Holiday

So here are a few items I'd like to discuss for "Holiday" tomorrow...

1. Porter's technique of creating silence in a story: Silence is referrenced frequently as a theme in the story (and of course, we should discuss that ultimately), but what about the function of silence as a purely technical device in Porter's writing? How is it possible--literally--for a writer to create a sense of silence in a medium that requires one to use words? The narrator speaks directly to the audience, and yet, because the story uses dialogue so sparingly, the reflective narration assumes the quality of a series of images, rather than a string of sounds. Why do the images in this story seem so much more silent than the images of many other stories we have read? (Or am I the only reader with this impression?)


2. Silence: Barrier to communication or the means of ultimate, transcendent communication?
Is silence a mark of alienated individuality (as in the case of Ottilie), or does a certain level of silent physicality actually reinforce a communal bond? The family is bound by common language, but also, emphatically, by shared physical traits (and these physical traits are the marks by which the narrator recognizes Ottilie as a member of the family). The narrator relishes the isolation of silence in the beginning of the story, remarking that silence--in this case, linguistic isolation--"means a freedom from the constant pressure of other minds...the freedom to fold up in quiet and go back to my own center" (413). The narrator watches and narrates--linguistically, to an audience, at a distance from his/her narrative objects, as an isolated individual observer making use of language as a mechanism or medium which implies an alienation. S/he notices that Hatsy's groom resembles her brothers, but "nobody ever noticed this except myself, and I said nothing because it would have been the remark of a stranger and hopeless outsider" (421, emphasis mine). In fact, the narrator almost never expresses his/herself in dialogue--except in a few lines at the very beginning of the story, to a college friend, before s/he ever reaches the farm. Linguistic silence isolates him/her as a guest, but physical tasks--helping Hatsy in the garden, sweeping glass after the storm--seem to be the beginnings of an attachment within the family. Physical effort, though still silent, allows some kind of communal identity, if not the individual identity carved out by linguistic communication.

3. Ottilie, as a crux between this physical, communal identity, and linguistically-isolated individual identity. (Are these two different directions in which "silence" might go?)
The passage I'd really like to examine is on page 417, the paragraph beginning "there was a gust of excited talk in German...". The narrator remarks that the family is united in "tribal scepticisms...[that they were] one human being divided into several separate appearances"(417). This seems to suggest the physical nature of communal identity. But then the narrator goes on to say, using very physical terms, that s/he "felt divided into many fragments, having left or lost a part of myself in every place I had travelled, in every life mine had touched, above all, in every death of someone near to me that had carried into the grave some part of my living cells." This seems to suggest a contradictory thesis, that the linguistic isolation the narrator experiences actually contributes to a sense of physical fragmentation, of a loss of identity. Then, the final line of the paragraph: "But the servant, she was whole, and belonged nowhere." Does this then suggest that linguistic alienation can create a healthy individual identity? Is belonging nowhere a freedom or a curse? Why should the Muellers, a family so emphatically rooted in physicality, physical labor ("muscular life"), physical similarities, and their physical, natural surroundings, alienate a physical member of their family because she cannot speak?

4. Silence as a plot device. The first paragraph of the story mystifies me (in a good way). We are not meant to know, presumably, what the heck the narrator is specifically referring to, and the plot of the story never doubles back to illuminate it. So the great silence running througout the story is the narrator's mysterious, unspoken past.

5. Das Kapital. The father Mueller is a fan. Porter goes so far as to describe it as a "canonical, once-delivered text," which father Mueller treats as "a very bible." In some ways, the Muellers are the ultimate Marxist family in the sense that they are expressing their humanity through their labor--they are not alienated from their labor. They own their farm and eat what they produce. In other ways, their lifestyle echoes the idealized, capitalist myth of the hardworking farm family--everyone contributes his or her use-value. Ottilie's use-value is determined by what she is able to produce. In a story with so many intersecting themes of alienation, individuality and communal identity, I know I know I know there must be some threads we can pull out of this Das Kapital reference, and I'd really like to know what other people make of it.