Lie Down Research Articles

“When will we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes?” A Reader-Response Analysis of William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness

This paper highlights the literary achievement of William Styron’s (1925-2006) debut novel Lie Down in Darkness (1951) from a reader-response approach. The novel’s plot, characters, and themes evoke relatable emotions in the readers’ minds. By studying the emotional developments of the protagonist Peyton, through her thoughts, words, and symbols, this paper examines the emotional response the novel’s aestheticism provokes in readers. The research gives a brief background and explains the main premises of the reader-response theory according to the American critic Louise M. Rosenblatt. The study elucidates the tools of imagery and symbolism used by Styron to make readers reflect on their personal experiences in relation to issues like sin, guilt, loss, nostalgia, and failure. Through an exploration of the characters, themes, and narrative structure, this analysis reveals the novel’s capacity to resonate on a deeply personal and individual level. The Loftis family’s complex dynamics and internal struggles serve as a mirror through which readers reflect on their own experiences, forming unique connections and interpretations. The narrative’s shifting perspectives and temporal shifts invite readers to actively construct meaning, further fostering a dynamic reader-text relationship.

Research on the Optimization of Labor Law Adjustment System based on the Phenomenon of Youth "Lie Down"

"Lie Down" is a "temporary" psychological adjustment mechanism and "tactical" behavior adjustment strategy for some youth groups to cope with the dilemma of non-creative labor. As a youth subcultural phenomenon, "Lie Down" is characterized by a series of unique psychological representations, value contexts, discourse narratives and image positioning. The formation of "Lie Down" has deep interest motivations and the reasons of the times, and it is a group portrait reflection of the plight of the times faced by contemporary youth. Therefore, this paper proposes research on the optimization of the labor law adjustment system based on the phenomenon of "Lie Down" of youth, which can effectively curb the negative impact caused by the utilitarian tendency of labor, make labor itself a kind of happiness for contemporary youth, and let the younger generation in labor. To achieve positive and healthy development in the experience of happiness.

Set at Random: The Book that Wouldn't Lie Down by Declan Dunne

Reviewed by: Set at Random: The Book that Wouldn't Lie Down by Declan Dunne Mason Whitehorn Powell (bio) SET AT RANDOM: THE BOOK THAT WOULDN'T LIE DOWN, by Declan Dunne. CreateSpace: Self-Published, 2018. 287 pp. $12.00. I would like to know what Declan Dunne set out to say by writing Set at Random. His novel meanders a bit alongside its protagonist, Set Wright, beginning in Pendleton, Texas, during the "'29 cotton-picking season'" (1). This specific seasonal detail, like many others, does not color the novel so much as it hangs undeveloped. Intriguing subject matter and an engaging plot struggle to develop a clear path. What begins as a bildungsroman, where bankers take farmhouses from hapless families, develops into a battle against the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice's attempt to censor James Joyce's Ulysses. Wright relocates to New York City, where he is taken under the wing of an Irish-American family, the Finnegans, and finds himself working for Bennett Cerf and Donald Knopfler of Random House and [End Page 376] their attorney Morris Ernst.1 Thus: Set (works) at Random (House), filing paperwork for the imminent court case—United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—and is eventually sent to Paris to meet with the Joyces and their coterie as the verdict is reached. Dunne's story searches for a sense of purpose and direction without clear realization, which mirrors the nature and execution of its protagonist's journey. Dunne makes it overtly clear that this is a novel of parallelism: if Wright, with his Texas mettle, did not envision the foreclosing banker and artistic censor as one and the same, then his evolution from admitted ignorance to the center of the Joycean controversy by happenstance would not have occurred. "Make sure they're heard—the people they're trying to silence," a mentor says to Wright early in the text in Texas (21). The repetition of circumstance and patterns is not simply a trick in the Ulysses playbook appropriated by Dunne but rather a surface-level theme of which Wright becomes consciously aware, and it consistently pops up in dialogue from beginning to end. Here are examples: "You remind me of Joyce." "Who's she?" [Wright asks, now in New York City]. "James Joyce. His book, Ulysses, takes a lot from Homer's Odyssey. So people read one and refer to the other trying to find connections or where Joyce has reflected the story in Ulysses. That's if they can get their hands on a copy of Ulysses. You have found, Set, at an early age that life repeats itself in strange ways. I think you might have the mind of an artist." "I don't know about that, Mr. Finnegan. What do you mean, if they can get their hands on a copy of Ulysses? Is it nearly sold out?" "No," Mr. Finnegan answered. "It's banned." "You mean they won't let him talk?" (42) A question worth asking is whether the novel is more about the battle for publication rights to Joyce's book or the agency of its protagonist's life. Wright seems to be at the mercy of greater cosmic forces that guide him, and whether this is coincidence or randomness, it really is up to the author. If Wright was removed from the world Dunne created, Joyce's novel would become unbanned anyway. His presence, however, highlights the reality of both small and large figures who advocated for Joyce and fought to defend Ulysses. Even if the novel is heavy-handed, it does provide a unique perspective on the ontological divide between reality and fiction: that words and ideas, like people, must be protected when threatened. How Dunne goes about this is not seamless and epic, as in Ulysses, yet the author's prose is clear and his ideas straightforward. The novel is an engaging read if approached with an expectation that it does not shed new light on Joycean scholarship but instead refracts it through the eyes of a boy from Texas on a white-knight mission. [End Page 377] Set at Random lacks the sensuousness, mental entanglement, and iconoclasm that...

Heard-Hoard by Atsuro Riley

Reviewed by: Heard-Hoard by Atsuro Riley Julian Gerwitz Atsuro Riley Heard-Hoard Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 2021. 96 pages. IF YOU WANT to understand what the poet Atsuro Riley is up to, start with the title of his second collection: Heard-Hoard. This could be the name of a hymnary, a mystical almanac, or even a book of spells; the phrase promises a great store of sound and story, gathered up through generations. Sonically, its half-rhyming Old English monosyllables preview the strong, dense music for which Riley is known. Linking the two words into a kenning also immediately positions Riley in a poetic lineage from Gerard Manley Hopkins—one thinks of his poem entitled “Heaven-Haven,” for instance—to Seamus Heaney. (In Heaney’s “North,” we find the admonition: “Lie down / in the word-hoard . . .”) Most of all, the title unabashedly lies outside the naming conventions of much contemporary poetry; this book will not be like others, the title announces. Paradoxically, the book is no less unique for the fact that Riley returns here to the same terrain as his much-lauded first book, Romey’s Order (2010), which was set in the South Carolina low country where Riley grew up. Some characters recur, and two poems repeat in much-revised form. But these are profoundly different books. Romey’s Order was grounded in named geographies, a defined child-narrator (the titular Romey), the identifiable biographies of his ex-soldier father and Japanese mother, and specific memories. Heard-Hoard is far stranger, sparer, and more abstract, with more universal claims about the human condition and the powers of language. Riley is like a painter who increasingly allows color, form, and texture to be his guide, as he becomes less concerned with making the subject or the narrative explicit to the viewer and more interested in creating universal sensory, emotional, and philosophical effects. The first poem in the collection, “Crack-ler,” declares that the book will aim straight for “What came to seem to him the core // (the pulsing core),” which is “a lit / meat-mesh of heards” and “tales he’d gnawed.” The book moves deep into this “pulsing core,” a mythic realm that is hot with dirt, flesh, “meat-mesh,” and the irreducible, luminous “ember-words” of his experience. What Riley means by “the core” is visible in the brief poem “Chorus: Seed,” a snapshot of a child: “The knee-boy / bent to his daddy’s shoes / spit-gobbetting and rag-shammying // hard for shine.” This scene may seem to be generic, in a sense—with no location, temporal markers, or contextual details—but it conveys the feeling of both an intensely specific personal memory and the beginning of a myth. Riley compresses several valences into the first two lines. The boy is made into a worker down on his knees polishing shoes—and also a supplicant before the absent father, symbolized by “daddy’s shoes.” Riley’s use of the “knee” evokes the forces that interrupt the innocence of childhood—being thrown over a parent’s knee to be spanked, or even the racist playground chants using the phrase “dirty knees” to target children of Asian origin. (Heard-Hoard, like Romey’s Order, contains powerful descriptions of anti-Asian racism and violence in the communities where Riley grew up.) Here, the “bent” child seems to be the grim axis around which this family’s life revolves, almost in the way that Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus centers on that boy’s brilliantly illuminated knee. Next, the actual task—polishing the shoes—is disaggregated into two components, rendered in Riley’s characteristic diction: turning the nouns “gobbet” (which can mean a small quantity of liquid) and “shammy” (a cloth of chamois leather) into verbs that can take a gerund form. In both cases, these coinages seem almost onomatopoetic of the actions they describe, with “shammying” calling up the rapid shimmying friction of the cloth polishing the shoes. These consonant-heavy phrases convey a jumpy anxiety to please, a twanging desire to do the task right. The stanza break suspends the actions in time for a moment, before three firm, monosyllabic punches end the poem. “Shine” is...

Dead, but Won’t Lie Down? Grammatical Gender among Norwegians

This paper examines grammatical gender from the sociolinguistic perspective. The question pursued is to what extent exponents of grammatical gender are tied indexically to identity categories. Building on literature and corpus data, I claim that within the Norwegian context, grammatical gender is associated with sociolinguistic dimensions such as the urban/rural distinction, political views, class, ethnicity. The traditional three-gender system is being replaced by a two-gender system in several dialects, resulting in the loss of the feminine gender. Indexical values associated with the feminine gender features are still valid, though, and some forms take on new pragmatic functions. Once grammatical gender is viewed through a sociolinguistic lens, with the agency of speakers being recognized, it becomes clear that it may not be fully understood without taking into account the context of interaction at a micro-level, and the sociohistorical characteristics of—for instance—regions with language contact at a macro-level.*

Pregnancy denied, pregnancy accepted

Pregnancy denied, pregnancy accepted Farisa Khalid H. C. Gildfind. Born Sleeping. Miami University Press, 2021. $20.81 pp. ISBN: 9781881163695 One of the most striking features of H. C. Gildfind's Born Sleeping is that it is written through second-person narration, a relatively unconventional narrative approach. One [End Page 299] comes across it, occasionally, in works like R. P. Warren's All the King's Men, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story "That Thing around Your Neck." Readers—I include myself—are so accustomed to the third-person omniscient or first-person narrator that when suddenly confronted with the presence of that "you" on the page, they might find themselves disarmed by its intimacy. I was. H. C. Gildfind is an Australian writer and academic. Born Sleeping is her second published work, following her collection of short stories, The Worry Front, published in 2018, which was also reviewed in this journal in June 2019. Born Sleeping has some of the gothic elements of the stories in The Worry Front. Gildfind's protagonists are unmoored, paranoid, and at times, unlikeable young people sailing into the early part of middle age. The Worry Front is a more stylistically complex work than Born Sleeping. A novella, this work has a more hermetic focus. Born Sleeping is the story of a woman coping with the family trauma of her sister-in-law's stillbirth. In the midst of this tragedy, the narrator struggles with her own anxieties regarding marriage and fertility. She is also a woman frustrated by the expectations of bourgeois gender roles and femininity in the twenty-first century. As the story of a woman's breakdown and her eventual emergence from that breakdown, Born Sleeping is a work conducive to the kind of intimacy that second-person narration brings. Gildfind uses the "you" address throughout to emphasize that the protagonist experiences as a sense of existence dictated from the outside, an effective narrative mode as she attempts to deal with the realities of inhabiting various roles: wife, dutiful in-law, sister, friend, and woman. Born Sleeping is a moving, impressionistic, and probing journey of grief and self-reflection. It is about a woman's struggle to come to terms with the complex relationships within her family, her identity and womanhood, her own body, and the nature of embodiment in what often seems like a digitally heightened, image-obsessed twenty-first century. The narrator of the story, a writer, recounts to the reader how she learned the news that her pregnant sister-in-law, Mel, experienced a stillbirth. Mel is married to Stefan, the brother of Ivan, the narrator's husband. One of the interesting aspects of marriage highlighted by Gildfind in the story is the lingering sense of insecurity that sometimes persists in a relationship when a spouse's family is particularly clannish. The narrator feels like the odd woman out in this attractive, seemingly perfect household of do-gooders. The story has a confessional, voyeuristic feel, as if we were reading journal entries. The narrator recounts, over various recollections, her relationship with Mel. On the surface, it is pleasant enough, but secretly, she can barely conceal her loathing, jealousy, and resentment. Mel is more attractive, more charismatic, more popular, and loved by everyone, even, worst of all, on social media, where a photo of Mel's pregnant belly garners over five hundred likes and ninety-six comments (9). The narrator conveys the insecurity and anger she feels at being outmatched by someone who revels in the attention she receives: "Mel was feeling powerful. … She was the bearer of the first grandchild. She knew the beauty and potency of her young, pregnant body" (9). One is reminded of the atavistic and primal feelings that women have felt, since time immemorial, of the expectations and burdens of fertility and motherhood. As a novel about pregnancy, Born Sleeping follows at the heels of other memorable stories that explore how women come to terms with pregnancy and their bodies, works such as Yōko Ogawa's "Pregnancy Diary" from [End Page 300] The Diving Pool: Three Novellas (2008...

William Styron in Mexico

To date, William Styron has published four novels: Lie Down in Darkness, 1951; The Long March, 1952; Set This House on Fire, 1960; and The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1967. This last novel won the P...

The Nonfiction of William Styron

The Nonfiction of William Styron Fred Hobson (bio) William Styron: Collected Nonfictionedited by James L. W. West iii (Random House, 2015. 656 pages. $35 pb) In this vast and immensely readable collection of a number of William Styron’s nonfiction—which includes essays, book reviews, occasional pieces, ventures into autobiography, and other forms of what might be called creative nonfiction—we see that Styron, if he hadn’t made it as a novelist, could have found great success as a reporter, op-ed columnist, memoirist, literary historian, and practitioner of various other literary callings. Most of these pieces, assembled by Styron’s biographer James L. W. West iii, saw earlier publication in the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and other publications, but a few others are published here for the first time. We have some of Styron’s best-known essays, “A Case of the Great Pox,” a chronicle of his fearful stay at age nineteen in a military hospital—because he had been misdiagnosed with a case of syphilis which turned out to be trench mouth—and “Havanas in Camelot,” concerning his introduction to (at least what others saw as) the delights of cigars in the presence of John F. Kennedy. We see Styron’s reflections on the success of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, which appeared when he was twenty-six, the growth of his interest—beginning in his Virginia childhood—in the slave Nat Turner, who became the subject of one of his greatest literary triumphs, The Confessions of Nat Turner, as well as his greatest literary trial: charges by numerous black critics and scholars that he had created a misleading picture (a weak, conflicted man, obsessed with white women) of an African American hero. Styron knew southern history, and he knew his own times, but those times they were a-changing. The grandson of a slave owner but also a racial liberal who had many friends (most prominently James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison) among black writers, he had begun his novel in the black-and-white-together phase of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, assuming it would be well-received by African Americans. However, when it appeared in 1968, it was critically disdained. Styron’s sin seemed to be not only that he had misrepresented Turner, but that he told his story—had, in the eyes of his critics, appropriatedhis story—in the first place. West’s collection is arranged thematically and generally, but not always chronologically: Childhood and Youth, The South, Race and Slavery, World War ii(including powerful pieces on Auschwitz and Hiroshima), Military Life, “Disorders of the Mind” (reflections on the deep depression he suffered later in life, the roots of which he finds much [End Page xxi]earlier), and so forth. His love-hate relationship with the South is clear from the beginning: he is proud of being a Virginian, finding in the Tidewater landscape a beauty equalled in few parts of America and in Virginia history a richness lacking in most of the United States. However, he certainly doesn’t care to live and die in Dixie. Two of the finest sections in the collection are entitled “Antecedents” and “Friends and Contemporaries.” In the first he discusses the influence of Mark Twain (“my most beloved literary forefather”) and of William Faulkner (that influence is clear to anyone who has read Lie Down in Darkness, parts of which one might see as The Sound and the Furyset in Tidewater, Virginia), as well as that of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also reflects on Thomas Wolfe: “it would be hard to exaggerate the overwhelming effect that reading Wolfe had upon so many of us who were coming of age during or just after World War ii”—particularly, he adds, if one was a southerner. But like almost every other writer of that time who was drawn to Wolfe, Styron insists that he got over the early infatuation, and for the most part he did. It is not difficult to see, however, some remnant of that influence in certain of Styron’s works, particularly Sophie’s Choice, the story of a young...

Cold War American literature and the rise of youth culture: children of empire

Introduction-An Unprecedented Recession from Adult Life Chapter 1. Don't Step on my Blue Suede Shoes-Empire, Deterrence and Origins of Dissent in Cold War Chapter 2. Generational Politics, Fifties Freud and the Fragmentation of Oedipus Chapter 3. The Parent-Apparent: The Post-Freudians, 'De-Parentification,' and Cold War Family Paradigm Chapter 4. Generation on Trial: Arthur Miller's Theater of Judgment Chapter 5. Trauma, Mourning and Self-(Re)fashioning: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in Rye and Reinvention of Youth in Cold War Chapter 6. Racing with Moon: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and All-American Girl in Styron's Lie Down in Darkness Chapter 7. The End of Adulthood: Nabokov's Lolita Chapter 8. Jack Kerouac: 'Oedipus Eddy and the Story of America Chapter 9. Death's Child: Lost Fathers, Bereaved Daughters, and Rise of Postwar Feminism-Re-reading Sylvia Plath Chapter 10. The Comforts of Home: Generational Dialectics in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction Conclusion: The Cold War, Vietnam, Sixties and After

Rome to Ravello with Set This House on Fire

Rome to Ravello with Set This House on Fire Gavin Cologne-Brookes (bio) More than half a century after its publication William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960) retains the power to fascinate its readers. It is his least successful, least integrated work, and had he not already produced Lie Down in Darkness (1951), and gone on to write The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979), as well as a memoir on his clinical depression, Darkness Visible (1990)—it might now be forgotten. It has, to use Louis Rubin’s phrase, “a grievous structural flaw”: the same story is recounted twice but with little new revelation the second time around. The primary narrator is the Eisenhower-era attorney Peter Leverett. He recounts what he knows about the murders of his old school-friend, the wealthy playboy Mason Flagg, and his Italian servant, Francesca, on the very night that Peter arrives from Rome to visit him in the hilltop Amalfi coastal town of Ravello (known as “Sambuco” in the novel). In particular, Peter recounts witnessing Mason’s humiliation of Cass Kinsolving, an alcoholic painter with a long-suffering wife and small children. For much of the novel’s second half Peter cedes the narrative to Cass, and we learn that this semiliterate, self-absorbed man has helped Francesca, with whom he is romantically involved, steal medicine from Mason to give to her dying father. Believing Mason to be responsible for her rape and death (the perpetrator is in fact a local named Saverio), Cass murders Mason. Contrived though this twice-told tale is, Styron’s awkward experiments with viewpoint proved to be a dry run for the assured shifts of perspective in Sophie’s Choice. Moreover Set This House on Fire still contains enough good material for Styron’s fellow novelist Michael Mewshaw to write in his memoir, Do I Owe You Something? (2003), that it left him hoping to meet Styron and one day live in Italy. Even in this problematic work Styron knew how to captivate a reader through evocation of personality and place. Having written about visits to Styron’s other settings in Rereading William Styron (2014), I traveled to Rome and Ravello to find what further insights I might glean about Styron and his work. Many years have passed since our friendship ended with the onset of what Styron’s daughter, Alexandra, described at the memorial service as his “epic, wretched descent” into terminal decline. Many more years have passed since I discovered Set This House on Fire, but I still feel a personal connection to it. The novel was the subject of my first publication, and during my research I found that the New Statesman carried a review of it on the day I was born. I sent Styron the essay and explained that his novels were [End Page 484] the subject of my doctoral thesis. He invited me to Connecticut. The thesis became The Novels of William Styron (1995), which contains an appendix of our conversations. He spoke of Set This House on Fire as transitional, in that he was trying to write another big book without being sure of his subject matter. Lie Down in Darkness had brought him both personal and professional rewards, including his first encounter with Rose Burgunder, who would become his wife of more than fifty years, and the Prix de Rome, which involved a sabbatical in the Eternal City and, coincidentally, a reunion with Rose. By 1954, when he began Set This House on Fire, they were raising a family in the big house in Roxbury, Connecticut that, along with a summer place on Martha’s Vineyard, would be their home until his death in 2006. The novel, prize, and sojourn in Rome thus enabled him to follow Flaubert’s advice and be orderly in his habits like a bourgeois, in order to be revolutionary in his work. With Lie Down in Darkness set in his Virginia Tidewater hometown of Newport News and adopted city of New York, it must have felt logical to mine his sojourns in Europe. The problem was that, after writing a first novel in which he had articulated...

This Quiet Dust Swirls Back to Life

REVIEW-ESSAY GAVIN COLOGNE-BROOKES Bath Spa University This Quiet Dust Swirls Back to Life I READ THE SIX HUNDRED PAGES OF MY GENERATION: COLLECTED Nonfiction during a visit to Bucharest. Sitting each evening in an Old Town café I’d have appeared solitary and still. In fact I was all over the world,enjoyingtheeloquentcompanionshipofWilliamStyron,essayist. I’d glance up from my whiskey sours at the chiaroscuro of the reclaimed buildings and cobbled streets yet also see other times and other places. Skillfully edited by James L. W. West III, My Generation provides a constantly entertaining, provocative mental journey. Styron was fond of saying that he valued being able in his novels to transport readers to another world, and he does so through rhythm, verbal acumen, and carefully placed information. Thanks to his mastery of the art of the essay, I found myself in the 1930s gazing through a classroom window at “one of the broadest estuaries of any river in America” and thinking back to the early seventeenth century, the voyage of Captain Smith and, in 1619, another ship lumbering upstream “with a different cargo to make the James the mother-river of negro slavery for the whole New World” (61). In Tidewater Virginia in the 1940s I experienced “an orgy of moviegoing” including “ten days when we viewed a total of sixteen” (9). I attended a Rhodes Scholarship interview in Atlanta, then got “gloriously drunk on the Southern Railway local that rattled its way all night up through the Carolinas, gazing out at the bleak, moon-drenched, wintry fields and happily pondering my deliverance” from having “to row for old Balliol” and write papers “on the hexameters of Arthur Hugh Clough.” Instead, I’d be “in New York, beginning my first novel” (24-26). But soon enough I was haunting a military urological ward with suspected syphilis, and found myself called up for war. In the 1950s I sojourned in Paris. In the 1960s I met President Kennedy, discussed race with James Baldwin, and attended William Faulkner’s funeral in Mississippi and the Democratic Convention in Chicago. In the 1970s I trudged the bone-fragmented paths of Auschwitz, thankful to leave before nightfall, and grew to understand the experience of clinical 320 Gavin Cologne-Brookes depression. In the 1980s I walked the Connecticut woods with a golden retriever and envisaged a trip down the Nile with Gustave Flaubert, Maxime du Camp, and Arthur Miller. In the nineties I slept well in Vineyard Haven and thought back on decades experienced in a matter of days. All this was thanks to a writer able to put words and observations together so appropriately that he becomes your guide and companion through times and places hitherto unknown. Styron was, as West writes, “primarily a novelist” (xix). The modernistinspired Lie Down in Darkness (1951) is not least extraordinary in that so young a writer could master the form with such verve. Set This House on Fire (1960) showed Styron’s willingness to experiment, and fail, in order to advance his art. The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) has proved to be more revolutionary and impactful than its author could have realized, instigating debates about race, history, identity, and the function and meaning of the historical and the biographical novel. But Styron’s most remarkable achievement, Sophie’s Choice (1979), is the true complement to this collection. With that novel he found a way to combine the art of the novel with the art of the essay. In telling the story of Sophie Zawistowska and her family in Kraków (or Cracow, as Styron refers to it in the novel) during the Second World War, and her 1947 New York summer with Nathan Landau and Styron’s fictionalized younger self, Stingo, Styron weaves between fiction and fact in the service of verisimilitude. My Generation shows, in turn, how Styron used his novelist’s skills in the service of the essay. No less than the novels, My Generation is a testament (exercisable both for good and ill, as Styron points out) to “the power of the written word” (283). Even discounting the extended passages of nonfiction in Sophie’s Choice, this volume is not, West...

From Charles Lamb to Josep Carner: Translation and Rewriting of the Familiar Essay

From Charles Lamb to Josep Carner: Translation and Rewriting of the Familiar Essay

My Father’s House

My Father’s House Robert Lacy (bio) Reading My Father: A Memoir by Alexandra Styron (Scribner, 2011. 304 pages. Illustrated. $25) Alexandra Styron was the last born of the late William Styron’s four children, arriving long after the other three. She was not her father’s favorite, and she knew it. Yet she also knew, as she wrote in her journal in 2000, “that I, at the last, will have to tell this story. Someday.” Reading My Father represents her effort to do so. It’s the story of a talented but troubled man and his much abused wife and children. William Styron was, by his daughter’s account, a tyrant and a bully in his own home, even as he was being lionized in the larger world for his charm and wit and novel-writing skills. At home he was the Great Man who was not to be disturbed on any account while he pursued his muse. His wife, Rose, bore the brunt of his verbal attacks, but the children also came in for their share. At age sixty, forced by his failing health to give up the alcohol that had long fueled him, he cracked up and fell into a deep clinical depression. But, being Bill Styron and the gifted writer that he was, he managed to capitalize even on that grim situation by writing Darkness Visible, which became a surprise best seller. His daughter, after poring over the hundreds of letters from troubled readers of the book she found in her father’s archives at Duke University, was moved to ask herself: “How could a guy whose thoughts elicit this much pathos have been, for so many years, such a monumental asshole to the people closest to him?” William Styron, at least in his daughter’s version, was in many ways a man at war with himself. A southerner by birth, reared in Virginia and educated at Duke, he spent most of his adult life living in the Northeast, in places like Brooklyn and Manhattan, and in the family homes in Roxbury, Connecticut, and on Martha’s Vineyard. Buoyed by the success of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, he married Rose Burgunder, a department-store heiress from Baltimore, in 1953; and, despite the household cruelties and his many infidelities, the marriage would endure until his death in 2006. Together the two of them embarked on a life among the rich and famous at the time: the youthful hell-raising Teddy Kennedy was a favorite neighbor on the Vineyard; Arthur Miller a friend and neighbor in Connecticut; Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, James Jones, Mike Nichols, Carlos Fuentes, Willie [End Page xvi] Morris—the list of pals and drinking buddies goes on and on. But the man little Alexandra Styron saw when he came home was not the bon vivant, not the literary man about town. “My father used to scare the crap out of me,” she told the mourners at a memorial service for him in 2007, and then she related how he used to come into her room at night and tell her stories about ghosts and demons in the Roxbury house, leaving her lying there shivering in the dark. Once, when she was eight and in a girlish horse-loving phase of her life, he told her that the governor of Connecticut had banned horses in the state and then left her alone to deal with that. She could never decide whether he was being consciously cruel or merely carelessly indifferent. “He’d lob his invective into the room, storm away, and leave everything behind him in flames,” she writes. Styron had been a Marine Corps officer in the waning months of World War ii, but, like Scott Fitzgerald before him in World War i, did not experience combat then or in Korea. This appears to have been critical to his development, both artistically and emotionally. Mailer and Jones had served overseas and had come back home to write big best-selling novels about their experiences. War was to be the theme for writers of his generation, Styron saw; and he wanted, his daughter says, “to paint on that...

Don't Clean Up And Lie Down: Ethnography and Conceptual Art

I'm a conceptual artist and an ethnographer. Since 2006 I've been creating ethnographically inspired conceptual photographic series. Focusing on three photographic series, I discuss my research interests and how my ethnographic training and mindset have shaped my approach to making art.

My Son, You Must Remember: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness

VIRGINIA NICKLES OSBORNE University of South Carolina My Son, You Must Remember: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness Always remember where you came from, the ground is bloody and full of guilt where you were born and you must tread a long narrow path toward your destiny. (Lie Down in Darkness 77) IN HIS 1993 NEWSWEEK COVER STORY,WILLIAM STYRON REFLECTED ON HIS service as a Marine officer in World War II. Remembering the fear and fatalism with which he and his rifle platoon regarded the approaching Japaneseinvasion,awarethatseventeenthousandAmericansoldiershad already died at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Styron recalled his joy at the news of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, believing these events had almost certainly saved his life. After the war ended, Styron claims there was a period of “a year or so when it was truly possible to conceive of a world without war” (28). The prospect of peace dimmed, however, with Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech and disappeared entirely with the onset of hostilities in Korea in 1950, convincing Styron that war was “a savage continuum . . . a perpetual way of life in which small oases of peace provided intermittent relief.” (28). Though he admits that the attacks on Japan did save lives, Styron nevertheless acknowledges the cataclysmic effects of the bombs, arguing that “the war left us, with nothing else, two prodigious and enduring metaphors for human suffering—Auschwitz and Hiroshima. History has carved no sterner monuments to its own propensity for unfathomable evil” (28). Styron’s literary career has, in many ways, focused on suffering and the human penchant for evil. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) recounts his own major depressive episode that almost ended in suicide; the concentration camp at Auschwitz serves as the backdrop for his 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice and its 1982 film adaptation; Pulitzer-Prize winning The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) is narrated by the leader of the 1831 slave revolt in Virginia in the hours before his execution; and Lie Down in Darkness (1951), the story of Milton and Helen Loftis and their troubled daughter, Peyton, progresses in tandem with the events 284 Virginia Nickles Osborne of World War II, culminating with Peyton’s suicide on the day of the Nagasaki bombing. According to Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Lie Down in Darkness marks a decisive change in the complexion of Southern literature, a radical departure from the Faulknerian tradition. In The Faraway Country (1963), Rubin argues that the setting of Lie Down in Darkness is wholly contemporary and the text is “fully of the present moment in its concerns and attitudes”; Styron, more than any other postwar writer, conveys a sense of speaking “directly to the experiences of his times” (186, 193). In response to the suggestion of stylistic and thematic parallels between Lie Down in Darkness and The Sound and the Fury, Rubin counters: The Loftises exist entirely in the present. Milton Loftis’ alcoholic stupor is not importantly the result of changed times. There is no outdated concept of Loftis honor, no heritage of former leadership to be lived down. Milton is not the sot he is because of the impossible burden of the past; his failure is entirely the result of personal weakness. His spinelessness must be blamed on his own character, not on the decadence of a fallen dynasty. Likewise, Helen Loftis is no Mrs. Compson; she is no morose worshiper of her family’s past, but a twisted psychotic, whose sin is not hypochondria but insane jealousy. And her daughter Peyton’s tragedy is not the result of a massively decadent family past, but of the personal failure of her parents. (200) In a word, Styron has all but removed the historical dimension from the novel and the tragedy of Peyton’s suicide is private rather than communal. Contemporary literary critics come to similar conclusions, arguing that Lie Down in Darkness is the story of personal failure in an increasingly individualized society; the issues the family faces are modern ones rather than holdovers from the Southern past or other regional issues. Jeanne Nostrandt, for example, views the novel as a parable that critiques the lack of personal...

From the Archive: An Interview with Richard Yates

From the Archive: An Interview with Richard Yates Dewitt Henry and Geoffrey Clark Reprinted from Issue 3 of Ploughshares, Winter 1972. (guest edited by James Randall) Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1926. He graduated from the Avon School in 1944, served in the last years of World War II, and until 1952 worked at a variety of jobs, ranging from newspaper rewrite man to freelance ghost writer to publicity writer. He has taught at the New School for Social Research, Columbia University, and the University of Iowa; in 1963, he was special assistant in the United States Attorney General’s office. His first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961 and has since gone through four editions and is currently available in the Dell “Contemporary Classics” series. A collection of stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, appeared in 1962, was reissued in 1966, and is now out of print. In 1962, under contract to United Artists, Mr. Yates wrote a screenplay from William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness. A second novel, A Special Providence, was published in 1971 and is still available both in hardcover (Knopf) and paperback (Dell). Mr. Yates is presently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wichita State University, and a new book is in progress. The interview was conducted during a reading tour last spring at Roger Williams College, and has since been modified by mail. [End Page 207] Ploughshares In Revolutionary Road, was the ending thought out before you began? Richard Yates Yes. I thought of that girl dying in that way, and then the whole problem was to construct a book that would justify that ending. And it wasn’t easy. PS When you first planned the book, did you have John Givings in there? RY No, I didn’t. He occurred to me as a character about midway through the writing of the book. I felt I needed somebody in there to point up or spell out the story at crucial moments, and I did know a young man very much like that at the time, a long-term patient in a mental hospital who had an uncannily keen and very articulate insight into other people’s weaknesses, so I worked a fictionalized version of him into the book. PS You really lambasted the suburbs. RY I didn’t mean to. The book was widely read as an antisuburban novel, and that disappointed me. The Wheelers may have thought the suburbs were to blame for all their problems, but I meant it to be implicit in the text that that was their delusion, their problem, not mine. PS Doesn’t the title suggest an attack on The System? RY I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witch-hunts. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that—felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit—and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. I meant the title to suggest that the [End Page 208] revolutionary road of 177 6 had come to something very much like a dead end in the fifties. PS You weren’t knocking marriage? RY Oh, of course not. That’s another false interpretation too many people put on the book. And in a way Alfred Kazin was at least partially responsible for that, however inadvertently. The publishers sent the book to him in manuscript, and he wrote back a very nice letter that said in part—only in part—“This novel locates the American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage.” So the publishers grabbed up that one quote out of context and plastered it all over the dust jacket, in big red print—they thought it would “sell”—along with a cheap, vulgar illustration. And I let them do it...

The sexual abuse of black men under American slavery.

I n 1787 a n e n s l av e d m a n i n Maryland raped a free black woman. The story comes to us from the female victim in the incident, elizabeth Amwood. One white man, William holland, had her “Pull up her Close and Lie Down he then Called a Negrow Man Slave” “and ordered him to pull Down his Britches and gitt upon the said Amwood and to bee grate with her.” A fourth individual in this horrific scene, a white man named John Pettigrew, operating with holland, pointed a pistol at the unnamed enslaved man and elizabeth Amwood. All the while, holland taunted them both, asking if it “was in” and “if it was sweet.” Afterward, William “went up into the Company and Called for Water to wash his hand, saying he had bin putting a Mare to a horse.” Scholars have suggested that rape can serve as a metaphor for enslavement—thus applying to both men and women who were enslaved. As Aliyah I. Abdur-rahman argues, “The vulnerability of all enslaved black persons to nearly every conceivable violation produced a collective ‘raped’ subjectivity.” The standard scholarly interpretation of how slavery affected black manhood is perhaps best captured by the comments of one former slave, Lewis Clarke, who declared that a slave “can’t be a man” because he

June 19th, 1974 When at Night You Lie Down

June 19th, 1974 Renee Pollock (bio) Spirited dipsfling tongues of water, lick onto her fingers,witless.The water is calm beneath our boat.She trails long hands into murkish angry depths, laughing at the trails of spiralsFollowing and repulsing her movements. We are naked in pure summer sunlightrocking in our battered fixed-up boat,tempting the capsize,relaxed.Tanned golden peaks, sensual,mosquitoes humming buzzing,somehow we are swifter than the oldest rivers,moving gently among rushesand sunlight. [End Page 82] Renee Pollock Born in Trinidad and raised in Bronx, NY, Renee Pollock is a multicultural lesbian feminist who explores the intersection of culture and sexuality. She attended Pratt Institute where she pursued her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. Her poetry has been published in Decompression Zine and Outwardlink.net. She is an emerging artist and writer who lives, writes, and paints in a beautiful, quiet Jewish neighborhood in lower Brooklyn. Copyright © 2010 Bridges Association

Cyril Tourneur : déictique1 et/ou didascalie, écriture d’un décor virtuel

In Cyril Tourneur’s Laugh and Lie Down or The World’s Folly and The Transformed Metamorphosis the scene is set in enclosed claustrophobic spaces, frightening replicas of hell and purgatory in which shadows occupy the whole locus. The camera-obscura-like microcosms, respectively given as ‘the world’s folly’ and a ‘concavitie’, can be seen as specific theatrical places devoted to entertainment and revelling, including fantasmagory. It was then fashionable to stage the spectacular in garden grottoes and follies. The evolution of mechanical devices amplified the performances in which the audience took an active part. The pamphlet and poem by Tourneur render the ‘texts in contexts’ relationship as if particular images of the period were cast and traced on their sheets through the magnifying glass of a politically involved and committed author. Deictic and Didascalia punctuate the virtual and/or real journey, onstage, offstage and backstage.

My Headache Does Not Get Better When I Lie Down: Spontaneous Intracranial Hypotension Complicated by Venous Thrombosis

Two patients with spontaneous intracranial hypotension (SIH) subsequently developed cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) when their headache lost its distinctive orthostatic characteristic. In addition to typical MRI features of tonsillar descent, subdural fluid collections, and diffuse pachymeningeal enhancement, hyperintense thrombi were detected in the dural sinuses, and filling defects on magnetic resonance venography. Knowledge of the typical neuroimaging features of SIH and CVT and change in headache characteristics are important for prompt diagnosis and treatment.