Media, Mimesis, and the Figure of the Orphan in William Carlos Williams’s Life Along the Passaic River

Abstract

finest short stories are those that raise, in short, one particular man or woman, from that Gehenna, newspapers, where at last all men are equal, to distinction of being an individual. To be responsive not to ordinances of herd (Russia-like) but to extraordinary responsibility of being person.-William Carlos Williams, A Beginning on Short Story (Notes)He judges not as judge judges but as sun falling round helpless thing.-Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of GrassThe world's an orphan's home.-Marianne Moore, Distrust of MeritsIn his 1938 short-story collection Life Along Passaic River, Wil- liams emphasizes discrepancy between realist verisimilitude and modernist self-reflexivity to dramatize plight of poor due to general economic conditions, particularly through metaphor of orphan. In addition, figurations of family, both positive and negative, offer an imaginative survey of possibilities and pitfalls for remedying orphan's predica- ment. The signs of personal dignity and creativity that permeate Williams's collec- tion of stories testify to capacity and culture of marginalized people. Such accomplishments are all more admirable for existing in face of being cut off, or orphaned, from beneficial resources that ought to be available. Williams's narrative map of Passaic reveals how such achievements help people cope with losses symbolized by orphanhood. In what follows, several stories will be singled out as figuring orphan (the first date of publication follows each title in parentheses): title story (1934), Girl with Pimply (1934), Use of Force (1933), Jean Beicke (1933), A Face of Stone (1935), Under Greenwood Tree (1938), and World's End (1938).In title story, which also opens volume, Williams draws reader into his fictive world by following contours of Passaic River and variety of human activities in relation to it.1 The syntax of opening sentence pays hom- age to landscape by imitating river's drift, but also carefully establishes urban setting of collection by calling attention to factory on river as well as children playing along river's banks. The visual appeal of first sentence has cinematic intensity, zooming in on a spot of canoe filled by small boy who no doubt made it (FD 109). Williams also includes soundtrack to his midstream portrait when he alludes to a sound of work going on there from Manhattan Rubber Co. By carefully situating his reader in this richly elaborated world, Williams sets stage for participant-observer ethos of much of his collection and conjures vivid reality.2 In Robert Gish's words, the narrator [ . . . ] is so moved to empathy that he passes beyond voyeur to partici- pant through telling and retelling of their lives (66).At same time, in very next paragraph Williams reminds his readers of mediated quality of his portrait by focusing on children's cry of Paper! (FD 109). In doing so, Williams unites his commitment to local, historicized realism with self-reflexive form of representation common in modernist writing. He makes readers notice variety of material modes or media (visual as well as linguistic) available for depicting Passaic. And he draws attention to his own man- ner of representation, formal techniques for rendering that world. By uniting what Stephen Halliwell calls mimesis as referential imitation to mimesis as per- spectival world-making in opening scenes of this first story in collection, Williams invites his readers both to experience world of Passaic, New Jersey, first-hand through an absorbingly realistic verisimilitude and to notice his artis- tic creation of that world through modernist self-consciousness about form (5).3 In other words, realist mimesis is generally content-based, while modernist mimesis is more oriented toward process of creation necessary for representa- tion. …