The Gates Open: Lock 7 Erie Canal / The River Styx?

Erie Canal Lock 7: Susan watches the massive hydraulic doors open to allow a boat to travel up the Mohawk River. Of course, this becomes a metaphor for all kinds of passage. Susan thinks of the River Styx. Others think of water-skiing. She thinks of our American history, literature, Ovid, From Nohow to Nowhere (Elting Morison), river journeys, Mark Twain, folk tunes. It's all about passage -- and perhaps transformation... (filmed by Dave Feiden)

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: Thoughts on a Walled City

Lock 7 on the Mohawk River on the Erie Canal inspires Susan to think of themes in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. (filmed by Dave Feiden)

The Killer of Lover's Lane, or, the Ten-Mile-Flats Murder: Transgressions of Closure

Audio File / Podcast / mp3 file

When I was a teen-ager in Norman, Oklahoma, there was a long-standing unsolved murder. It was something straight out of Friday, the 13th or any other movie where illicit sexuality is promptly punished with a chainsaw, and where unnatural desire is slashed with a big phallic knife. Two Norman High School students -- juniors, I believe - had parked at the very end of Main Street in the low-lying floodplain, Ten Mile Flats, on the edge of the South Canadian River.

It was an isolated spot at a bend in the river, near a sandy bank. It was a part of a point bar, I believe. Weeping willows, mimosas, persimmons, and cottonwoods created a secluded, park-like Lover's Lane in the heart of the prairie.

Apparently, they were parked there at sunset, when a member of the Norman police force pulled up. He expected to find two young adults who would be defensive and who would have plenty of excuses for why they happened to be parked there, and why they happened to be partially clothed.

Instead, the officer found a grisly scene. Blood was everywhere. The girl and her boyfriend had died due to extreme trauma and multiple stab wounds.

For years, the rumor was that the killer was a "dirty cop" -- a police officer with "peeping Tom" proclivities, but no one was ever indicted or even accused. The case stayed open, and then it finally chilled out. It was a "cold case" - an unsolved mystery that had never achieved closure.
When closure finally came, it was uncomfortable, awkward, and unsatisfying. A former police officer who had left the Norman police force was arrested in Colorado for exposing himself to young teen-age girls. Someone made the connection and requested a DNA analysis.

So, although the story was officially written, with a beginning, middle, and an ending, it was not a positive experience. One still had the feeling that there was something more, and that not all the loose ends in the story were ever tied up.

The forced ending, the "too neat" closure brought to mind urban legends. In a certain way, urban legends are constructions and extrapolations of closure. They start with closure and then work backward to make the events align to have the desired outcome.



Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, are not examples of forced closure. Instead, they have false closure.

Fairy tales, fables, and other morality tales have imposed closure. The ending has to fit a very well-defined and well-known set of values and roles in a particular society.

What does narrative closure do for the reader? What is the function of narrative closure?

In many ways, narrative closure helps combat what I like to call "ambiguity anxiety." The reality that closure is almost always a false construct is interesting. It means that everyone is aware, at least on a subconscious level, that the nice, neat ending is false. It is a lie. And yet, the kinds of tales that have the kind of closure we've been talking about are almost always considered "truth" or "wisdom" discourse.

When we think that didactic tales and all the narratives with forced, false, or imposed closure are actually false, it's a little sad. Who wants to admit that we live out our lives knowing that we are deliberately embracing false consciousness?

But, perhaps that's exactly where the jouissance or plaisir is manufactured. Perhaps that's the profound meaning of it all. We know that we are -- at least for a nano-second -- self-aware and in control of the narrative we impose on ourselves. For a flash of jouissance or plaisir, we feel alive, joyous unity, with our own false consciousness. We thrill with omnipotence (or at least the knowledge of what omnipotence might mean) -- we have, for an instant, completely controlled the meaning and the reality of our lives.

But, is the imposed closure of the morality tale effective?

The fact that the two young teenagers were killed on the edge of a river did nothing in terms of changing behavior in Norman, Oklahoma. Kids continued to park in the tree-lined shadows of the edge of the river in the middle of a flat, trackless prairie.

As a cautionary tale, the event served to propose a series of actions and to create a causal chain.

As a tale of morality, of crime and punishment, the story did nothing to change behaviors. In fact, it enchanted the place and imbued it with danger and in doing so, it deepened the magic and the mystery. By uniting sexuality and death, youth and blood, Lover's Lane became, in the dark of night, ineffable.

There was not much to say after the trial, when the headlines and the photos were laid out across the front page of The Norman Transcript.

I drove home from the courthouse, where I had been filing an oil and gas lease, and fighting traffic as people left the packed courtroom. When I arrived home, my mother was pulling weeds out of her flower garden that bloomed with bright pink, gold, red, and purple zinnias and snapdragons.

"They were saying the guy they found guilty was claiming to be innocent right up to the very end," I said.

"He probably believed it," she said.

"How?" I asked.

"It was the only way he could get closure in his life," she said.

"Oh, of course," I said, but I didn't really agree. I don't think he actually wanted closure. Instead, he probably wanted the ineffable, inarticulate horror of bringing the horrors of one's imagination into the realm of flesh and blood.

I never parked at Ten Mile Flats. I was shy. I was unpopular in high school. And yet, on some level, I realized that the tragedy of youthful lovers dying in the pursuit of unity was somehow generative to the community as a whole. We did not throw virgins into a cenote or pull still-beating hearts up to the Sun God in a way that anyone was willing to admit.

Instead, we had our psycho killers who punished youthful sexuality. They died so the community could live.

Now, that's narrative closure.

words on limestone

Snippet by photographer Dave Feiden. Susan has a few deep thoughts on limestone, travertine, and stalactites with fanciful names like "Elephant's Tusk" and "Rip Van Winkle's Dream." Filmed in Thacher's Park near Altamont, New York, at the Heidelberg Escarpment.

ahupua`a: Kane'ohe Fish Ponds

downloadable mp3 file - podcast

Somewhere along
the eroded edge of a drowned volcano

I passed by a pond
swimming with dreams

miraculous
pigmented flashes of light and dark

muscle under the scales
that should have been feathers

you fly
if only for 3 or 4 seconds of pure longing --

I fly
with you in my shadows

my fears, my failures
confined to grim swimming

except when we leap
flying fish

a pond,
teaming with dreams

reflected
in a drowned volcano

becomes flesh
and fire

Guide to Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Podcast.

While many readers focus primarily on magical realism in all of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work, the short novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, provides an opportunity to examine the text through multiple critical vantage points and perspectives. Each yields a particular insight, and reveals much about the nature of the narrative, ideas about what it means to be human, the nature of reality, and community / individual identities. This is brief guide for readers who would like to employ the techniques to enrich their understanding of the work, as well as of literature in general.

Overview and themes:

The fact that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold is structured as a non-linear narrative can make the plot a bit difficult to follow. Here is a resource that provides an overview plot, the characters, and author background.

Sparknotes' plot summary. (very clear). http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/chrondeath/summary.html

Textual issues:

Dialogical imagination -- Bakhtin and the Dialogical Imagination http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/bakhtin.htm-- This concept is useful because it gives the reader a way to look at the presence of voices and polyphony in a text. In the case of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, interrelationships, juxtapositions, and connections are more important to
the narrative than a linear plot and clear character development.

Fragmentation and disintegration -- Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) holds that the way to understand phenomenon is not to try to find a unifying theory or explanation, but to "dissolve" the explanations that we have. In the disintegration process, there will be fragments that reveal often overlooked relationships. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, we see literal fragmentation and disintegration in the case of disemboweled rabbits and the body of Santiago Nasar, cut to ribbons. This is figurative as well as literal, and serves as a metonymy for the fragmentation of reality that occurs once one disrupts the equilibrium. Fragmentation and disintegration characterize the self, and they also are employed against the story (or lack of, which could be considered silence), that has been told about the murder. The fact that people mention that they foretold the murder, but they only mention this after the murder has taken place foregrounds the notion of artifice and a constructed reality, which is destabilized when problematized.

The corporeal self vs. the disembodied collective self -- In Chronicle, there is a tension between what is considered to be the individual self, and that of a collective self that is comprised of the multitude of voices in the community. The voices comprise a disembodied collective self, and it is a self that is constantly in a state of growth, evolution, and change as the voices rise up in unison or in a counter-cantus. In this case, the "cantus" refers to the motif that is repeated throughout a fugue. A "counter cantus" would be a motif that is not repeated exactly as it first appears. Instead, it would run counter to it; perhaps appearing backwards, or with different rhythms and meter. The counter-cantus in Chronicle is a story told many times, but distorted each time. The function is to undermine the notion that there exists a predictive quality in a narrative, and that patterns matter. Instead, Chronicle suggests that patterns deceive, and that you cannot really trust the conventional way of interpreting a story.

Death throes and ecstatic transcendence:

Antonin Artaud. Theatre of Cruelty. The Wikipedia entry for the Theatre of Cruelty contains an excellent overview of how Artaud sought to shake people up and rouse them from their conventional ways of seeing and perceiving the world. His goal was to awaken them to see that what they had believed to be reality was simply a convenient illusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Cruelty

George Bataille. Tears of Eros. Bataille's final work, the Tears of Eros suggest that one's final agonies are actually pleasurable. His work was condemned by the French Minister of Culture. Although his work is problematic on many ethical and moral levels, the basic notion that extreme experiences cause a fundamental reperception of reality and reclassification of what one has learned to consider truth, is useful when looking at Chronicle. An overview of Bataille, his life, times, and work, appears here: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bataille.htm

The presence of the "Other"

It is significant that Santiago Nasar, the man who is murdered in the story, is clearly identified as Arab, and that he speaks to his mother in Arabic. One could argue that he is both victimized and revered for his difference, which starts to put him in the realm of the sacred. Nasar and his family also function as a bridge from one world to another. The beliefs, customs, and behaviors of Nasar and his family are shaped by their constant contact with something that lies outside the dominant culture. In other works, Garcia Marquez uses ghosts, spirits, and the energy of ancestors to bring about the same effect. The fact that they could be viewed as the "Other" makes it possible to look at them as a kind of doubling (or doppelganger) for the collective, community identity. The mysterious, violent, or otherwise poorly understood parts of their psyche can projected onto the "Other," thus preserving the illusion that they do not exist. The theories of Jacques Lacan apply nicely to Chronicle, in the sense that what Lacan proposed as a "mirror stage" in developmental psychology gives rise to the presence of an "Other," which is composed of displaced thoughts, projections, and above all, desire. http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/lacweb.htm

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Biographical Notes

Garcia Marquez was born in 1928 in northern Colombia, where he was raised by his grandparents. The website, The Modern World, has an outstanding entry for Garcia Marquez, which provides biographical details as well as historical contexts and backgrounds. http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_biography.htmll

Contexts and Backgrounds: Honor Killings and Blood Feuds

Hispanic "honor killings" http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/050924_hispanic.htm

The blood feud: Corsica to Appalachia http://www.ls.net/~newriver/osh/osh15.htm

"Body Count" -- Review of Blood Feud by Annabell Thomas,
a novel about two feuding Appalachian families.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/13/reviews/981213.13harlemt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Excerpt - First chapter of Blood Feud: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/t/thomas-blood.html

Blood Feuds Trap Albania in the Past http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1046385,00.html

Hatfield-McCoy Feud http://www.blueridgecountry.com/hatmac/hatmac.html

Hatfield McCoy Feud-- chronology and history of Matewan (economic connections)
http://www.matewan.com/History/feuds.htm

Guide by Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D., 2006