In response to Sarah Petrak's post:
The narrative structure in "That Tree" struck me first for sticking it to convention, and second for being the third story of Porter's (that we've read) that does so. Where stories like "Flowering Judas" and "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" employ narrative flashbacks, and "Maria Concepcion" indulges in gentle exposition, "That Tree" - along with "Theft" and "Magic" - are all examples of unconventional - at times non-linear - storytelling.
"Theft" begins with the protagonist fresh out of the shower, noticing her purse missing. Most of the story is concerned with the nights of the event previous (when she had her purse) and getting her purse back from the janitress.
We discussed "Magic" as a dramatic monologue in class - an idea I stand behind - though, for the sake of my discussion of "That Tree," I'd like to put forward my own pet theory here. Because of the way the story is formatted, where the hair-brusher's words are all put forward as the be-all, end-all narrative, and with Mme. Blanchard's interspersed dialogue in quotation marks, I think "Magic" is a retelling of the narrator telling Mme. Blanchard this story in the first place.
(I especially find this theory compelling because of the implications of that suggestion in class that the narrator - now armed with Mme. Blanchard's hair - is threatening her new employer with casting the very same spell that was used on Ninette. Further evidence for this idea - the fancy house madam "always hit people over the head with bottles, it was the way she fought" (39); Mme. Blanchard's only has one action in the entire tale (beyond saying something), and that is to close her perfume bottle (41). Could she be arming herself for the coming conflict, the climax that the retold telling of the tale is leading towards? This is thin ice, I know, but isn't it just like Porter to give us a taste of a hint to let our imaginations run wild.)
In "That Tree," the narrator seems to be paraphrasing the words of the journalist to his companion, quoting him directly to spice up the story or reground it in the cafe. The scene is after three marriages, and before Miriam's return.
"Theft" is the working model for my argument. What happens in the moment that Laura stands outside the shower - the opening of the story - is an opportunity for change. She spent the night previous being walked all over, thinking of other people's feeling before her own. With the theft of the purse the protagonist finally has a chance to stand up for herself, but instead gives in, and it's the janitress' own weird pride that gets her the purse back.
So what if these first present moments (the woman standing outside the shower, the narrator brushing Mme. Blanchard's hair/telling of how she brushed Mme. Blanchard's hair, the journalist in the cafe) stand as a crux between how it has been and how it will be, which are nearly identical? What if these present moments represent, instead of a turning point in people's lives, a portrait of a wheel in a rut? So often Porter's stories are the tales of unhappy people stuck going in some direction they never wanted to go in the first place, and unable to get themselves back on tracck.
Some evidence of this "wheel in a rut" idea in "That Tree": Miriam seems to have a new outlook on the journalist in her letter begging for him to take her back; "she regretted, oh, everything, and hoped it was not too late for them to make a happy life together once more" (79). Contrast that with Miriam's letters before their marriage, and that breathy, hopeful tone pops up for the first time; "she longed to live in a beautiful dangerous place among interesting people who painted and wrote poetry" (73-74). Miriam has different desires but seems to be setting herself up for much the same disappointment, especially considering that that happy life she wants to have "once more" never existed in the first place, much like she doesn't find the painters and poets interesting the first time around.
And, of course, there is the problem of that tree. The journalist opens his story to his companion in that way, noting he "had really wanted to be a cheerful bum lying under a tree" (66). And despite all of the alleged changes he has gone through - Miriam's abandonment, becoming an authority on revolutions (moments of real change, mind you), two more marriages - "that tree" persists throughout the story as some impossible ideal. The journalist has spent his adult life proving to Miriam that he "was not just merely a bum, fit for nothing but lying under a tree," when lying under a tree, "writing poetry and enjoying his life" is exactly what he wants to do (78). What the journalist wants hasn't changed, and Miriam doesn't seem to have changed, and when they both get back together - though no one can tell for sure - change doesn't seem to be on the horizon. In fact, the journalist makes a point of saying that things are going to be the same: "She was going to live again in a Mexican house without any conveniences and she was not going to have a modern flat" (79).
In brief, my theory is that Porter uses the unconventional narratives to spice up what could otherwise be a boring story. By telling them non-linearly, or from a strange point of view, she captures the humdrum in an exciting way, adding mystery and a sense of possibility to lives going nowhere (and of course getting all literary in the meantime). Maybe someone can beef this argument up for me, or tear it on down?
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1 comment:
I like the parallel you draw between Magic and That Tree, because Ninette is "semi-eclipsed" in the same way as Miriam is. You're right, many of Porter's stories employ unconventional narrative, so I guess my claim that "That Tree" is unique requires some more qualification. Perhaps it is not necessarily unique, but I still think it has a slightly different purpose than some of the other stories.
The interesting difference between Theft and That Tree, however, is that we don't have the conversational dialogue of another person relating the character of the woman to us, the audience. We get her through a limited 3rd person, a very direct storytelling in which there is constant tension between interiority and detached exterior observation from which we must infer interiority.
I agree, Porter is great at creating interesting unconventional narrative--
I guess, to clarify my post, I was concerned primarily with the ways in which viewpoint force us to read character. For example, in Theft, you don't have Camilo, Roger or Bill telling a friend about the woman.: She is eclipsed from us by the limitations of 3rd person observation, rather than the filter of another character's perspective. In That Tree, however, we have to take each of the journalist's statements with a grain of salt because he is too involved in this own story to be a reliable narrator. But Porter plays with that shock: we don't have any indication that he is having a conversation at all until "They both jumped nervously at an explosion in the street"--that is, until almost two and half pages into the story, it could be a third person musing narrative (which would suggest a greater objectivity with which we might interpret Mariam's character).
I also think we should take some class time to consider the role of this shadowy guest: we only ever get one, sudden interior thought (effectively surprising, since we don't even know the gender or name of the character), and the guest is compared to a mirror ("as though admonishing himself before a mirror"). I'd love to see how everyone read that.
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