Geometry and Music: Rita Dove's 'Fifth Sunday'

Abstract

Abstract The eight short stories in the collection are considered as a short story sequence or ensemble. They are linked with Joyce's Dubliners in terms of epiphany and naturalistic motifs in an analysis of the effect of socially prescriptive worlds upon the African-American protagonists. The relationships of ideology and form through the symbolic functions of geometry and music as organizing principles are discussed. 'The Vibraphone' is compared with Joyce's 'The Dead' on the theme of belatedness, and, in enacting the conflicts between verbal narrative and musical expression, is read as metafiction. Rita Dove's collection of short fiction published in 1985,[1] takes its title, as she has explained in an interview, from the idea of there being some leeway, some place for individual expression, even in the most regulated forms of institutional control: Fifth Sunday is also the title of the lead story and refers to those occasional months where there are five Sundays. In the church I attended when I was growing up, fifth Sunday was youth Sunday, and the entire service -- all except the sermon -- was conducted with the church youth. Using that title for the book was an intuitive decision, one I can't really articulate -- I suppose there is the sense of a fifth Sunday as something special -- once in a blue moon -- as well as the idea of being in control only occasionally, and in strict accordance with the social rules.[2] She went on to say that the eight short stories all 'feature individuals who are trying to be recognised as human beings in a world that lives to pigeonhole and forget' (p. 165). Her interest in the possibilities for individual expression of spirit within very socially prescriptive worlds unites the stories thematically: their variety of form is an index of the diversity of that expression. 'Fifth Sunday', the lead story, moves to its concluding negative epiphany with a Joycean assurance. Dove herself invites the analogy in stating that several of the stories 'are fairly traditional, a la Joyce's Dubliners' (p.164). 'Fifth Sunday' deploys naturalistic motifs to track and drag the romantic desires of Valerie, the teenage protagonist, within the confines of an urban American black church. As in 'Araby' in Dubliners, 'Fifth Sunday' mirrors the painfully limited environment against which youthful fantasy presses, but Dove is ideologically acute in revealing that Valerie's romantic longings and aspirations are not an escape, but the most marked internalization of the narrow constrictions of her social group. The revelation of the conclusion is how readily Valerie is re-absorbed into the petty downside of her society. The preparation of effect to make such a conclusion both an unpleasant shock and also inevitably proved, is finely done. In this tightly controlled narrative the imagery which acquires a structural value is that of geometry. The opening sentence condenses the essential framework with a poetic economy: 'The church stood on a hill all to itself, at the intersection of Prospect and Maple' (p. 3). The church is the focus of all Valerie's social aspirations, and it suggests a fine vantage point, exclusivity, with nature and culture amicably combined and coded in the names of the streets. However, it becomes apparent that the parts of the area available to blacks, even relatively prosperous respectable ones such as Valerie's father, are rundown and decayed. The park, in which 'birds sat as if drugged in the trees' (p. 4), is a geometric construct which facilitates transit. The second paragraph lays down the ironic markers precisely: Catercorner from the church was a park. It was everything a park should be: green, shaded, quiet. Stout black poles marked its perimeter at regular intervals, and strung between each pole were two chains, one at waist-level and another six inches from the ground. The park itself was segmented by two concrete paths that cut it on the diagonals, like a huge envelope. …