Eudora Welty 19092001

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Eudora Welty (19092001)

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Weltys best work is among the best work of any
writer in the twentieth century. The two volume
Library of America edition attests as much Welty
was the only living writer to be granted a place
in the series.
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1, Similes in Death of a Traveling Salesman

• 1, Her voice emerged low and remote, like a sound
  across a lake. (1403)
• (The elements compared to in an apt simile
  usually have something to do with the setting of
  the story.)
• 2, Inside, the darkness of the house touched him
  like a professional hand, the doctors. (1403)
• 3, The bed had been made up with a red-and-yellow
  pieced quilt that looked like a map or a picture,
  a little like his grandmothers girlhood painting
  of Rome burning (1404). (too personal?
  Provincial? Bearing any cultural connotations?

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• 4, The white speck floated smoothly toward her
  finger, like a leaf on a river, growing whiter in
  the dark. (1406)
• 5, When that was done she lit the lamp. It showed
  its dark and light. The whole room turned
  golden-yellow like some sort of flower. (1407)
  to give the room life?(be cautious, when compare
  anything to a flower)
• 6, The woman moved among the iron pots. With the
  tongs she dropped hot coals on top of the iron
  lids. They made a set of soft vibrations, like
  the sound of a bell far away. (1408). peaceful?

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• 7, Just as he reached the road, where his car
  seemed to sit in the moonlight like a boat.
  (1409)
• Pay attention to the image of water involved in
  the several similes. By this repetition, the
  similes inapt when standing in isolation together
  achieve a symbolic significance. River image
  floatingrootlesssteadfast womanmainstay in
  lifes river///he always traveling in his car
• A question Why did Sonny have to borry his
  own fire?

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2, structurephotographic narrative technique

• 1, Photography taught me that to be able to
  capture transience, by being ready to click the
  shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest
  need I had. (One Writers Beginning)
• 2, Her photographs published in One Time, One
  Place (1978) Photographs (1989)

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• 3, She had been cleaning the lamp, and held it,
  half blackened, half clear, in front of her. He
  saw her with the dark passage behind her. She was
  a big woman with a weather-beaten but unwrinkled
  face her lips were held tightly together, and
  her eyes looked with a curious dulled brightness
  into his(1403)

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• 4, He turned unwillingly and peered over her
  shoulder he hesitated to rise and stand beside
  her. His eyes searched the dusky air. The white
  speck floated smoothly toward her finger, like a
  leaf on a river, growing whiter in the dark. It
  was as if she had shown him something secret,
  part of her life, but had offered no explanation.
  (1406)

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• 5, After they had waited a while, Bowman looked
  out the window and saw a light moving over the
  hill. It spread itself out like a little fan. It
  zigzagged along the field, darting and swift, not
  like Sonny at all Soon enough, Sonny staggered
  in, holding a burning stick behind him in tongs,
  fire flowing in his wake, blazing light into the
  corners of the room. (1407)

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• 6, Then she stood for a minute looking at them,
  tall and full above them where they sat. She
  leaned a little toward them. You all can eat
  now, she said, and suddenly smiled A pain
  pressed at his eyes. He saw that she was not an
  old woman. She was young, still young She stood
  with the deep dark corner of the room behind her,
  the shifting yellow light scattering over her
  head and her gray formless dress, trembling over
  her tall body when it bent over them in its
  sudden communication. (1408)

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• A piecing together of a series of frames
• 7, There was nothing remote or mysterious here
  only something private. The only secret was the
  ancient communication between two people. But the
  memory of the womans waiting silently by the
  cold hearth, of the mans stubborn journey a mile
  away to get fire, and how they finally brought
  out their food and drink and filled the room
  proudly with all they had to show, was suddenly
  too clear and too enormous within him for
  response (1400)

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• 8, My first good story began spontaneously, in a
  remark repeated to me by a traveling man our
  neighbor to whom it had been spoken while he was
  on a trip into North Mississippi Hes gone to
  borry some fire. The words, which carried such
  lyrical and mythological and dramatic overtones,
  were real and actual their hearer repeated them
  to me. (One Writers Beginning, p87)
• So, she began her story with a scene, and thats
  why Sonny had to borry

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• Other examples
• 9, When she was directly behind him she stood
  quite still for a moment, in the queer sheathed
  manner she had before beginning her gardening in
  the morning. Then she raised the hoe above her
  head the clumsy sleeves both fell back, exposing
  the thin, unsunburned whiteness of her arms, the
  shocking fact of their youth. She gripped the
  handle tightly, tightly, as though convinced that
  the wood of the handle could feel, and that all
  her strength could indent its surface with pain
  In that moment, the rain came. The first drop
  touched her upraised arm. Small, close sounds and
  coolness touched her. Sighing, Mrs. Larkin
  lowered the hoe to the ground and laid it
  carefully among the growing plants. (A Curtain of
  Green, Collected Stories, p111)
• J. Alfred Prufrock, Do I Dare Should IHave the
  strength to force the moment to its crisis?
• Tensions built all the way up only to be
  dissolved.

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• 10, ????????????????????,??,???,???????????,??????
  ?????,??????????,????????????????????????,??,?????
  ????????????,????????,???????????????p140
• Repetition?

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3, life/fiction

• 1, In outward semblance, many stories have plots
  in common which is of no more account than that
  many people have blue eyes. The Reading and
  Writing of Short Stories Eudory Welty
• 2, Writing a story or a novel is one way of
  discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling
  upon cause and effect in the happenings of a
  writers own life. This has been the case with
  me. (90) I had been writing a number of stories,
  more or less one after another, before it
  belatedly dawned on me that some of the
  characters in one story were, and had been all
  the time, the same characters who had appeared
  already in another story. (98) One Writers
  Beginnings

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• 3, There was a smell in the hall like the
  interior of a clock. (A Visit of Charity,
  Collected Stories, 113)
• ????,???????????????????????,????????????????????
  ?????????p56
• In our house on North Congress street in Jackson,
  Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of
  three children, in 1909, we grew up to the
  striking of clocks. There was a mission-style oak
  grandfather clock standing in the hall(OWB, p1)

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• 4, ????????????????????????????????????,???????
  ??????,??????????????????,???????????????111
• It was an early summer dawn everything was a
  cloud of mist we were standing on the bank of a
  river and I didnt know it. When my mother pulled
  the rope of an iron bell, we watched a boat come
  out of the mist to meet us, with her five
  brothers all inside. (OWB, 51)

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• 5, It is not for nothing that an ominous feeling
  often attaches itself to a procession. This was
  when I learned it. In films and stories we see
  spectacles forming in the street and parades
  coming from around the corner, and we know to
  greet them with distrust and apprehension their
  intent is still to be revealed. (Think what it
  was in My Kinsman, Major Molineux) (OWB, 37)
• ???

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• 6, he had died on the operating table in Johns
  Hopkins, of a ruptured appendix, The last lucid
  remark hed make to my mother was If you let
  them tie me down, Ill die.(OWB, 51)
• ???,??????????,???????????,?????????????115

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• 7, Say, do you believe that two pigeons could be
  sent from here to Euroda say in April or do you
  think they could not go without some one being
  along to take care of them. (OWB, 55)
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  ?,??????????????123

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• 8, The characters who go to make up my stories
  and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent
  along with the story that carries them. Attached
  to them are what Ive borrowed, perhaps
  unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen
  or noticed or remembered in the flesh a cast of
  countenance here, a manner of walking there, that
  jump to the visualizing mind when a story is
  underway. (Elizabeth Bowen said, Physical detail
  cannot be invented. It can only be chosen.) I
  dont write by invasion into life of a real
  person my own sense of privacy is too strong for
  that (OWB, 100)

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• Other kind of repetitions?
• 9, He flung the purse violently to the floor,
  where it struck softly like the body of a shot
  bird. It was empty. Flowers for Marjorie,
  Collected Stories, 101
• When the butt glowed, her hand dropped like a
  shot bird from the flame he rather blindly stuck
  out. The Bride of the Innisfallen, Collected
  Stories, 498

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• Only the Nobel Prize eluded her, and many believe
  this to be one of that committees great
  oversights. --- Internet
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4, Then how should we evaluate Weltys literary
creation?

• Her first story is a good starting point
• But he wanted to leap up, to say to her, I have
  been sick and I found out then, only then, how
  lonely I am. Is it too late? My heart puts up a
  struggle inside me, and you may have heard it,
  protesting against emptiness. It should be full,
  he would rush on to tell her, thinking of his
  heart now as a deep lake, it should be holding
  love like other hearts. It should be flooded with
  love Something which seemed always to have just
  escaped him1406
• He felt as if he might burst into tears. 1407

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• , this first attempt, is most telling, when the
  author has not yet learnt the technique of
  appearing as if she had shown him something
  secret, part of her life, but had offered no
  explanation.
• First, it tells us that her stories have a theme
  of loneliness and difficulty in communication,
  the same with Anderson.
• Second, sentimentalism is an inherent trait in
  her writing, though in her later work the
  optimists Daughter, she has learned to have the
  doctor forbid the judge to weep.

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5, other possible topics for discussion?

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  ??,??,?????????????????????????????
• The Sound and the Fury
• A Worn Path
• Member of the Wedding

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• So the first thing we see about a story is its
  mystery. And in the best stories, we return at
  the last to see mystery again. Every good story
  has mystery not the puzzle kind, but the mystery
  of allurement. As we understand the story better,
  it is likely that the mystery does not
  necessarily decrease rather it simply grows more
  beautiful. The Reading and Writing of Short
  Stories
• So, What are the mysteries in Salesman?

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