landscape and a day as bleak as any in literature. We want to get to the titular house, of course, to meet the last, appalling members of the Usher clan, but Poe doesn’t want us there before he’s prepared us. He treats us to “a singularly dreary tract of country,” to “a few rank sedges” and “white trunks of decayed trees,” to “the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn,” so that we’re ready for the “bleak walls” of the house with its “vacant eye-like windows” and its “barely perceptible fissure” zigzagging its way down the wall right down to “the sullen waters of the tarn.” Never perhaps have landscape and architecture and weather (it’s a particularly dingy afternoon) merged as neatly with mood and tone to set a story in motion. We are nervous and dismayed by this description even before anything has happened, so of course when things do begin happening, when we meet Roderick Usher, one of the creepiest characters to ever grace the pages of a story, he can’t give us the creeps because we already have them. But he sure can make them worse, and he does. Actually, the scariest thing Poe could do to us is to put a perfectly normal human specimen in that setting, p. 167 where no one could remain safe. And that’s one thing landscape and place—geography—can do for a story.

  Geography can also define or even develop character. Take the case of two contemporary novels. In Barbara Kingsolver’s Bean Trees (1988), the main character and narrator reaches late adolescence in rural Kentucky and realizes she has no options in that world. That condition is more than social; it grows out of the land. Living is hard in tobacco country, where the soil yields poor crops and hardly anyone makes much of a go of things, where the horizon is always short, blocked by mountains. The narrator feels her figurative horizons are also circumscribed by what seem like local certainties: early pregnancy and an unsatisfactory marriage to a man who will probably die young. She decides to get away, driving a 1955 Volkswagen to Tucson. On her way she changes her name from Marietta (or Missy) to Taylor Greer. As you know by now, there’s rebirth when there’s a renaming, right? Out west she meets new people, encounters a completely alien but inviting landscape, becomes the de facto mother of a three-year-old Native American girl she calls Turtle, and finds herself involved in the shelter movement for Central American refugees. She wouldn’t have done any of these things in claustrophobic old Pittman, Kentucky. What she discovers in the West are big horizons, clear air, brilliant sunshine, and open possibilities. She goes, in other words, from a closed to an open environment, and she seizes the opportunities for growth and development. Another character in another novel might find the heat oppressive, the sun destructive, and space vacant, but she wouldn’t be Taylor Greer. In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Milkman Dead grows up without ever learning who he really is until he leaves his Michigan home and travels back to the family home country in eastern Pennsylvania and Virginia. In the hills and hollows (not unlike the ones Taylor Greer must flee to breathe) he p. 168 finds a sense of roots, a sense of responsibility and justice, a capacity for atonement, and a generosity of spirit he never knew before. He loses nearly everything of his associated with the modern world in the process—Chevrolet, fine clothes, watch, shoes—but they prove to be the currency with which he buys his real worth. At one point direct contact with the earth (he’s sitting on the ground and leaning back against a tree) provides him with an intuition that saves his life. He responds just in time to ward off a murderous attack. He could have done none of those things had he stayed in his familiar geography; only by leaving “home” and traveling to his real home can he find his real self.

  It’s not too much to say, I think, that geography can be character. Take Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam masterpiece, Going After Cacciato. The main character, Paul Berlin, admits that the American soldiers don’t really know the land, don’t understand what they’re up against. And it’s a forbidding place: dry or wet, but always hot, full of microbe-filled water and leeches the size of snakes, rice paddies and mountains and shell craters. And tunnels. The tunnels turn the land
itself into the enemy, since the land hides the Vietcong fighters only to deliver them virtually anywhere, producing surprise attacks and sudden death. The resulting terror gives the land a face of menace in the minds of the young Americans. When one of their number is killed by a sniper, they order the destruction of the nearby village, then sit on a hill and watch as shell after shell, alternating high explosives and incendiary white phosphorus, pulverize the village. A cockroach couldn’t survive. Why do they do it? It isn’t a military target, only a village. Did the bullet come from the village? Not exactly, although the shooter was either a VC villager or a soldier sheltered by the village. Is he still there? No, the place is deserted when they look for revenge. You could make the claim that they go after the community of people who housed the enemy, and certainly there’s an elep. 169ment of that. But the real target is the physical village—as place, as center of mystery and threat, as alien environment, as generic home of potential enemies and uncertain friends. The squad pours its fear and anger at the land into this one small, representative piece of it: if they can’t overcome the larger geography, they can at least express their rage against the smaller.