George Garrett

George Garrett Short Stories

Page numbers refer to An Evening Performance.

King of the Mountain--

Plot:

This story has got big plot-- enough it for a novel. A small time inland Florida lawyer decides to challenge the Klan in his home town. Klansmen beat him, not quite to death, at a Fourth of July public meeting. They believe they can terrorize him in this way. They shoot his dog. They do scare his wife enough that she is willing and eager to quit the struggle. But the lawyer, who is more politically shrewd than they are, seems to have planned all along how he will make these early defeats the material of much bigger victory. In the end it turns out that anything they can do to him he can turn into a weapon against them.

The significant subplot has to do with the marriage and its tensions-- backstory elements to do with class issues, the lawyer being of a lower class background than his wife. Their different attitudes toward the situation above are perhaps rooted in this difference of background. The lawyer's unstoppability, admirable in the outside world, looks a little ruthless at home. He gets around his wife's reservations by walking right through them.

Then there are some comparatively disorganized elements of a plot surrounding the boy... he's incompletely comprehending witness to it all. There is an aimlessness to his sense of the story and nothing, in his version, seems to be more important than anything else. Yet the title, for instance, comes out of one of these seemingly unimportant moments (p 20)

Finally there is a frame story with a first person narrator-- can you call this a plot? Technically it constitutes the present action of the story, though its only content is the story being known and being told.

note allusion to Absalom Absalom in the ending.

Character: What's the effect of the namelessness of everyone? These are quite specific characters, certainly. You could even say the story is mainly about the emergent stubbornness of the man's character. What about the lawyer? He is a heroic figure, certainly. Is he altogether positive? As much a hero at home as on the steps of the post office? How much is your feeling about him affected by the questions at the end?

In the end his strength is sort of scary. Reader's attitude toward him may be something like his wife's (or the boy's?) His virtues can also read as faults. He can't be stopped-- do you want to live with some one that unstoppable?

The mother is not as strongly characterized as the husband, perhaps. Her main quality is to be too refined for the situation in which she is placed "like a queen from another country." The backstory riff about her father emphasizes this-- it's all about social graces and status issues that turn out to be impotent under the surface. In various iconic tableaux the mother is shown as helpless-- held down by the women during the beating at the beginning, trapped in the victory tableau at the end. She plays the piano because she can't do anything else. She can't even protect her son from experiences she doesn't want them to have.

If the mother and father are quite specific characters, the boy seems closer to generic little-boyness --Almost a transparent window onto the action. Certain parts of the story he doesn't seem to process... and his naiveté is instrumental in presenting the outcome as a surprise to the reader. Reaction to what ought to be the story's disturbing moments from a child's point of view (the beating, the dog getting shot) is weirdly suppressed. It's as if the kid were in shock. The one moment in the story where private emotion is completely expressed is mutely shared by the boy and his mother. When his mother collapses over the piano, the boy goes out to shut up the mockingbird-- just about the only power he has got in the situation-- and for a second he feels himself, for no sane reason under these circumstances, to be very powerful indeed-- king of the mountain. As powerful and immovable as daddy.

What are the advantages of presenting the story from the boy's point of view?

Then of course there is one more major character (or two): the narrator in the frame, about whom we know little except that he knows that time and that place-- and the boy as an adult, who seems to have turned on his father...or maybe not quite. The presence of a narrator who can turn out of the story toward the reader is common to many Garrett stories which are otherwise completely different from each other.

Tone: Compare the tone(s) of the frame and central narrative. The central narrative is comparatively prosaic. Filtered through the boy's point of view, it is rather flat for the most part (except in the extremely vivid dialogue and the father's oratory) and doesn't emphasize distinctions.

The frame narrative has got more stops pulled out on it-- a big swelling movement, like the kind of music that accompanies a movie montage. That incantatory feeling-- out to impress you with authority of the narrator and his power to present you the whole story-- with an interpretation by no means so stable as the tone would suggest.

Form.

Frame A (reaction)

The beating and aftermath (action)

piano-mockingbird-king of the mountain sequence (reaction)

the post office sequence and its aftermath (action)

Frame Z (reaction)

Looking at this pattern, one can see the story built out from the center, and that the plot of the action sequences, big and vivid as it is, is probably secondary in importance to the reaction sequences. The central scene, where the title comes from, is formally the turning point of the whole story, though it is really a lyric moment, with no effect whatsoever on the big events of the plot. This central moment reaches out to both edges of the frame, reminding the reader (subliminally) that reaction is more important than action in the story, as important as the action seems to be.

What's the Purpose of the Bayonet

King of the Mountain is basically a linear story. What's the Purpose of the Bayonet is modular.

Plot:

Across the whole there is a complete plot discontinuity. Nothing connects the 5 modular units plotwise except the similarity of postwar European locale, and the persistence of a narrator who may be (though not necessarily) the same person in each.

There are different kinds of plot in the different sections. 2 3 and 4 are basically miniature realistic narratives. Complete with beginning middle and end, indeed very strong plot closure in all three cases, they could stand alone as short-shorts or be expanded into full-length stories.

Section 1 is mostly summary exposition, brightened by half-scenes. It looks like the opening, expository phase of a longer linear narrative-- but the longer linear narrative is not exactly what comes.

Section 5 looks like another short-short in the manner of the other three sections but really it's not. It consists of only one scene-- a vignette really, though a strikingly horrible one-- while its opening and closure take place at the level of abstraction. As does section 1 in a less obvious way, beginning with "we were the scum of the army" and ending with "give me the bottom of the barrel."

Character:

There are a lot of strong rapidly sketched characters: the C.O., Joe the boxer, Inge.... We see their outlines and their boundaries clearly. But reader focus is more on the person talking to us-- the narrator or narrators-- Is there one or several? In a way we might rather think there were several-- the boxing narrator is certainly easier to like than the one who trashes Inge's flat... or even the stockade guard. On the other hand it seems at least as likely that there is a single narrator who is completing his moral education through the events of the five sections.

Tone: Tone modulation helps shape the story. Both the first and last segments have a big swelling tone at the end. Whereas the middle three are grim and flat. In this sense tone is used a structural elements.

Form: Is the main effect more of symmetry or dissymmetry? The symmetrical elements are subtle-- as above, the sorts of plot and tone deployed are similar in 1 and 5 and in 2 3 and 4-- which gives a feeling of radial symmetry. However, the thematic movement of the story is more like a steep ski run into the darkest pit of hell-- thus asymmetrical. In that sense the story feels like movement from one outside edge of something in section one to its core in section 5.

Bread from Stones

Plot

Where is it? What is it?

The plottiest elements have to do with Raymond, not the narrator. Raymond rebels from a frayed old aristocratic southern family, and from the family point of view he wastes and ruins his life. The plot of the story is Raymond's life. He blows his Yale tuition money in New York and then becomes a quasi-professional dancer and finally pretty much a gigolo. The exposition and denouement of this plot are summarized by the narrator, and the middle phase of it-- the Sonya relationship-- is dramatized...

...to the extent that the narrator participates in it. One might also say that the plot of the story is a series of encounters the narrator has with Cousin Raymond, and there is a sort of symmetry to that-- opening and closing on the gun, for example. But the narrator's side of the story is without big events. The biggest thing he does for himself is buy a dog. But in a way, by not doing anything much he is responsible for a big turn in Raymond's story line-- if it's true that he scotches the Sonya - Raymond match by withholding his approval from it. How much does the reader approve?

Character:

The obvious thing is a sort of Goofus and Gallant contrast between Raymond and the narrator-- Raymond does whatever he wants, or tries to, thus living a life of noisy desperation, while the narrator never does anything unconventional and is therefore safe and rather dull. He is "neutral, disinterested, indifferent," yet somehow envious to some degree of the romantic flamboyance of Raymond's much higher colored personality. His one desire (345-6) is to be free of guilt... while Raymond racks up all the guilt you can possibly imagine. And yet it is the narrator who ends up feeling guilt toward Raymond in the end, as much as he would rather not. Sonya occupies the middle ground between-- representative probably of the type of disturbed and damaged woman interested in paying for Raymond in her life.... A nice person in her way but certainly a catastrophic alcoholic.

Then again, maybe the story is, at a higher level of abstraction, about the character of rich people as compared to the character of everybody else. A spin on the famous Fitzgerald idea-- "the rich are different from you and me...."

Tone:

Less variation of tone in this than the previous two... because the source of the tone is a single narrator whose presence and tone of discourse is constant throughout the story (not that the two necessarily go together, as Record will show).

Form:

If you think of the story as Raymond's biography then the form of it is created by the Raymond plot as above. But there is another formal pattern set up at a level of abstraction by the narrator at the beginning: rich people are weird and here's three examples, 1 a paragraph long, one a scene long, and the last a whole story's worth-- with an abstract if rather ambivalent conclusion at the end. Nested into this sequence is Raymond's story, symmetrically arranged around the Sonya episode with the framing riff on the gun helping to balance it.

It's typical of Garrett stories to interlace a formal pattern based on plot with another based on abstraction.

What's the title refer to? trying to get support from the rich? trying to get approval from the narrator? in the end, is it the narrator who's seen to be most rigidly withholding?

A Record as long as your Arm

Plot:

Straight-up slapstick farce, right? just a low comedy featuring adultery and academic scandal, with big comedy scenes like the romantic principal dashing through the nabe naked except for the screen of the window he just dove through... but somehow it picks up a little light wife-beating along the way, and ends with a grisly suicide, no detail spared....

Character:

We start, apparently, with comic types: Geraldine-- nymphomaniacal faculty wife. Annie, the cool and remote heiress identified with the satire of her Swedish modern decor. Ray, cuckolded husband, buffoon and butt of every joke. The narrator, the rake, the trickster. A worthless piece of sh** in every way... no truth in him whatsoever. Much of the comedy comes from the repeated point that this guy can always go a little lower than you figured even he would go.

The trick of the story is to deepen the stereotypes, imperceptibly at first, until they turn into real people capable of suffering tragedy. Annie looks like a completely dimensional character visiting this narrative from some other longer story that spends a lot more time on her. Even Geraldine looks a little more serious by virtue of the final scene she is given to play.

The real deepening, though, comes with Ray and the narrator. Ray is, maybe, pathetic throughout, but morphs from comically pathetic to tragically pathetic... from the buffoonish cuckold to somebody capable of suicide... and rather a vengeful suicide at that if (Big If) we can believe the narrator.

The narrator lies, wildly and hilariously, to everybody all the way through the story. Except for Ray, and the reader. Of course he has lied to and deceived Ray throughout-- except in the telling of the story itself, which is a direct address to Ray, and is completely honest-- the narrator dissects all his own lies as lies. (also he knows that when the chips are really down you can't lie to the cops.) Does all that make you trust (or believe) him at the end? By the end of the story the narrator has evolved from somebody running around dressed only in a window screen to somebody who can in all seriousness invoke St. Augustine in a rejection of Sartre and Camus. At the end we are invited to see him as, well, he's still a worthless piece of sh**. But he knows very well that's what he is-- in the end he isn't lying to himself.

Tone: The modulation of tone from wildly comic to grimly serious is that this story is all about. Note that, as opposed to "Bread from Stones," in this story the shifting of tone across the complete spectrum can happen in the mouth of a single narrator whose presence in the story is fixed.

Form:

Tone is very important to the form of the story here since tone-shifting is responsible for the story's major effect. As in Bread from Stones and many others there is a plot based formal pattern interlaced with an abstract formal pattern.

The plot pattern is straightforwardly linear with its content pulling it from comedy to tragedy from one end of the line to the other.

The abstract pattern is involved with the "occasion" of the story-- told to Ray, who is as we come to find out a dead guy. Once we know that, we recognize that the story has been operating on two levels all along. That even in its most comic phases it has an underlying concern for the issue of forgiveness (yes, for the most ludicrously egregious faults!) for the impossibility of winning forgiveness from the dead, and for the final question, maybe unanswerable, as to whether the narrator (who comprehends guilt though not capable of experiencing it) is in sum more guilty, less guilty or as guilty as Ray.