J. D. Salinger nine stories

The aim of the lesson is to teach you to identify the ways a poetic mood may be instilled in a story and to view a collection of stories as one single whole.

1. “I can see the problem with most of the people who didn’t like this book. They expected stories… but this book’s main course aren’t stories, but feelings. Salinger used stories, places, characters and situations to paint feelings, the way a painter would use oil and canvas to paint a picture. So at the end of the story you don’t have to see if you liked the story… what you got to do is look at how you feel after you’ve read it. What Salinger tried to make you feel is mostly feelings like melancholy, and he succeeds at that, and that’s what makes it a great book.”

Compose your own introduction to the collection.

2. Salinger is known as a keen student of children. His extraordinary achievement in this area rests on the principle of viewing children not from adult perspective, but from their own, from the inside. He portrays children who are extraordinarily mature for their age, who speak, or attempt to speak like adults and who want to be accepted by adults on an adult basis. His grown-ups, suffering from loneliness and misunderstanding, often find a source of spiritual cure in communication with children. Their contact is always sincere and deeply moving, though never sentimental.

Salinger’s children are fragile, odd, hypersmart, whereas his grown-ups (even the materially content) seem beaten down by circumstances – some neurasthenic, others (often female) deeply unsympathetic.

Show how the theme of children-adult relationship is interpreted in a story from the collection.

3. Salinger has an unerring eye for dialogue and for detail. Speak of the value of these methods of characterisation in the stories.

4. A poetic mood is not to be understood as something homogeneous, it may be created with the help of a whole range of emotions and psychological states. For instance, in the story For Esme – with Love and Squalor rasa 6 (fear) is achieved via gradual accumulation and interplay of the following psychological states: depression, despair, alarm, annoyance, madness, fright.

Speak about the way the rasa is instilled in one of the stories. Be ready to discuss the others!

5. How does the Zen Koan used as an epigraph correlate with the “Nine Stories”?

6. Can one speak about frame construction in the collection?

7. Which story from the collection appeals to you most? Explain.

J. Steinbeck. The Pastures of Heaven. Analytical reading. Pp.31-49.

The target skills: interpreting the role of factual detail in a bigger context, predicting the role of the opening stories in a collection of stories.

1. John Steinbeck is, at heart, a novelist of the California experience. Born in Salinas in 1902, he grew up in the fertile Salinas Valley, the "Salad Bowl of the Nation," as it was later called. That sharply beautiful and expansive landscape, where Steinbeck spent hours as a boy roaming the hills, shaped Steinbeck's creative vision. Most of his fiction is informed by the idea that people must be seen in the context of their environments. Early in the 1930s he wrote: "the trees and the muscled mountains are the world--but not the world apart from man--the world and man--the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as being separate I do not know."

Can the above-said be referred to the “Pastures of Heaven”, judging by the beginning of the book? Reproduce the essence of the information and supply quotations to support your viewpoint.

2. Bring the following summary of chapter 2 to the end. Draft-age George Battle comes from New York state in 1863 and sets up a farm in the middle of the valley. His mother dies off Patagonia in her way out. He marries Salinas epileptic Myrtle Cameron who bears him a son. She winds up at Lippman Sanitarium in San Jose. John inherits her epilepsy and religious mysticism. George dies at 65 and John, returned from missionarying, lets the farm go to seed while he chases demons, finally dying of...

3. “Each book is defined by Steinbeck's sensitivity for common man - misfits, striking workers, a lonely ranch wife, migrants who sought prosperity in the golden land”. Steinbeck's California fiction, from apprenticeship novel, To a God Unknown (1932) through his epic treatment of the Salinas Valley, East of Eden (1952) envisions the dreams and defeats of common people as shaped by the magnificent land they inhabit.

What kind of people do you find in the first narrative about the inhabitants of the valley (Chapter 2)? What visual or other sensual details help to bring out their nature?

4. The book opens with a Spanish corporal chasing runaway Indians, rides into Las Pasturas del Cielo and is stunned by its beauty. Before he can return to retire an Indian woman gives him the pox and he dies locked in an old barn. The tone of the opening chapter is distinctly ironic. How is the irony expressed? Why does the author need such a setting to tell his story of the people dwelling there?

5. “The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” (from Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize Speech)

Can this quotation be applied to what you have read of the book so far?

J. Steinbeck. The Pastures of Heaven. Any three chapters, from the3^rd up to the end, + the short concluding one. The target skill is that of interpreting separate stories as parts of a fragmentary novel.

1. “Humanity has been passing through a grey and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal physical fear, so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about. Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being.

This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. “ (J. Steinbeck. From his Nobel Prize speech)

Render the essence of the above passage and say, in a few weighty words, what passions, dreams, and failures are explored by the author of “The Pastures of Heaven”.

2. The summaries suggested in your handouts are of a purely factual kind. Give your own summaries of any two of the four stories you have read for today, (three + the concluding one) placing emphasis on the passions, fears, and dreams which govern the characters’ lives.

3. Express your agreement or disagreement with the following piece of criticism. In either case, provide more examples (not quotations, but summary-like assessments of this or that kind of human predicament).

A wonderful early collection of interrelated stories, rich in the feeling for the land and for its hardworking people so characteristic of Steinbeck's work. In these beautifully crafted, poignant stories Steinbeck charts the gradual disintegration of a peaceful farming community in a lush California valley. As he writes of a family suddenly made to feel "poor" through the charity of a neighbor, of the wanton destruction of a retarded boy's tenuous hold on reality, and of a father jealous of suspected attentions paid to his daughter, Steinbeck movingly depicts the destructive impact of one family's insensitivity on the lives of all those around them.

4. Formulate, partly in your own words, partly resorting to the author’s vocabulary, the ever-growing obsession or uneasiness that weighs heavily on this or that protagonist’s mind. Try to resort to the stylistic device of gradation, i.e., semantic repetition, growing in intensity.

For instance: “George Battle kept toiling on his farm incessantly for many years, bending his body lower and lower down to the earth, caring about nothing else – not even his son-, until at last his hands became nothing but sockets into which the handle of tools fitted tightly.” Or: John Battle, whose religious mysticism degenerates into lunacy, keeps fighting demons, sneaking about the farm armed with a heavy stick, charging upon them, fearlessly rushing forward, slashing the demons with deadly blows, - until one of them proves to be a perfectly genuine rattle snake.

5. Increase your groupmates’ awareness of the expressive capacities of the English language, by offering a number of idiomatic or emotionally colored phrases from the chapters, in Russian, and supplying the original, should your groupmates fail to provide an adequate version. E.G., think of the best way to render the following: «Ну, старина, тебе конец» (c.173) or «Он начал заводить друзей в Долине и укреплять свои позиции». (47).

6. Give sufficient evidence of the implications suggested by descriptive, narrative and characterizing details. Say what senses they appeal to.

7. What glues the stories together and makes them a fragmentary novel? In what ways does the concluding story contribute to the integrity of the collection? In what ways does it differ from and echo the introductory story?