Scarcity in Refrigerator: Themes of Abundance and Escape in "Salvage the Bones" and "As I Lay Dying

1. Today • Passage re: scarcity in refrigerator • Salvage the Bones and As I Lay Dying • World of abundance vs. world of scarcity • Getting into groups • Ways of escape in Salvage the Bones

2. What did you see in this passage? "There are six eggs in the refrigerator. A few cups of cold rice. Three pieces of bologna. An empty cardboard box from the gas station that holds chicken bones sucked dry. A half gallon of milk. Ketchup and mayonnaise" (189-190).

3. Ward & William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying • Both are set in poor, rural Mississippi. • Both feature male-dominated families. • Both feature an absent mother who is nevertheless a conspicuous ghostly presence and in which rising floodwaters generate the texts’ key dramatic tensions. • Both feature pregnant teenagers, Dewey Dell and Esch • Both share motifs (floods and storms; trees) and themes (sexuality and reproduction; maternity; rural poverty). • Ward has said she thinks AILD is “perfect.”

4. From As I Lay Dying My mother is a fish. Darl says that when we come to the water again I might see her and Dewey Dell said, She's in the box; how could she have got out? She got out through the holes I bored, into the water I said, and when we come to the water again I am going to see her. My mother is not in the box. My mother does not smell like that. My mother is a fish. As I Lay Dying has an experimental style—Ward discards this in favor of realism.

5. Rewriting • Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) – rewrite Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) • J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) – rewrite Robinson Crusoe (1719) • China MiévilleRailsea (2012)= rewrites Moby Dick (1851) • Linda Hutcheon: such rewriting can be “critical”--decenter historically dominant voices and “to counter a tradition of silence and alleged misrepresentation” • Problem, though: rewriting may be validated by original text.

6. Recycling, rather than rewriting? • Sinéad Moynihan: argues that instead of rewriting, Ward “recycles” Faulkner—she is not critiquing Faulkner, but using Faulkner to resituate the lives of her poor, marginal characters. • Why do you think using Faulkner—one of the most praised writers of the twentieth century—helps readers see her characters in a new way?

7. Ward on her use of mythology •  It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghettoized as “other.” I wanted to align Esch with that classic text, with the universal figure of Medea, the antihero, to claim that tradition as part of my Western literary heritage. The stories I write are particular to my community and my people, which means the details are particular to our circumstances, but the larger story of the survivor, the savage, is essentially a universal, human one.

8. How does this passage fit into the novel? “He hasn’t changed a thing here since Mama died: there are small glass candleholders with tall peach candles wedged into them, and two small bunches of fake flowers in squat vases that look like cups that Mama placed at both ends of the dresser. There are pictures of us, Polaroids, which Mama wedged between the glass and the frame of the mirror. There is one picture of her and Daddy standing chest to chest, in a frame. Her hands are on his shoulders, her hair ironed straight and pulled back smooth, her dress cut open in the front so that it shows her collarbone, as dense and burnished and beautiful as a brass doorknob. She smiles without opening her mouth. Daddy doesn’t smile at all, but his hands are around her back, and he has that serious, prideful tilt of his head that Skeetah has when he is standing with China at a dogfight, showing her off before the mad scramble, the cutting barks and teeth” (134)

9. Edward Burtynsky “Shipbreaking” We tend to see ships when they are whole—images of them launching, paintings of them in a bay, images of tankers going through the Panama Canal https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs/shipbreaking Look at the photos in the Burtynsky series. How would you describe the world that they represent?

10. Two worlds World of fullness Intact things Intact family StB New products Intact buildings Abundance New iPhone, computer Literature that is still read Broken world Broken things Broken family StB Garbage Abandoned, ruined buildings Scarcity Discarded or broken iPhone, computer Literature that was never read, or has become so familiar that it seems old Salvage Repair Savage Reuse

11. I am a good writer Very true 4 Less true 3 Somewhat true 2 Not at all true 1 I am good at coordinating others’ work (making sure people work together, reminding people about deadlines, and so on). Very true 4 Less true 3 Somewhat true 2 Not at all true 1 I am good at reading and analyzing literature Very true 4 Less true 3 Somewhat true 2 Not at all true 1 I am good at editing others’ work. Very true 4 Less true 3 Somewhat true 2 Not at all true 1

12. Ways of escaping world StB • Basketball • Dogfighting • Love? [Esch and Manny] • Myth [Esch thinking of herself as Medea] What is at stake with China potentially dying/Skeetah losing puppy Randall succeeding at basketball/going to camp/getting drafted Manny rejecting Esch

13. I try to read the entire mythology book, but I can’t. I am stuck in the middle. When I put the book down and wipe my wet face and breathe in my morning breath, ripe to the afternoon under the sheet, this is where I have stopped. Medea kills her brother. In the beginning, she is known by her nephew, who tells the Argonauts about her, for having power, for helping her family, just like I tried to help Skeet on the day China first got sick from the Ivomec. But for Medea, love makes help turn wrong. The author says that there are a couple of different versions of how it happened. One says she lies to her brother and invites him onto the ship with the Argonauts as they were fleeing, and that Jason ambushes him. That she watched her brother die, her own face on his being sliced open like a chicken: pink skin cut to bloody meat. The other version says that she kills her brother herself, that her brother runs away with her and the Argonauts, assuming that he is safe, and that she chops him into bits: liver, gizzard, breast and thigh, and throws each part overboard so that her father, who is chasing them, slows down to pick up each part of his son (154)