Cinematic modernism and Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples.

Cinematic modernism and Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples. IN A SYNERGY PERHAPS NOT AS "FAMOUS" AS THAT OF WALKEREVANS For the off-road and NASCAR driver, see Walker Evans (racer). Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. AND James Agee Noun 1. James Agee - United States novelist (1909-1955)Agee , Eudora Welty Noun 1. Eudora Welty - United States writer about rural southern life (1909-2001)Welty worked within two registers, as bothfiction writer and photographer. Those registers dynamically cometogether in The Golden Apples, a text, as we will see, heavily indebtedto the visual. The Passionate Observer, a 2002 exhibition organized bythe Mississippi Museum of Art, has suggested that had she not beenturned down for employment in 1936 as a photographer for theResettlement Administration The Resettlement Administration (RA) was the brainchild of Rexford G. Tugwell, an economics professor at Columbia University who became an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the latter's campaign for the presidency in 1932. , Welty may have very well become anotherMarian Post Wolcott. "If fate had made Welty a photographer,"Michael Kreyling muses, "we would have lost a great writer butgained an equally great photographer" ("Free Eudora"763). Intuiting her photographic sensibility, critics have continuallyexplored her fiction's narrative time, its various "stillmoments," thus privileging a photographic discourse built on visualfixity fix��i��ty?n. pl. fix��i��ties1. The quality or condition of being fixed.2. Something fixed or immovable. and the instantaneous. Accordingly, her fiction parallels herphotography, illustrating the process of embalming embalming(ĕmbä`mĭng, ĭm–), practice of preserving the body after death by artificial means. The custom was prevalent among many ancient peoples and still survives in many cultures. time imagistically,as is the case, one could argue, with the embedded history that emergesin Delta Wedding's descriptions of family photographs. Katherine Henninger begins to challenge this view of Welty'sfiction, noting that Welty rarely writes about photographers. Herfiction is strangely devoid of explicit references to photography andyet her writing is "framed around the act of framing, envisioning,and telling" (188), as Welty is interested in what lies outside ofthe picture's frame (189). Hers is a more mobile vision and in TheGolden Apples, Welty-the-photographer transforms intoWelty-the-cinematographer, as she continually experiments with therelationship between time, space, and movement in a complicatedrendering of history. With its multiple points of view and"deep-focus" narratives, Welty renders her fictional Morganain cinematic terms, where image meets word. Such a meeting is a reminderof the historically complicated and intertwined relationship of literaryand filmic film��ic?adj.Of, relating to, or characteristic of movies; cinematic.filmi��cal��ly adv. modernisms. Welty came of age in a culture given over to the cinema, as moviesplayed a dynamic roll in small-town life, in towns like Jackson or TheGolden Applegs fictional Morgana. Movies, as pervasive as the scent ofwisteria wisteria(wĭstēr`ēə)or wistaria(–târ`–), any plant of the genus Wisteria, , saturated small-town fife. With Hollywood studios producing anaverage of fifty films per year, the local movie offerings wereplentiful during the 1930s; given the individual exhibitor'sarrangement with distributors, someone like Welty could, in theory, seea different movie every day of the week. Moreover, small-town businessesadvertised the movies, and vice versa VICE VERSA. On the contrary; on opposite sides. , creating an imbricated imbricated/im��bri��cat��ed/ (im��bri-kat?id) overlapping like shingles. imbricatedoverlapping like shingles or roof slates or tiles. local filmculture in which standardized Hollywood was balanced by the demands oflocal and regional audiences and businesses (Waller xvi). As a youngwoman, Welty could have walked by a local candy store whose windowdisplay constructed a diorama of "sweet" romance, using themovie promotional material distributed by local theater owners to townbusinesses. A cardboard cut-out of Jean Harlow eating chocolates inDinner at Eight (1933) might have stirred a young Eudora Welty to take abite at the movies. These storefront window displays, as well as otherstreet-side promotional stunts, provided "interludes or fragmentsof diversion and entertainment" to all passersby (Waller 11). As Leslie Kaplansky illustrates, Welty was an avid moviegoer mov��ie��go��er?n.One who goes to see movies.movie��going adj. , asthe references to movies proliferating through her fiction demonstrates(579). Welty loved Chaplin movies and Keystone cops serials, both ofwhich resonate in The Golden Apples (One 36; Schmidt 88). In OneWriter's Beginnings, Welty elegantly describes the culture ofsmall-town movie going: All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Whole families attended together in the evenings, at least once a week, and children were allowed to go without chaperone in the long summer afternoons. (36) In the South, as with much of early twentieth-century small-townAmerica, movies formed a crucial part of the local imaginary. The vastinner and exterior life of the movies finds expression in the"interludes and fragments" o Morgana s hastory (Waller 11). InThe Golden Apples, the cinema acts not only as a recurring narrativemotif but also offers a lens through which we may read the cycle'sreflexive narrative frames. As if describing the undulating short-story-cycle structure of TheGolden Apples, in 1946 film theorist Andre Bazin, writing at the samemoment as Welty although on a different continent, described the cinemaas the "synthesis of simple movements"--a series ofreframings, of mise-en-scenes upon mise-en-scenes--wherein every objectis an image and every image is an object or story (15). In one of hismost startling metaphors, Bazin imagined that within the cinema, an"art of space," the "image of things is likewise theimage of their duration, change mummified as it were." Movement infilm is fluid, a repeatable flow like that of Morgana's Big BlackRiver and the text's discrete yet connected narratives,constructing a montage of associations through narrative juxtaposition.In The Golden Apples, Welty asks us to enter into a series of fictionalframes that render Morgana's history cinematically by using spatialand temporal elisions to create the text. As Siegfried Kracauer notes, "The nature of photographysurvives in that of film," in the "longing for an instrumentwhich would capture the slightest incidents of the world about us"(171). Early cinema pioneers like the Lumiere Brothers wished "todevelop photography into a means of storytelling," opening the lensonto a dynamic world (174). Like a film, The Golden Apples is an"ever-changing whole," broken into discrete narratives thatconnect like frames of a film (Rodowick 30). Composed of linearsequences or "instants" in Morgana's time, thecycle's structure recalls Gilles Deleuze's definition of earlycinema as "the system which reproduces movement as a function ofany-instant-whatever, that is, as a function of equidistant e��qui��dis��tant?adj.Equally distant.equi��distance n. instants,selected so as to create an impression of continuity" (5). Brokeninto sections that remind one of early cinema intertitles, those spatialpauses that created frames within and against the film's visualdiegesis Di`e`ge´sisn. 1. A narrative or history; a recital or relation. , the cycle's structure indeed creates "the impressionof continuity." The cycle's gaps become historical gaps,unnarratable time which, through the framing of absence, inform thecycle's implicit critique of a teleological tel��e��ol��o��gy?n. pl. tel��e��ol��o��gies1. The study of design or purpose in natural phenomena.2. The use of ultimate purpose or design as a means of explaining phenomena.3. history. In this way,The Golden Apples works its way through spectacular instants, as well asgaps, in Morgana's history. Welty's Morgana is a world ofduplicity DUPLICITY, pleading. Duplicity of pleading consists in multiplicity of distinct matter to one and the same thing, whereunto several answers are required. Duplicity may occur in one and the same pleading. , surfaces and citations that eddy and undulate undulate/un��du��late/ (-lat)1. to move in waves or in a wavelike motion.2. to have a wavelike appearance, outline, or form.un��dulatory , alluding tothe depths of a culture not seen yet spatially invoked, like thetown's peripatetic wanderer, King MacLain. Intertextual in��ter��tex��tu��al?adj.Relating to or deriving meaning from the interdependent ways in which texts stand in relation to each other.in in that it mobilizes as it deconstructs myth,assembled as it connects, montage-like, a series of related but discretestories, The Golden Apples plays with cinematic conventions--with itsscreens, projections, visual eroticism EroticismAphroditenovel of Alexandrian manners by Pierre Louys. [Fr. Lit.: Benét, 783]Ars AmatoriaOvid’s treatise on lovemaking. [Rom. Lit. , and temporal and spatialexperimentation. Instead of viewing the cycle as bifurcated, as PeterSchmidt has argued, moving from the a narration of distance, in whichwomen's points of view arise only through indirection Not direct. Indirection provides a way of accessing instructions, routines and objects when their physical location is constantly changing. The initial routine points to some place, and, using hardware and/or software, that place points to some other place. , to a moredirect first-person stream of consciousness of Ran's andEugene's narrations, I would argue that the cycle works through aseries of point-of-view surrogates by which no one character seemsprivileged above the rest. We enter into Morgana and the lives of itsformer citizens through a myriad of voices and eyes, or through a seriesof narrative "reframings." In this way the text operates likea camera that moves about a space, repositioning its gaze. Indeed, weenter Morgana through Katie Rainey and exit through Virgie, amother/daughter generational and decisively female-constructed narrativeframe. The Golden Applesbegins with gossipy Katie Rainey's directaddress that invites the reader into the dynamic space of Morgana. Thecyle directs us inside the frame of the text, engaging us to become partof the lively movement of Morgana's streets. The town's nameis an allusion to "rata morgana," which literally translatesinto the Fairy Morgana, sister of Arthur, but more often refers to a"mirage." Morgana can be read as a projection, a cinematicmirage of a place that shifts focus as it shifts historical frames.Katie points us in a direction when she says, "That was MissSnowdie MacLain" (263). Objectifying Snowdie as "that,"with no visual antecedent ANTECEDENT. Something that goes before. In the construction of laws, agreements, and the like, reference is always to be made to the last antecedent; ad proximun antecedens fiat relatio. , Katie spatially situates us, howeverobliquely, inside Morgana. She invites us into the frame of the text,both temporally and spatially, as Snowdie has passed by us physicallyand is now in the past as we discursively enter the present of"Shower of Gold." We then take a place in the story'smovement, moving back and forth, in and outside narrative and historicalframes, spatially mimicking the movement of Miss Eckhart'sever-ticking metronome metronome(mĕ`trənōm'), in music, originally pyramid-shaped clockwork mechanism to indicate the exact tempo in which a work is to be performed. It has a double pendulum whose pace can be altered by sliding the upper weight up or down. . Here, as Welty has said of fictional time,"we see not simply an act taking place in time; we are made, aswitnesses, to see time happen. We look upon its answer as it occurs intime. This moment, this rending, is what might happen to anyone"(Eye 169). We, as readers, follow Katie Rainey, our textual surrogate,and participate in the rendering. Welty immediately creates a visualidentification with a character, seen but not seen, crafting a series ofvisual ellipses through which we enter Morgana. To understand the particularities of Welty's vision, we mightusefully look at her photographic style, especially in trying todecipher the visually inspired re-framings that pervade per��vade?tr.v. per��vad��ed, per��vad��ing, per��vadesTo be present throughout; permeate. See Synonyms at charge.[Latin perv her work. In herphotography, Welty plays with depth of field, often entreating herviewer into the image. For instance, in "Ruins of Windsor / PortGibson / 1942," she photographs a plantation ruin, the ultimatesignifier sig��ni��fi��er?n.1. One that signifies.2. Linguistics A linguistic unit or pattern, such as a succession of speech sounds, written symbols, or gestures, that conveys meaning; a linguistic sign. of antebellum white privilege White privilege has the following meanings: White privilege (sociology) -- social privileges argued to be enjoyed by whites. White privilege (royalty) -- better known as "privil��ge du blanc", a clothing protocol in the Vatican. (Photographs 119). In deepfocus, the plantation lies in the center of the background, while in theforeground Weky's shadow emerges from off-frame. As our eyepiece EyepieceA lens or optical system which offers to the eye the image originating from another system (the objective), at a suitable viewing distance. The image can be virtual. onto this Mississippi landscape, she stands "out there," inher partiality, simultaneously in the past and yet before us, as werealize, "That is Welty." Janus-like, we peer at the ruins ofa whites-only past, beyond her shadowy frame. She thus becomes acharacter in this visual fiction. Although photography drains an obiectof movement, this photograph points the way toward the cinema thatextracts movement, pulling us into the frame (Rodowick 31). Here webecome the photograph's witnesses, seeing an act taking place asWelty frames not only this landscape but also her relationship to thisplace in time. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With its reflexive framing, resembling the opening sections of"Shower of Gold," Welty's photograph thus constructs amise-en-abyme onto a series of Southern histories, opening up thisplantation as a kind of historical crypt. Such allusive al��lu��sive?adj.Containing or characterized by indirect references: an allusive speech.al��lu framing, withits implied movement, constructs a tension between what's in theframe and what lies outside it. It constructs a tension betweenon-screen and off-screen space, which always exist in relation to eachother. According to according toprep.1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians.2. In keeping with: according to instructions.3. film theorist Noel Burch, the spectator only becomesaware of this relationship through the movement of a character andobject in and off screen: As soon as a character actually enter[s] the frame, [her] entry retrospectively calls to mind the existence of the spatial segment from which [she] emerged. Conversely, as long as the frame remains empty, all of the surrounding space is appreciably equal in potential, and the spatial segment from which the character emerges takes on specific and primordial importance only at the actual moment the person enters screen space. (19, emphasis mine) Off-screen space is anxious space, imaginative space. It is thespace of history, of the interstitial historical present, of thenon-narratable. A haunting A Haunting is a television series on Discovery Channel that, according to its website[1] chronicles the "terrifying true stories of the paranormal told by people who experienced real-life horror tales. projection onto this ruin, Welty's flatshadow paradoxically creates a sense of depth, or resonance, not only tothis suggestive landscape but also to the spatial segment from which sheemerges. This shadow darkly pierces this place at this time. The shadowenters the photograph's present, the real, and yet, by virtue ofthe image's permeability, the image bears witness to that whichlies outside of consciousness, the unrepresentable. Seeing Welty caughtin the shadow, we are also caught between two indexes, for the shadow isan index of the moment of the photograph. And yet, situated against theruins, this black shadow also uncannily becomes a part of thishistorical tableau, retrospectively calling attention to the specter ofslavery that has always cast a shadow on Southern monuments, especiallythose built by black labor. Welty constructs one mise-en-scene uponanother, layering shadows of the present upon a specter of the past. Bychallenging the spatial and historical singularity of this image, thisplace, Welty creates a visual fiction which, as Patricia Yaeger argues,like so much of Southern women's fiction Women's fiction is an umbrella term for a wide-ranging collection of literary sub-genres that are marketed to female readers, including many mainstream novels, romantic fiction, "chick lit," and other sub genres. , explores "aradically dislocated surface landscape filled with jagged whitesignifiers and pallid pal��lid?adj.1. Having an abnormally pale or wan complexion: the pallid face of the invalid.2. Lacking intensity of color or luminousness.3. detritus detritus/de��tri��tus/ (de-tri��tus) particulate matter produced by or remaining after the wearing away or disintegration of a substance or tissue. de��tri��tusn. pl. that bespeaks a constant uneasiness aboutthe meaning of whiteness" (Dirt 20). The image acts an invocationas we, as witnesses, look onto the past through Welty'sphotographic present, one still haunted by the specter of segregation. Welty's shadow concretely positions us outside of the frame;in other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently , we literally and figuratively don't have a place inthis picture. However, through our shadowy surrogate, we must considerthe space in between us and this ruin, or the history of racial andclass subjugation SubjugationCushan-rishathaim Aramking to whom God sold Israelites. [O.T.: Judges 3:8]Gibeonitesconsigned to servitude in retribution for trickery. [O.T.: Joshua 9:22–27]Ham Noahcurses him and progeny to servitude. [O. that potentially invades this frame. The shadow thatscores this plantation emerges out of yet another ruin, that of theGreat Depression. Only a year earlier than the photograph, in 1941, W.J. Cash published his monumental study, The Mind of the South. He endshis text by evocatively framing the Depression from a Southern point ofview, illustrating how the South's present economic devastationparalleled the Civil War's. [The Depression] was the conclusive disaster for the South. Immediate disaster for farmer, planter, tenant, and sharecropper ....Many of the planters abandoned their lands altogether, or turned them over to their tenants to dig a living out of it if they could--without seeds or fertilizers, without foodstuffs for the work animals, and, in the case of the cropper at least, without work animals. Having always gone essentially hungry for a reasonably good diet, the great body of the sharecroppers, white and black, would begin to go hungry after the fall of 1931, and these people who had neither employment, means of subsistence, nor any place to go were wandering along every road from county to county and state to state, or crowding into nearly overcrowded slums in the towns and cities, in the hope of securing aid from the always totally inadequate, often downright niggardly local relief funds. (360-61) With this devastating critique of the plantation economy'scollapse, Cash offers a detailed rendering of a Depression-era Southabandoned, once again, by a conservative elite. According to Cash,individual farmers once again became absorbed by "the ideal ofpersonal profits"; their greed became part of the "long decayof the feeling of responsibility and honor" that still crippled themodern South (424). Similarly, Welty's shadow dares to wander into a past thatreckons with the present and, by implication, a future. Her photographreminds us of Virgie, who, at the end of "The Wanderers,"lingers at a stile that connects a series of visual tableaux onto thepast. From a Civil War monument to a decaying small-town bijou, Virgiesees a series of connected yet discrete visual "histories" inwhich a dispossessed past leads to an economically ravaged present,paralleling the arch of Cash's text. Welty's photograph, inits historical restlessness, reminds us that the physical world containssites where, as Yaeger contends, unrequited desires, bizarre ideologies, and hidden productivities are encrypted, so that any narration of space must confront the dilemma of geographic enigmas head on, including the enigma of what gets forgotten or hidden, or lost in the comforts of ordinary space. ("Introduction" 4) Thus, the photograph invites us to imagine not only how thispresent and past come together but also the "enigma of what getsforgotten or hidden," such as the subaltern histories andnarratives buried amid these ruins. Welty's hovering shadow parallels the many images ofpartiality, or absence, that invade her fiction. Morgana's mostcelebrated resident is also its most absent. Indeed, we first and lastsee King MacLain, the cycle's preternatural playboy, through thevisual cue of a hat, which, marking him as missing, leads many in thecommunity to assume he is dead. As Katie tells it, King "wentsallying out through those woods and fields and laid his hat down on thebank of the river with 'King MacLain' on it.... I wishI'd seen him! I don't guess I'd have stopped him. Ican't tell you why, but I wish I'd seen him! But nobodydid!" (266). An expressive visual prop that literally names"King MacLain," the hat marks his disappearance within the BigBlack, Welty's version of a blank screen onto which we may projecthis movements. The hat, then, becomes a visual and discursive fetish fetish(fĕt`ĭsh), inanimate object believed to possess some magical power. The fetish may be a natural thing, such as a stone, a feather, a shell, or the claw of an animal, or it may be artificial, such as carvings in wood. ,one of many in The Golden Apples. Welty continually frames her characters through visualfetishes--King's hat, Virgie's red sash, Miss Eckhart's"feminine ankles." In this way, she duplicates thecinema's scopophilia scopophilia/sco��po��phil��ia/ (sko?po-fil��e-ah) usually, voyeurism, but it is sometimes divided into active and passive forms, active s. being voyeurism and passive s. being exhibitionism. , the pleasure, according to Laura Mulvey,associated with "taking other people as objects, subjecting them toa controlling and curious gaze" (835). Such fetishistic scopophilia"can exist outside of linear time as the erotic instinct is focusedon the look alone" (840). In closeup, through Katie, our textualand spectator surrogate, the fetishistic hat-as-substitute"preserves" or "embalms" King MacLain outside ofMorgana's everyday time. And yet it is an image in constantmovement for, as Katie admits, "Everybody to their ownvisioning.... With men like King, your thoughts are bottomless"(268, 274). In this way King exists in the imaginary off-screen spacethat defines Morgana's spatial and narrative borders. King'shat becomes a magician's hat, with no bottom to it, a site offantasy. Of course, in true Sam Spade fashion, Katie wants a moreconcrete temporal sign: "I think with the hat," she confides,"he ought to have laid his watch down, if he wanted to give it abetter look" (266). Then Katie adds to the mise-en-scene of"Shower of Gold." As the watch keeps ticking, its hands pointto the continuous stream of time, opening up the time and space forKing's repeated return. Beginning with "Shower of Gold"and ending with "The Wanderers," King keeps"sallying" in and out of the text, marking its boundaries andkeeping us "in time" with Morgana's ebbs and flows.King's apositionality, his physical absence, challenges theverisimilitude of Morgana's cinematically rendered space, in whichthe position of characters "is always determined" (Bazin 32).He is in and out of frame at the same time. Like the rigid yetconstantly moving hand of Miss Eckhart's metronome, the hat marksKing Maclain as here (on-screen) and there (off-screen), framed and notframed--in constant movement or, to return to Bazin, in a"synthesis of movements." King's movement, as with the cycle's vacillating textualand historical frames and various points of view, delineates thecycle's spatial and temporal boundaries, regulating the text like ametronome, another of the cycle's framing tropes. Intriguingly,"to metronome" is to fill with a sound or "toregulate" as if by a metronome's sound or action. As bothsound and image in the text, the metronome broaches the two dements ofthe cinema. Measuring time spatially, like the frames of a film, thisextended metaphor An extended metaphor, also called a conceit, is a metaphor that continues into the sentences that follow. An extended metaphor is also a metaphor developed at great length, occurring frequently in or throughout a work. is simultaneously a noun and verb, object and action,structuring presence and absence in the text. As the text moves forward,it inevitably traces back again to the histories, memories, and mythsthat inhabit Morgana. A few characters, like Virgie and Loch, may escapeits linear space and time, slipping beyond not only the text'sframe but also Morgana's gaze. In and outside of Morgana's gaze is Old Plez Morgan, one ofthe few black characters and points of view in the cycle, albeitmediated. As Katie informs us, Plez is "one of Mrs. Stark'smother's niggers....Lives down beyond me. The real old kind, thatknows everybody since time was" (269). Once the Stark family'spossession, Plez bridges Morgana's antebellum slave past with itsJim Crow Jim CrowNegro stereotype popularized by 19th-century minstrel shows. [Am. Hist.: Van Doren, 138]See : Bigotry present, spatially invoked when Loch reminds us that"niggertown" is just past the cemetery (278). Plez reminds usof the continuity of Morgana's dramatic space, of the duration ofsegregation. Black Morgana is buried beyond the town's whitelimits, as crucial to the town's history as those buried in thecemetery next door. Plez's entrance into the cycle pierces thewhite narrative space of Morgana, reminding us that "the beginningof time" for Morgana leads back to the subsemantic history ofslavery The history of slavery covers many different forms of human exploitation across many cultures and throughout human history. Slavery, generally defined, refers to the systematic exploitation of labor for work and services without consent and/or the possession of other persons as . Through deep space description, Welty illustrates howbackground (niggertown) and foreground (white Morgana) are inextricably in��ex��tri��ca��ble?adj.1. a. So intricate or entangled as to make escape impossible: an inextricable maze; an inextricable web of deceit.b. bound. Living physically and socially "beyond" Plez, Katienevertheless speaks through and for Plez, their voices imbricated, whenshe recounts yet another story of King MacLain: But yonder ahead of [Plez] was walking a man. Plez said it was a white man's walk and a walk he knew--but it struck him it was from away in another year, another time. It wasn't just the walk of anybody supposed to be going along the road to MacLain fight at that time--and yet it was too--and if it was, he still couldn't think what business that somebody would be up to. That was the careful way Plez was putting it to his mind. (270) Situating the reader "on the road to MacLain," andemphasizing "right at that time," a description synchronizedby the 2:15 p.m. train whistle The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.Please [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page. , Katie, once again, virtually inserts usinto the text through a series of interior frames of narration. Visuallycoded as white by a character who, though he reads signs of whiteness,may do so only in the "coloreds only section" of the localmovie theater, King's "another year, another time" walktakes place in a future-past that is "right at that time."King MacLain typifies cinematic time as "change mummified."Through different points of view, this description of an externalreality vacillates back and forth, here and there in time, creating aspatial "objectivity in time." Katie later admits that Plez had a tendency to"fabricate" stories for his white listeners. In the process,Katie belies her own tendency to fabricate or, given this passage'sincredible interiority, "put[ting ting?n.A single light metallic sound, as of a small bell.intr.v. tinged , ting��ing, tingsTo give forth a light metallic sound. ] it" in the mind, or voice,of Plez. In the retelling of King's first meeting with his sons,Eugene and Randall, on that "old-year's-night" ofHalloween, Katie cannibalizes Plez's story when she incorporatesracist imagery in her description of the MacLain twins' antics: You know if children can be monkeys, they're going to be them. (Without the masks, though, those two children would have been more polite about it--there's enough Hudson in them.) Skating around and around their papa, and just as ignorant! Poor little fellows. After all, they'd had nobody to scare all day for Hallowe'en, except one or two niggers that went by, and the Y. & M.V. train whistling through at two-fifteen, they scared that. But monkeys--! Skating around their papa. Plez said if those children had been black, he wouldn't hesitate to say they would remind a soul of little nigger cannibals in the jungle. When they got their papa in their ring-around-a-rosy and he couldn't get out, Plez said it was enough to make an onlooker a little uneasy, and he called once or twice on the Lord. (271-72) In their masks, performing a kind of black-face minstrelsy min��strel��sy?n. pl. min��strel��sies1. The art or profession of a minstrel.2. A troupe of minstrels.3. Ballads and lyrics sung by minstrels. , thetwins scare "nobody" except a few "niggers." Thisperformance is then further doubled by Katie's putting on the face,or voice, of Plez before the reader. The racist imagery ("niggercannibals") that she imports into Plez's tale reminds us thatwhite Morgana, like so much of the South, is "a culture so casualabout its throwaways that it fails to repress re��pressv.1. To hold back by an act of volition.2. To exclude something from the conscious mind. them" (Yaeger, Dirt85). This fusing of black/white storytelling also betrays the blurredracial boundaries between white and black cultures in the Jim CrowSouth, of which the fleeting but crucial presence of black characters,like Plez and Juba, is evidence. Ironically, perhaps "takenin" by Plez's signifying, Katie embeds a social critique ofblack negation, for Plez (i.e. nobody), as the only one who sees King,becomes the origin for a crucial story in Morgana's whitemythology. While Welty calls attention to Katie's owncannibalization can��ni��bal��ize?v. can��ni��bal��ized, can��ni��bal��iz��ing, can��ni��bal��iz��esv.tr.1. To remove serviceable parts from (damaged airplanes, for example) for use in the repair of other equipment of the same of Plez's tale, she also undermines Morgana'swhite mythology by framing the way in which Plez undermines Katie'stale. As the onlooker made uneasy by the spectacle of King's shame,Plez inserts himself into the tale. He invests in Katie a narrative thatbespeaks a fallen white patriarchy, one humiliated hu��mil��i��ate?tr.v. hu��mil��i��at��ed, hu��mil��i��at��ing, hu��mil��i��atesTo lower the pride, dignity, or self-respect of. See Synonyms at degrade. by its own sons.Eugene and Randall become "little nigger cannibals" whoconsume their father's shame, while Plez serves up that shame tothe town gossip, who will consume just about anything, even a tale ofwhite abjection. Welty thus calls attention to the process by which she inscribes,however cantedly, Morgana and its characters in our minds as virtualobservers. Like Plez "making his way down the road" (269), wefind our way through the text "by stages." Welty fictionallyconceptualizes what Bazin would term "objectivity in time."She positions us somewhere between narrative frames--between Plez'sand Katie's voices, the various nows and thens of the text. In TheGalden Apples, as with the cinematic observer, "the body itself isa fiction, a site for departure and return" (Friedberg 38). TheGolden Applesasks us to continually enter and exit the stories'temporal and spatial frames. "June Recital," the longest story in the cycle, mostextensively conceptualizes the process by which the movies informWelty's text. Indeed, it is an allegory of moviegoing, and bearsevidence that Welty the writer and photographer was also a moviegoer.From Virgie's piano playing piano playingNeurologyA fanciful descriptor for finger movements linked to the loss of position sensation, in which the Pt seeks to discover finger position in space by periodic movement; PP occurs in Dejerine-Sottas syndrome; PP also refers to intermittent "in the world" ofMorgana's Bijou to Loch Morrison's turning Miss Eckhart'smetronome into a climactic "ticking bomb" or Cassie'simagining Virgie's ice cream cones as pirate's daggers, themovies, as well as a host of other mass culture forms, are a crucialpart of the everyday and imaginative life of Morgana. Michael Kreyling describes "June Recital" as a story thatmoves the present moment of The Golden Apples to around 1920, sixteenyears after we first meet Snowdie, Katie, and King on the road toMacLain (Understanding 119). As many critics have noted, it is by farthe most formally ambitious of Welty's stories in terms of itssplit narration and flashback structure (Schmidt 88). On one side,literally on one side of the Morrison house Morrison House can refer to any of the following sites listed on the Untied States National Register of Historic Places: Morrison House — Arizona Morrison House — Kentucky Morrison House — Cincinnati, Ohio , we have Loch Morrison stuckin his bedroom with malaria, peeping out his "rear window"like Jimmy Stewart at the abandoned McLain house, constructing a literalthird-person-point-of-view narration of what he sees. Loch eitherdangles from a tree outside his window or uses his phallic phallic/phal��lic/ (-ik) pertaining to or resembling a phallus. phal��licadj.1. Of, relating to, or resembling a phallus.2. littletelescope to see, camera-like, and narrate the comings and goings ofteenage Virgie Rainey and her sailor boyfriend, as they make love in theupstairs bedroom. He also notices the senile senile/se��nile/ (se��nil) pertaining to old age; manifesting senility. se��nileadj.1. Relating to, characteristic of, or resulting from old age.2. Miss Ecldaart, thetown's piano teacher, who moves about downstairs, returning to thesite of her beloved June piano recitals. When he moves "his eyeupstairs, up an inch on the telescope" (281), he becomes our"eyepiece," as critics have noted, on the erotic antics ofVirgie and the sailor, but only in a limited fashion as, given his age,he cannot name the sexual display that he sees. As Kreyling argues, in"the gap between what Loch sees and what he can name, readers mustmake The Golden Apples" (Understanding 121). Or, more to the point,we must partake and fill in the blanks of Loch's gaze. In this story, Welty self-consciously creates a parallel betweenfictional narration and the cinematic apparatus, for the narrationsimulates the liminality between the camera's objectivity (thirdperson) and the central character's subjectivity (first-personpoint of view). As we become increasingly aware of our dependence onLoch's suspect rendering of the visual, the story calls attentionto its own narratological mediation. Welty forces us to see the worldfrom a pubescent pubescent/pu��bes��cent/ (pu-bes��int)1. arriving at the age of puberty.2. covered with down or lanugo.pu��bes��centadj.1. boy's point of view, projected onto the pagethrough the lens of third person. By doing so, Welty uses cinematicmotifs to call attention to the way in which all narratives aremediated, reflexively so in "June Recital." Ultimately, thissection playfully investigates constructed ways of seeing everyday life. "June Recital" begins by situating us in a kind of movietheater, as Loch sits undetected in his room watching events across theway. Loch "squint squint:see strabismus. [s]" and "move[s] his eye" (278,281) about the house, operating as a camera lens on the antics nextdoor. And yet, as the story plays with cinematic codes, it also recalls1930s-40s movie theaters that, given their ample space, usedrear-projection systems. In these theaters, the projection booth projection boothn.1. A booth, as in a theater, in which a movie projector is operated.2. A booth, as in an auditorium, in which audio-visual equipment is contained and operated. waslocated behind the screen, projecting a reverse image onto the back of atranslucent screen, a technology illustrated in a scene from AlfredHitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. The story invokes a varietyof competing cinematic motifs in a tour-de-force exploration of thecinematic apparatus. Welty's titillating prose, evoking Loch'smasturbatory mas��tur��ba��to��ry?adj.1. Of or relating to masturbation.2. Excessively self-indulgent or self-involved: "[The play's]star . . . , malarial dreams and his attempts to understand who'sstealing the pickle over there in that window, create a sensual, eroticprojection for the reader. In this way, he frames for the viewer/readerthe events in terms of what he can and cannot see. As our surrogate inthis fiction, he begins the story as a third-person-point-of-viewnarrator NARRATOR. A pleader who draws narrs serviens narrator, a sergeant at law. Fleta, 1. 2, c. 37. Obsolete. , yet through him Welty illustrates how the cinema altered thevery nature of storytelling. In a number of passages, Loch, inhabiting the viewpoint of thevoyeuristic classic film spectator, shifts identification. He looksthrough windows and connects with "characters" across the way.Like a boy in a movie theater, he enters into, or creates, the narrativenext door. Loch has to shift from the "real" of his room, andthe space between his room to the MacLain home (with its sensuous figtrees), to the framed events in the windows. In this way, Loch'spoint-of-view narration also betrays his initial awareness of hissurroundings and the process by which he gives way, like all moviegoers,to the spectacle: In that window across from his window, in the back upper room, a bed faced his. The foot was gone, and a mattress had partly slid down but was holding on. A shadow from a tree, a branch and its leaves, slowly traveled over the hills and hollows of the mattress....A framed picture could be seen hanging on the wall, just askew enough so that it looked straightened every now and then. Sometimes the glass in the picture reflected the light outdoors and the flight of the birds between branches of trees. (276) In this passage, we become aware of the series of frames into theMacLain home, for the reflected light and shadow of "birds betweenbranches of a tree" invade this scene, breaking the frame. Indeedevery flat surface in this brief description becomes a screen: shadowstravel "over the hills and hollows of the mattress," evokingthe early lantern shows, and the picture's glass simulates that ofa projector which reflects, in detail, "the birds between branchesof trees" onto Loch, the reader's screen. Welty illustratesthe way in which vision itself would shift with the rise of the cinema,for this passage uncannily resembles one by Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Sch?nflies Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt about theaura attached to witnessing natural phenomena: "If, while restingon a summer afternoon, you follow eyes over a mountain range on thehorizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience theaura of those mountains, of that branch" (223). In an oddlydenaturalized description of the Southern landscape, Loch describesMorgana's birds and trees, however, as reflections, mediated andreproduced. Morgana is a mirage of a place, a two-dimensional surface.For Loch, to return to Benjamin's language, "the sight ofimmediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology"(233). With this dappling of outside and inside, screens and projectors,Welty reflexively calls our attention to the series of framings, bothexternal and internal, that pervade The Golden Apples. Loch's gazebecomes like the "shadow from a tree," his desires projectedonto this scene, as he constructs his version of the events across theway. As one of those shadows projected, Loch betrays "that momentwhen the subject inserts itself into the symbolic register in the guiseof a signifier, and in doing so gains meaning at the expense ofbeing" (Silverman 137). He takes in like a camera's apertureand reflects back to his reader like "the glass in thepicture" (276). As with "Ruins of Windsor," Welty createsa shadowy presence that pierces one of the many internal frames in hertext. This reflexivity arrests the reader-as-spectator, bringing anawareness of the field outside of the frame, of the gaps in "JuneRecital's" narrative. Loch subsequently dangles from a tree,so that the skewed, framed picture "straightened every now andthen" (276), canting cant?1?n.1. Angular deviation from a vertical or horizontal plane or surface; an inclination or slope.2. A slanted or oblique surface.3. a. A thrust or motion that tilts something. the reader's perspective along the way. Welty calls our attention to the devices by which spectators becomesutured to a film's scene. As an allegory, "June Recital"illustrates the fragility of the spectator's identification withthe screen and the reader's with the fiction. In "TheTutor-Code of Classical Cinema," Daniel Dayan summarizes thevulnerability of this perceiver and perceived dynamic: When the viewer discovers the frame--the first step in reading the film--the triumph of his former possession of the image fades out. The viewer discovers that the camera is hiding things, and therefore distrusts it and the frame itself which he now understands to be arbitrary....It is now the space which separates the camera from the characters. The latter have lost their quality of presence. The spectator discovers that his possession of space was only partial, illusory. He feels dispossessed of what he is prevented from seeing. He discovers that he is only authorized to see what happens to be in the axis of the gaze of another spectator, who is ghostly or absent. (448) In third-person point-of-view, Loch's ghostly narration ofevents offers us an entry into this visual fiction but also suspendssuch entry when we discover that we only partially see what is happeningover there in the MacLain home and see it through the arbitrary gaze ofa young boy. Like a camera or projector--like all narrators--Loch thenbecomes the apparatus for our apprehension of this narrative: "Forwhile the invaders did not see him, he saw them, both with the naked eyeand through the telescope; and each day that he kept them to himself,they were his" (278). Loch substitutes conventional film narratives (pirates and cowboys)for the events that would otherwise make no sense to him. The worldbecomes readable only by making it cinematic. He describes Virgie'sand the sailor's romp in movie terms: "They went around andaround like the policeman and Charlie Chaplin, both intending to falldown" (282). He turns Miss Eckhart's metronome into anexplosive "ticking machine" (317). Setting up the scene interms of various movie genres, Loch eventually identifies the peopleacross the way as characters in a movie. Watching Miss Eckhart tear"ribbons" of paper (282), slowly building her fire, Loch findshimself sutured to Miss Eckhart, his cinematic operative. He becomes aco-collaborator in the fantastic destruction of the MacLain home, a homehe earlier describes as being "wrapped ... with the summer'slove" (275): Loch was suddenly short of breath and pressed forward, cramped inside, checkerboarding his forehead and nose against the screen. He both wanted the plot to work and wanted it to fail. In another moment he was shed of all the outrage and possessiveness he had felt for the vacant house. This house was something the old woman intended to burn down. And Loch could think of a thousand ways she could do it better. (283-84) With the window screen against his forehead, Loch wishes to enterthe frame of the narrative across the way through an identification withMiss Eckhart. The classic cinematic organization "depends upon thesubject's willingness to become absent to itself by permitting afictional character to 'stand in' for it, or by allowing aparticular point of view to define what it sees," argues KajaSilverman. "The operation of suture suture/su��ture/ (soo��cher)1. sutura.2. a stitch or series of stitches made to secure apposition of the edges of a surgical or traumatic wound.3. to apply such stitches.4. is successful at the momentthat the viewing subject says, 'Yes, that's me,' or'That's what I see'" (141). Stuck in his room,feverish with malaria, Loch moves from passive spectator to active agentwithin this cinematically rendered spectacle of fire and bombs. Hemomentarily gives way to the fantasy, so much so that he begins toinhabit Miss Eckhart's body: "She bent over, painfully, hefelt, and laid the candle in the paper nest she had built on the piano.He too drew his breath in, protecting the flame, and as she pulled heraching hand back he pulled his" (317). Her shame is his shame; herempowerment is his. And yet, Welty complicates this process by callingattention to the cinematic apparatus. Just when Loch has slipped intothis narrative, Welty pulls us back, reframing our relationship to thescene, as Loch in the role of a movie critic "could think of athousand different ways she could do it better" (284). Loch thusbecomes camera, projector, and observer, and his room a virtual movietheater in which we join him and take in the show. And yet--everyone to his own visioning--next to Loch's roomsits his teenage sister Cassie who, with her back to the window, hearssounds coming from the abandoned house. If Loch is camera and projector,Cassie provides the acoustic accompaniment to the scene. The Morrisonhouse then provides the setting for two theater spaces, and, as always,Virgie is part of the Bijou's attractions. On the bottom floor ofthe abandoned MacLain home, Miss Eckhart returns to the scene of herglory, to her former boarding house, which also served as thetown's piano recital hall. Shunned from the town, now livingoff-screen as it were, Miss Eckardt returns in this story, restaging herfamous June Recitals, but this time, in a spectacle worthy of Cecil B.De Mille, she tries to burn down the house. In the process, as if cueingthe show or lifting the curtain, Miss Eckhart plays a refrain from FurElise, which acoustically triggers Cassie's memory of the long, hotdays of her early June Recitals: But with Fur Elise the third time, [Cassie's] uncritical self of the crucial present, this Wednesday afternoon, slowly came forward--as if called on. Cassie saw herself without even facing the mirror, for her small, solemn, unprotected figure was emerging staring-clear inside her mind. (287) The story's narration then splits from the real of Loch'sblow-by-blow perspective of present events in the two rooms, or screens,across the way to Cassie's screen memory of the recitals, by whichwe intersubjectively enter the past through her flashback. In describingthe scopic nature of this split narration, Gall Mortimer argues that the limited vision of these (and by implication, all) characters is emphasized by Welty's focus on what each child can see of the house next door through the window of his or her bedroom. To each of them, parts of some rooms are clearly visible, while others are hidden from view. Together, what they see makes up a fuller yet still only partial view of the "vacant" house next door. (125) Welty thus creates an even more bizarre splitting of narrative byseparating sound from image, paralleling the fundamental split betweensound and image in the cinema. Theirs is also a gendered view, for Loch,although identifying with a female character, constructs a thrillerwhile Cassie constructs a melodramatic biopic bi��o��pic?n.A film or television biography, often with fictionalized episodes.biopicNounInformal a film based on the life of a famous person [bio(graphical) + pic(ture)] of the enigmatic pianoteacher. In a move that anticipates Laura Mulvey's arguments, Weltyreminds us once again that forms of looking in the cinema are gendered,mediated by the demands of genre. Welty thus calls attention to genericexpectations--moving from a male thriller to a female melodrama--throughthese differing point-of-view narratives of the same scene. The Golden Apples was written in the 1940s, coinciding with theemergence of American film noir, a genre noted for its bifurcatednarrative time motivated by sound bridges and the subjectivized memoriesof its lead characters. In "June Recital" we then have acomplicated spatial and temporal montage, in which we have splitscreens, split theaters, split narratives, and a visual as well as anacoustic observer. The story ends with Miss Eckhart and Virgie runningout of the house, both caught in the gaze of Morgana's societyladies. As Kreyling reads the end, "The two most passionate humanbeings in Morgana are united in a ceremony of shame at the conclusion of'June Recital,' yet the momentum of the narratives comes torest with Cassie, on whom the moment is lost" (Understanding 124).Miss Eckhart and Virgie are also two of the most independent charactersin Morgana, shamed, controlled by this gaze. Importantly, "JuneRecital," with its narrative of women's shame, takes placeduring the years when US women get the vote. We, the readers positionedas Morgana's spectators, cannot forget because, like Loch, weremain in the gap of what is seen, remembered, and projected in"June Recital," left to finish the script or look into anothernarrative frame. "June Recital's" split frames find metaphoricexpression in "The Wanderers," in the last iconic scene ofVirgie's reading of Miss Eckhart's painting of Medusa andPerseus: In that moment, Virgie had shorn it of its frame. The vaunting is what she remembered, that lifted arm. Cutting off the Medusa's head was the heroic act, perhaps, that made visible a horror in life, that was at once the horror in love, Virgie thought--the separateness. She might have seen heroism prophetically when she was young and afraid of Miss Eckhart. She might be able to see it now prophetically, but she was never a prophet. Because Virgie saw things in their time, like hearing them--and perhaps because she must believe in the Medusa equally with Perseus--she saw the stroke of [Perseus's] sword in three moments, not one. (460) Shorn shorn?v.A past participle of shear.shornVerba past participle of shearAdj. 1. of its frame, separate like Virgie, existing far out andendless in time, like the stars against the night's screen, thislast "wandering image" is, to return to Bazin, changemummified. Like The Waste Land seer, Tiresias, that old voyeur voy��eurn.1. A person who derives sexual gratification from observing the naked bodies or sexual acts of others, especially from a secret vantage point.2. An obsessive observer of sordid or sensational subjects. who hadbeen struck blind by Zeus because he had seen Diana nude, the paintingacts as an aperture onto a threatening past: Miss Eckhart's Europe,filled with the horrors of war and displacement, or the South, whose ownheroic memory is abducted by that "old black thief' ofslavery. The picture is like a typical photograph in its abstractionfrom history and narrative. Virgie, however, sees and hears things in their time, separate yetendless, invoking the image of frames in an endless strip. Like Welty,who edits (cuts) Morgana's history, Virgie cuts the painting intothree separate images, the basic structure of film montage. She can thusrearrange these images, projecting them in any order, dramaticallyaltering the story, which in the end is her story. Much like shedistorted the Bijou's accompaniment, with her disjunctive dis��junc��tive?adj.1. Serving to separate or divide.2. Grammar Serving to establish a relationship of contrast or opposition. The conjunction but in the phrase poor but comfortable is disjunctive. ,unromantic "creeping minor runs," Virgie tampers with theinevitable continuity of Medusa's death. She becomes editor,projectionist, and spectator, reflecting back on her past as sheconstructs and imagines her future. Like Welty, Virgie may challengeconventional narrative expectations, creating a series of disjunctivestories, separate yet endless, that, like her future, can be "read[or watched] over many a night" (460). Works Cited Barilleaux, Rene Paul, ed. Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty amongArtists of the Thirties. Jackson: Mississippi Museum of Art, 2002. Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema. Vol. 1. Ed. Dudley Andrew. Berkeley:U of California P, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction." Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. 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Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing SouthernWomen's Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. --. "Introduction." The Geography of Identity. Ed.Patricia Yaeger. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. 1-38. DINA DINA Direcci��n de Inteligencia Nacional (Spanish)DINA Disability Information Network AustraliaDINA Distributed Intelligent Network Architecture (Sprint)SMITH Drake University