Irvine Valley College - Online Literature Study of the School of Humanities and Languages

Literature 24 - Contemporary Literature

Summer 2010 - ticket # 62620

CLASS MEETS FROM 7/6/2010 to 8/15/2010

 // Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, MFA, Instructor

Richard Ford at a book reading and signing.

Unit 6: Enduring Consciousness and Culture

(1) Writing Techniques in Rock Springs -

Richard Ford's first novel was published in 1976 - and he is still writing steadily.  The short stories in Rock Springs were collected and published in 1986.  And, while there is a notable kind of contemporaneity about his characters and settings, it's not that easy to tell, even within Ford's own series of works, what year the story might take place.  The people in the stories have a kind of timelessness - Ford has said about them:   "they aren't very well off, but they might wish they were."   And the towns and highways have an eternal quality, as well.  The time in America seems to be all the "times" that are lonely and hard, out there.

In the part of the lecture where I talk about the Content/themes and the relationship to historical and current events, other Literature I will be explaining Minimalism - so if you don't know that term, you might want to read that part and then come back to the story analysis.

Because Rock Springs is a collection, it will be easier if we do the text analysis about just a couple of the stories - and I have chosen the first and the last stories as a focus - the story "Rock Springs" and "Communist."  I hope that we can discuss the other stories in the collection on the Discussion List.

Character:

The first thing that we notice about "Rock Springs" is that the narrator is using a simple, first person "I" voice - and that this voice is largely unadorned.  The reader is immediately drawn into the Point of View of the "I" narration - and the story continues in that mode for the entirety [note here, no change in Point of View, not even a reporting of how someone else in the story might see things except as Earl Middleton imagines they might.] 

We have the "minimal" point of view possible - one person, one viewpoint.  Now, inside of Earl's viewpoint, we might have vacillations - but this is the luxury of a story that is constructed with only one viewpoint.  If a story tries to cover the events from the Point of View of several characters, we really can't get close enough to one particular character to see that, within his head, competing versions are possible.  But in Ford's story, we see the equivocation of Earl - his uncertainty, and his consistency withal.

Earl is one of many Richard Ford characters who is down on his luck.  He is not a bad person - not in any sense that we would identify as someone who purposely set out to defraud or murder someone.  He is just less than organized, and his sense of what might be right and wrong is a little unfocused.  We need to seem him as a part of a larger contemporary society that does not really intrude much into the story - except in the "gold mine" part.  Ford's characters inhabit the underside of a society whose government can spend millions of dollars subsidizing private industry to exploit gold mines, but cannot provide basic decency for most of the workers in the country.

I wouldn't want to be dependant upon Earl for my well-being, but I can certainly empathize with his situation.  Although most of us have done "better" than Earl, we should all be able to imagine a situation in which things just didn't work out so lucky - a broken family, loss of job, family illness - any number of tragedies that can set us on the road to less and less effective solutions.  By the time that Ford catches up with his characters in Contemporary Times, they really have very few options.  [We are persuaded by the media that we have unlimited options, but that is not really true, today, I don't believe.]

And, so, at the end of the story, Richard Ford asks the reader:  " Would you think he was getting ready for a day when trouble would come down on him . . . .Would you think he was anybody like you?'

Plot :

The plot of this story has two elements - both of them having to do with enduring culture and themes.  At the top level, Earl, his companion, his daughter, and the dog steal a car and attempt to go to Florida.  Note that there is no real plot here - they are already on their way when the story begins and they are only in Rock Springs when the short story ends. The time frame of the story is not really a trajectory - it is more like a "slice of life."  The backstory is, however, where we do get to see the sweep of Earl's life and experience.  We are allowed to know very little of the specifics, but we can gather that Earl has had a life of gradual and then acute loss.  He doesn't start out with much, his marriage breaks up, he takes up with Edna (who also has an unpleasant ex-husband and has lost her children) - not because she is the love of his life but because he is hoping for a better "shake" for his daughter, Cheryl.  Even though we don't see the ending, we can guess that it ends badly.  And so this is a careful depiction of the last few days when Earl will be able to think that he can make his problems go away with a fried chicken dinner.

Structure:

While almost everything about Richard Ford's stories is pared-down and economical, his structural approach to a story draws heavily on traditional models.  The traditional structures look different in Ford's work mainly because his "scale" is so different.  In "Rock Springs" we have a 'slice of life' - but we also have a clear rising action, climax, and denouement.   Ford focuses very closely on the minute events of a few hours - and so the rising action is signaled by very small happenings:  The first thing is that the oil light goes on.  This is a very small happening, really, in the scheme of most novels.  It isn't big, like a murder or a birth or something, just an everyday occurrence that will be the forerunner of big, big trouble (which we won't see, either, really).  The second plot point in the rising action is when Edna starts drinking whisky and tells about the time she had a monkey.  The story has a particularly grisly ending, and somehow the joy of the adventure gets swallowed in a gloom that Edna can't shake, no matter how she tries to go along with things.  After that, at the trailer part, in the cab, at the motel, the little things begin to pile up - and soon we have a clear look at the turning point in the story - the moment that we, and Earl, realize that Edna will not be staying with Earl - and that he has not very many worthwhile options.  The denouement in this story is not really an ending - it merely points toward an ending.  The slice of life is completed - but the story will run its course without us.

Style and Tone:

The first thing one notices about Richard Ford's prose is the care he takes with every mini-aspect.  If you read it aloud, you are aware of the variation in sentence and phrase length - almost like poetry.  And, although there is nothing fancy or dazzling about the language - each word is in its place.  Also, since the "I" narrator controls the Point of View, we have relatively little description in the usual sense - Earl tells us where we are as a function of telling the plot, not to wow us with landscape.  When the narrator does tell us something about the landscape, it will often be because there is something especially rare about the sight - and in those places the description functions as an image-symbol as well:  "light from the interstate frosting the low sky and the big red Ramada sign humming motionlessly in the night . . . .  

Where other writers dazzle with description, or give characters trendy accents or colorful expression, Ford counts on the accuracy of each idea.  That is not to say that the Ideas are simple - in fact, they are very subtle and shaded.  Nonetheless, we have the sense that the "I" narrator is very carefully trying to explain exactly how he felt at the time - or feels now.  This means that the Greater Truth of each story is expressed in the words of the character-narrator and not in the terms that a different, omniscient author might construct it.   

This story takes place in Great Falls (Even though the collection is named after Rock Springs, Wyoming, most of the stories take place in Great Falls, Montana.)

 *Communist* is one of the best-known of Richard Ford's stories - and one that demonstrates that Minimalism does not mean transparency.  The story is as slippery as mud on a lake bottom - and the nature of the narrator's epiphany is remarkably subtle.

Character:

The narrator, Les, is the main character - the one to whom "something happens."  And the story revolves around Les, his mother, Aileen, and her boyfriend, Glen Baxter (who, Les tells us, is a Communist and liked hunting.)  Again, we have the simple, unadorned "I" narrator - and that narrator is not particularly erudite, does not use fancy language, and is seemingly telling us this all in confidence, since he is quite honest.  When Les begins narrating the story, we know that it happened some time ago - but we don't know how long ago until the last paragraph, where he tells us that he was sixteen at the time, and now he is 41.  In "Rock Springs," the narrator's slice of life is immediate - in "Communist" the narrator is telling the story from a long time afterward.  In both cases, though, it is the confiding, direct voice that makes the events seem fresh and real.  But the importance of the time lapse in "Communist" cannot be overstated.  Les, in some important way, does not realize the effect that his mother has had on him until well after - and now, when the actual narration is taking place, he "has not heard her voice . . . in a long, long time."

Plot:  

Even though we do know some of the events and history surrounding Aileen's relationship with Glen Baxter, the action takes place on one afternoon - the "slice of life" that reveals the discovery.  Les tells us that he "likes" Glen Baxter - and that he is eager to go hunting with him.  Aileen is less enthused - she seems not to approve of shooting the snow geese, and she is, in any case, angry with Glen.  When they arrive at the lake, Aileen stays in the car, initially, and Glen takes Les to the hidden lake where he sees, and hears, the geese.  Later Aileen walks out to the lake - after the men have already shot their birds.  One bird is still in the water, only "winged."  Aileen, sympathetic to a wild creature being left to die in much pain, nicely asks Glen to get the bird.  Glen refuses.  In this seemingly small event, everything is revealed.  It's a minimal plot, for sure!  But Les knows, then, that he cannot care for someone who does not have a heart (even if they have a sympathetic political position) - and Aileen knows, too, that she is wasting her time with him.  The 41-year-old-narrator does not seek to change or alter what has happened, he is only conscientious to tell it in detail - because now he knows what it means.  

Structure: 

This story actually seems to have two separate traditional structures layered one upon the other.  In the first place, we have the classic Aristotelian structure of rising action, climax, and denouement.  At the same time, there is a structure of opposition between forces in the story (a particularly traditional arrangement for a short story - we see this in Chekov, Poe, etc.).  The rising action is the series of increasingly tense moments between Aileen and Glen - as observed by Les.  The action starts when Glen arrives at the house:  "We haven't seen you in a long time, I guess," Aileen says.  Later, in the car - Aileen says:  "So where were you for three months?" And for neither of these questions does Glen have a good answer.  Still Aileen goes along with the hunting trip - and even walks out to the lake, prepared to be conciliatory, friendly.  Then the action escalates swiftly as she realizes - and Les realizes - that Glen is not going to do anything about the snow goose.  The denouement takes place much later, of course, when Les is a mature man and realizes exactly what his mother's integrity really meant.  

The "opposition" has to do with the expectations that are set up about the characters and then are reversed.  At the beginning, we think that Les is going to perhaps tell us how he bonded with Glen.  First, Glen is a Communist, and Les tells us:  "I liked that because my father had been a labor man" - and so we think that Glen is a both a manly man and a person with a social conscience, as well.  Just the role model that someone like Les would respond to - especially since he tells us that his mother "stayed inside watching television in her bedroom and drinking beers."  And the sense of expectation seems to grow, even though we become more and more uncomfortable with the offhandedness of Glen, his seeming coldness.  By the end of the story, our expectations have been entirely reversed - we see that it is Les' mother whose character he comes to admire - and that Glen, for all of his manliness, is really heartless.  There are several other "oppositions" set up in this story - the surprise of the hidden lake, the onset of the cold weather - I hope we can talk about these on the Discussion boards!

Style and Tone:

Communist is a story where the particular style of Richard Ford is in high form.  His narrator, Les, is careful not to overstate anything, and there is a resignation, a realism, and a sadness that shines though the simplicity of the language.  A line like the following is "signature" Richard Ford:  "and he looked at me with a look I think now was helplessness, though I could not see a way to change anything."  Or this:  "Then I thought about my mother, in the car alone, and how much longer I would stay with her, and what it might mean to her for me to leave."

You will notice that these are very important revelations in the story - and yet they are delivered without fanfare, almost softly, and in the plainest language.  It seems as if they were the normal thoughts for this narrator, Les - and not worried over and polished endlessly (as we know Ford did, and does!).

Be sure to mark your favorite lines and share them with the class!

and now, on to (2) Content/themes and the relationship to other literature - 

Richard Ford:  <http://www.shs.starkville.k12.ms.us/mswm/MSWritersAndMusicians/writers/Ford.html>

Rock Springs:  <http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?city=Rock%20Springs&state=WY&country=United%20States>

Great Falls:  <http://www.ci.great-falls.mt.us/>

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Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, your Instructor, is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Languages

Irvine Valley College, Irvine, California