Solitary Man Research Articles

Shiny Objects by Dianne Benedict

350 Western American Literature Shiny Objects. By Dianne Benedict. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1982. 137 pages, $8.95.) The 1983 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, Shiny Objects, is a collection of eight stories about the people and land of South Texas. The author, Dianne Benedict, grew up in the Rio Grande Valley and visited often with relatives in East Texas. Dissatisfied with an early career as a professional painter and art instructor, Benedict found that through writing she could transcend the limitations of her painting. With that discovery, she immersed herself in writing and in her early Texas experiences. Now a teacher of cre­ ative writing and literature at Vermont College and a contributor to INTRO, fiction international, and Atlantic Monthly, Benedict claims that if she attempts “to write about anything but the people, the land, and the roots of my beginnings, the pages turn to sawdust and words have no more power to fly than stones.” There is an obsessed quality about this collection: Benedict’s characters are solitary and intense; their stories are compelling. She writes of a lonely white woman who becomes a murderer when she is sexually exploited by the man she loves; of a black man who takes a pregnant white girl into his home and helps deliver her baby, only to be repaid with a vicious vandalism; of a boy who learns about responsibility by helping bathe the dead body of his grandmother; of an old Indian man who delivers his adopted son from the surreal and hellish world of a carnival; of a dying farmer whose last days are witnessed through a haze of hallucination. Benedict’s characters are some­ times bizarre, but always real. And as in Carson McCullers’ and Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, their eccentricities and deformities often serve to intensify the experiences of her characters. This is especially evident in the title story, “Shiny Objects,” in which a dying twelve-year-old, Bible-inspired, hydro­ cephalic dwarf-child, by far the oddest of Benedict’s characters, brings a moment of tenderness to an embittered widow, as she carries his misshapen body in her arms across a cactus flat. Throughout, the tough and vibrant Texas landscape interacts with these people, sometimes responsive — as when a crow takes a shiny object from the dwarf-child to the widow — sometimes indifferent, but always powerful. In “Where the Water Is Wide,” a deaf storekeeper, taught innocence and love by a deaf girl just before her accidental death, reverently places her body in a small black stream as rain begins to fall; in a few moments, the rising waters carry the girl’s body away to awe the picnickers downstream. Benedict’s descriptions are delicate, sure, and luminous as she depicts the grim struggles of her characters within a magnificent, even mythic Texas landscape: “He saw a solitary man silhouetted there with his arms raised as though in praise of the water, which lay rare and vast at his feet, or of the sky which was filled with a kind of candlelight at that hour, or of the earth which was turning slowly towards the darkness.” Shiny Objects is a fine book that captures both the beauty and the sordid, poverty-stricken reality of South Texas. CORINNE DALE, Texas A&M University ...

Shiny Objects by Dianne Benedict

350 Western American Literature Shiny Objects. By Dianne Benedict. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1982. 137 pages, $8.95.) The 1983 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, Shiny Objects, is a collection of eight stories about the people and land of South Texas. The author, Dianne Benedict, grew up in the Rio Grande Valley and visited often with relatives in East Texas. Dissatisfied with an early career as a professional painter and art instructor, Benedict found that through writing she could transcend the limitations of her painting. With that discovery, she immersed herself in writing and in her early Texas experiences. Now a teacher of cre­ ative writing and literature at Vermont College and a contributor to INTRO, fiction international, and Atlantic Monthly, Benedict claims that if she attempts “to write about anything but the people, the land, and the roots of my beginnings, the pages turn to sawdust and words have no more power to fly than stones.” There is an obsessed quality about this collection: Benedict’s characters are solitary and intense; their stories are compelling. She writes of a lonely white woman who becomes a murderer when she is sexually exploited by the man she loves; of a black man who takes a pregnant white girl into his home and helps deliver her baby, only to be repaid with a vicious vandalism; of a boy who learns about responsibility by helping bathe the dead body of his grandmother; of an old Indian man who delivers his adopted son from the surreal and hellish world of a carnival; of a dying farmer whose last days are witnessed through a haze of hallucination. Benedict’s characters are some­ times bizarre, but always real. And as in Carson McCullers’ and Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, their eccentricities and deformities often serve to intensify the experiences of her characters. This is especially evident in the title story, “Shiny Objects,” in which a dying twelve-year-old, Bible-inspired, hydro­ cephalic dwarf-child, by far the oddest of Benedict’s characters, brings a moment of tenderness to an embittered widow, as she carries his misshapen body in her arms across a cactus flat. Throughout, the tough and vibrant Texas landscape interacts with these people, sometimes responsive — as when a crow takes a shiny object from the dwarf-child to the widow — sometimes indifferent, but always powerful. In “Where the Water Is Wide,” a deaf storekeeper, taught innocence and love by a deaf girl just before her accidental death, reverently places her body in a small black stream as rain begins to fall; in a few moments, the rising waters carry the girl’s body away to awe the picnickers downstream. Benedict’s descriptions are delicate, sure, and luminous as she depicts the grim struggles of her characters within a magnificent, even mythic Texas landscape: “He saw a solitary man silhouetted there with his arms raised as though in praise of the water, which lay rare and vast at his feet, or of the sky which was filled with a kind of candlelight at that hour, or of the earth which was turning slowly towards the darkness.” Shiny Objects is a fine book that captures both the beauty and the sordid, poverty-stricken reality of South Texas. CORINNE DALE, Texas A&M University ...

Book Review: Shakespeare and the Solitary Man

Book Review: Shakespeare and the Solitary Man

Shakespeare and the Solitary Man by Janette Dillon

Shakespeare and the Solitary Man by Janette Dillon

George Orwell: A Life

And I was a chubby boy the joys of prep school and the echoing green learning and holidays Eton - resting on oars (1917-21) an Englishman in Burma (1922-7) going native in London and Paris (1928-31) hard times or struggling up (1932-4) bookshop days (1934-5) the crucial journey to Wigan Pier and home to Wallington (1936) Spain and necessary murder (1937) coming up for air (1938-9) - the political writer the challenge and frustration of war (1939-41) broadcasting days (1941-3) Tribune and the making of Animal Farm (1943-5) famous and solitary man (1845-6) Jura days the last days and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

John Barth's Chimera and the Strictures of Reality

Although many contemporary American novelists have rejected the straightforward representation of social reality in fiction, this rejection may occur for a number of reasons. In Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs it stems from a fear that the inanimate world is somehow superseding the animate, the sovereignty of the individual is being threatened. John Hawkes refers to the novelists ‘ who hope for more in the novel than trying to build brick walls of brick ’, and suggests that ‘ the true purpose of the novel is to assume a significant shape and to objectify the terrifying similarity between the unconscious desires of the solitary man and the disruptive needs of the visible world ’. Norman Mailer also remarks on this relationship in his essay ‘ The White Negro ’:The second world war presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of superstates founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?

A Scenography of Light

One of the most imaginative and innovative productions of recent London seasons was Arrabal's The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria. It was staged by the National Theatre of Great Britain in the Spring of 1971. Arrabal set his microcosmic fantasy on an island inhabited by a solitary man who lives without any knowledge whatsoever of civilization or mankind. As the play begins, this creature stands midstage, terrified by the roar of an approaching jet aircraft. The intensity of the sound builds as the aircraft passes low overhead. A deafening crash follows. The creature, petrified with fear, falls to the floor and hides his head. At this point, the second of the play's two characters appears. He approaches and announces himself as the only survivor from the crash. The panic-stricken creature flees, uttering bird-like screams of terror.

George Wythe Courts the Muses: In Which, to the Astonishment of Everyone, That Silent, Selfless Pedant Is Found to Have Had a Sense of Humor

T HE personality of a man can undergo an about-face as he grows older. The affable and extrovert may become silent and introvert. A serious outlook may replace lightheartedness. Gravity may supplant wit. Such a transformation seems to have occurred between the fiftieth and eightieth birthdays of George Wythe of Virginia. During his last fifteen years this solitary old man, then a widower for the second time, lived with three freed Negro servants in a modest frame building. He had no really near neighbor. His house stood on a lot which constituted a quarter of a partially vacant block in what is now the teeming heart of Richmond's downtown shopping area. When he died under peculiarly tragic circumstances on June 6, i8o6, this mellow but uncommunicative octogenarian was survived by no closer kinsman than the grandchildren of his sister. Only a few intimates had in recent years enjoyed his friendship, though he was admired by all, who knew him personally or were acquainted with his reputation. Tolerantly, even affectionately, people told of the idiosyncrasies in which, they felt, he had earned the right to be indulged. They spoke of his habit of ushering into his equity court's office without so much as a word those who called on business, of how he received courteously but with nothing other than a knowing and reassuring air the papers concerning their cases, and of how they were dismissed silently but with what Henry Clay described late in his life as the courtliest bow he had ever seen. Wythe's wordless visits to a Richmond bakery to purchase each time a single loaf of bread and the daily ritual at his backyard well of his early morning sponge bath, for which he stripped to his waist even in the coldest winter weather-these and other eccentricities had become legendary. They gave him a Quaker-like reputation for simplicity and austerity.