Save the Reaper
Save the Reaper (1998/1998) is a short story by Alice Munro , of which two very different versions were published in the same year. The magazine version has the subtitle: "Can you trust your children with your mother?", The book version has no subtitle. On the one hand, this work addresses the (non-) narrative of certain experiences and on the other hand it doubts that memory can be considered reliable when stories are told.
The title of the short story is a reference to the ballad " The Lady of Shalott " (1832) by Alfred Lord Tennyson .
Munro commented on this work in 1999 that, while writing this story, she was aware of the many changes in the past 25 years in the area of her teenage summer vacation at Lake Huron , both in people and in society the landscape.
action
Eve is out in the car with her two grandchildren Daisy and Philip during the summer vacation. As a result of a dialogue game between Eve and seven-year-old Philip, which is about "aliens", they come to a place that the grandmother seems to know from earlier. Something stirs Eve emotionally. Because they cannot continue because of a blocked path, after a dialogue with a little man, the three of them arrive in a neglected dwelling in which they are confronted with male culture under the influence of alcohol. Then they come into contact with a hitchhiker who turns out to be a drunken hitchhiker who took the opportunity to escape that dwelling. Eve realizes that she has not felt sexually attracted to women before, and the hitchhiker lets her hand run down the driver's bare leg.
When the three of them return to the summer house, the narrator demonstrates how experiences are modified when they are told again. In view of her conservative daughter Sophie, the mother of her two young travel companions, Eve believes that there are framework conditions that make a selection necessary. She wouldn't tell about the part of the wall behind the bushes, nothing about the dialogue game with Philip, almost nothing about the man and his cronies in the dwelling, and nothing about the girl who jumped into the car.
In the magazine version, in the middle of the last section, Eve seems to have the impression that she is momentarily forging a tacit pact with her grandson Philip regarding the events that she does not pass on to her daughter, which is apparently sealed with a single look. In the book version, this point is at the end of the ninth section and it seems unclear whether Eve will notice that Philip is looking at her. Only the narrator seems to see this look and it is commented differently than in the magazine version. Judith Maclean Miller quotes the book version and says that Eve passes this non-telling, the withholding, on to another generation. From her point of view, Eve realizes that Philip is not saying anything and Miller believes that it is Eve's comment that follows, with “What did this mean? Only that he had begun the private work of storing and secreting, deciding on his own what should be perserved and how, and what these things were going to mean to him in his unknown future ".
At the end of the same section of the magazine version, Eve's thoughts on the hitchhiker return. This is a separate section in the book version. The ending is different in the versions and both conclusions are open.
Interpretations
"Reaper" in the title of the story and the name of the protagonist, "Eve", combine the biblical mother of mankind ( sinner ) with much older Demeter connotations as "the birth mother of all", according to Ildikó de Papp Carrington in an article from 2002, which deals specifically with this work by Munro. The story speaks of a golden barley field and corn and maize fields also play a role. This is mythologically charged by the metafictional reference that Eve's daughter Sophie knew Greek myths in her childhood and that she later graduated from university in archeology. Papp Carrington argued that this resulted in the image of Demeter as a goddess who was the representative of women from all generations.
In the opening scene, "alien" is introduced as a term with numerous meanings and derivations and a mother-daughter relationship is discussed in the course of the story, including the description of Eve's maternal care for the hitchhiker's substitute daughter, Ildikó de Papp Carrington continues . Isla Duncan writes in 2011 that in Save the Reaper Munro depicts the family alienation of an older woman in her description of the protagonist and that the reliability of testimony and memory is questioned for the construction of what is told.
Intertextual references
The title of the story refers to the poem The Lady of Shalott (1832). On the drive back Eve changes the remembered line “Only reapers, reaping early” to “Save the reapers.” The title of Munro's work, however, is in the singular. Munro alludes to another line from the ballad, "And by the moon the reaper weary", which refers to the dull and lonely main character of the story, according to Isla Duncan.
In the second section, the film is called The Bridges of Madison County . Eve and her daughter had looked at it the night before, shook their heads at their tears and burst out laughing. The following day, Eve comes back to the evening when Sophie leaves Daisy alone for the first time to pick up her husband from the airport, and Eve stays behind with Philip and Daisy at the summer house.
Harold Pinter is also mentioned when, during the scene in the dwelling, Eve's ability to reflect, thanks to literature reading and stage experience, is described, where it says: “She thought about how she would describe all of this - she would say it was as if she were suddenly in the middle got into a piece of pinter. Or like her worst nightmares of a stubborn, silent, hostile audience. ”The boss in the dwelling has the same first name as the playwright.
In his review of The Love of a Good Woman collection for the New York Times 1998, Michael Gorra made an intertextual reference between Save the Reaper and O'Connor's story A Good Man is Hard to Find (1953). Gorra says Munro is bowing to the work of the others and revising it in a clever way. However, her narrative is formally completely different. Munro empathizes with their characters without any attraction to an external system of thought, which is Catholicism for O'Connor. According to Gorra , Munro's narrative style is related to that of Chekhov . Jeff Birkenstein noted in 2013 that, unlike O'Connor, the outsiders in the dwelling in Munro's story have no ideology. While they have no apparent malicious plans, they block Eve's car. They live in a shabby house, are men without women and already bored of the prostitute they brought home.
Within Munro's oeuvre, Miller saw a series of stories in 2002 that deal with the secret, beginning with Walker Brothers Cowboy (1968) and Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974). Save the Reaper is like recognizing the topic and this story completes the series. Carrington points out in 2002 that Munro has a few stories that focus on mother-daughter relationships, and most of them are told from the daughter's point of view. From the mother's point of view, there are only Miles City, Montana (1985/86) and one of the sections of The Progress of Love (1985/86). A grandmother's point of view appears for the first time in Save the Reaper . Although Images (1968) are told from a child 's point of view and Save the Reaper from a grandmother's point of view, the conclusions that are drawn are almost interchangeable, according to Magdalene Redekop in 1999, except that in Images it is a father who returns from an adventure and talks about it. Both stories end with a pact between an adult and a child. A neglected daughter figure with sexual abuse experience had previously existed in Vandals , in Save the Reaper it was the hitchhiker. Should this behave like the protagonist in Vandals , it could predict murder, whereby “save the reaper” would be Eve's prayer to be freed from death (“may be Eve's prayer for deliverance from death”), says Carrington towards the end of their contribution.
Reading experience
Judith Maclean Miller remembers that there is a dead person at Save the Reaper in the entrance room of the neglected house. Miller wonders why she remembers this. The reaper suggests death as a theme, but nobody dies in the course of the story. Duncan shares the discomfort with the dwelling and adds that various things remain puzzling in this story: why in the description "Massive disorder was what they had to make their way through - the kind that takes years to accumulate" the "massive disorder" on At the beginning, it is so powerful who created the mosaic wall, what kind of daughter as an adult still plays games like “What do you hate most about your mother?”. Some of it becomes clear when one perceives Eve's nostalgia as implausible and bizarre, and imagines what consequences such nostalgia means for Eve. Birkenstein gets the impression that Eve cannot intervene because she knows that the owner of the house has been taken to a home. Miller has looked at the point from a stylistic point of view where the little man who invites the three to come into the strange dwelling says “Mary, she owns it, but Harold he put her in the home, so now he does. It wasn't his fault, she had to go there. ”Miller notes in parentheses that she thinks it was Harold's fault, of course. And those many commas are the reason for her feeling that things are going on that are even more sinister. Miller takes a closer look at another passage: "" I told her maybe there was pictures in the front but she couldn't go in there you got that shut up, "the little man said. Harold said, "You shut up." "There is something about the pauses in this dialogue and the repetition of the phrase" shut up. " If it's not Mary who was buried in the house, there's anything or anyone to be charged, Miller is certain of that. Knowing another Munro story, Carrington, while reading Save the Reaper, suspects that Eve will be murdered after the story ends.
Editions and versions
The magazine version of the work appeared on June 22, 1998 in The New Yorker , the book version a few months later in Munro's short story book The Love of a Good Woman (1998). The book version is the first, the magazine version an abridged version based on suggestions from the editorial office at the New Yorker . In 2002, Carrington regards the fact that it is the magazine version that was published again in an anthology ( The Best American Short Stories 1999 , edited by Amy Tan ) as atypical. The book version of Save the Reaper was later included in Alice Munro's Best: A Selection of Stories (Toronto 2006), which was released in the United States with the title Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (New York 2006) . In English, the work has a length of 35 pages. In German, the story is titled “Einsig der Schnitter” and is part of the volume Die Liebe einer Frau (2000).
In the magazine version, the story consists of 8 sections, in the book version of 10 sections and is overall longer. In the book version, the eighth section, 17 pages long, makes up almost half of the narrative and is made up of sections four, five and seven of the magazine version. One of the few new sentences in this section is: “Philip was mute, pressed against her side.” The sixth section of the magazine version, which is the third in the book version, is about the childhood of Eve's daughter, Sophie, and about the fact that Philip also has a father who is no longer there. Eve remembers in this passage how Sophie joked when she was pregnant with Philip that she was finally upholding the family tradition of "flyby fathers". Sections five and seven are completely new to the book version. In them the dialogue game between Eve and Philip is continued. Section four is also almost completely new, in which only a few words about the daughter from Eve's point of view have been taken from the third section of the magazine version. This previously third section becomes the second part of the longer second section by moving the section end further back. The great-grandfather's story that you can hear the grain growing around here is varied from Eve's point of view, not in the magazine version, but at the end of the book version: that it may have stopped growing, even if it can still be heard .
Example and interpretation : In the magazine version, shortly before the visit to the neglected dwelling, it says: “She should never have let the game get so far out of control. Philip was too excitable . ”In the book version, however, these two sentences are:“ She should never have let that game get so far out of control. A child of Philip 's age could get too carried away . ”Isla Duncan is looking for a possible intention for this variant. “ That game” is more ambiguous, insofar as a game from her own childhood came back to Eve's mind as well as, shortly before this scene, the annoying excursions with her mother. Duncan says Munro's revised version wants to remind the reader that Eve's imagination was unleashed by remembering the pictures on the white wall and that this is why she turned the car around and back when she did doesn't remember the goalposts at all. Duncan is of the opinion that Munro wants to show that not only Philip is something wrong, but also Eve.
This representation by relative section length shows other aspects of the version difference. In the book version, there are four very short sections and the variance in section lengths is greater: more and relatively much shorter sections at one end of the scale contrast with a single long section at the other end of the scale. In the book version, this percentage is even longer than in the magazine version. In the magazine version, the 5th section is the longest, in the book version it is the 8th section. Before the long section begins, the scene change is more frequent in the book version than in the magazine version. After the longest section, there are 3 sections of medium length in the magazine version, and only two relatively short sections in the book version.
literature
- Isla Duncan, The "Queer Bright Moment", Chapter 4 in: Alice Munro's Narrative Art , Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2011, pp. 73-90, on "Save the Reaper" especially pp. 80-86.
- Judith Maclean Miller, Deconstructing Silence: The Mystery of Alice Munro , in: Antigonish Review 129 (Spring 2002), 43-52.
- Ildikó de Papp Carrington, Where are you, mother? Alice Munro's Save the Reaper (pdf), in: Canadian Literature / Littérature canadienne (173) 2002, 34–51.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Ildikó de Papp Carrington, Where are you, mother? Alice Munro's Save the Reaper ( Memento of the original from August 5, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in: Canadian Literature / Littérature canadienne (173) 2002, 34–51.
- ↑ “Can one entrust one's own mother to one's children?”, Cf. Facsimile of the first two pages of the work in the print edition of The New Yorker
- ↑ a b c d e f Isla Duncan, Alice Munro's Narrative Art , Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-230-33857-9 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-137-00068-2 (ebook), Pp. 17, 80, 83, 85-86, 106.
- ↑ a b c d Judith Maclean Miller, Deconstructing Silence: The Mystery of Alice Munro, in: Antigonish Review 129 (Spring 2002), pp. 43-52.
- ^ German translation by Heidi Zerning. In the English-language original it says: “she was thinking how she would describe this - she'd say it was like finding yourself in the middle of a Pinter play. Or like all her nightmares of a stolid, silent, hostile audience. "
- ↑ Michael Gorra, Crossing the Threshold. In Alice Munro's stories, characters are poised on the brink of a changing world , nytimes.com , November 1, 1998
- ^ A b Jeff Birkenstein, The Houses That Alice Munro Built: The Community of The Love of a Good Woman , in: Critical Insights. Alice Munro , edited by Charles E. May, Salem Press, Ipswich, Massachusetts, 2013, ISBN 978-1-4298-3722-4 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-4298-3770-5 (ebook), p. 212 -227, p. 223.
- ↑ Magdalene Redekop, Alice Munro and the Scottish Nostalgic Grotesque , in: The rest of the story. Critical essays on Alice Munro . Edited by Robert Thacker, Toronto: ECW Press, 1999, ISBN 1-55022-392-5 , pp. 21-43.
- ↑ See also a detailed list of Alice Munro's short stories in the English language Wikipedia
- ↑ The differences are marked in italics .
