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Tag Archives: Short Story

Letter from a Higher Critic

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by memoirandremains in Bibliology, Uncategorized

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Higher Critism, Letter from a Higher Critic, Literature, Short Story, Stewart Robb

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I recently was gifted a copy of Analog 6, published May 1968. It contains a series of short stories from the Analog science fiction magazine. It was written by Stewart Robb. I have not been able to find it easily available elsewhere — so check your used book store and cross your fingers.

The “letter” is dated May 4, 2415 and concerns the theories of American history in the 19th & 20th Century. Using the technique of the “higher critics” of the Bible, this future historians goes on to prove what a remarkable among of myth and fiction makes up the telling of American history.

This future historian self-consciously casts himself in the role of the higher critic who “proved” that David and Moses and Solomon were mere stories:

My method of demolition will be identical to that of those commendably clear-headed iconoclasts of earlier days, the Higher Critics. What they did to the Bible, including the Moses and Christ legends, I shall do with our nearly equally revered American history, so called, and perhaps more thoroughly.

He then goes on to “prove” much of history false. For instance, there was no World War II and no Abraham Lincoln. How so?

World War II is a “fairy tale”. The leader of Germany is “Adolph Hitler”, “a German ogre who burned people alive in ovens by the millions and who nearly conquered the world! now don’t you think that whoever made up this part of the yarn knew that the name Adolph in Old High German means Wolf Prince? Isn’t it a coincidence that he descended like a wolf on the fold of innocent sheep nations of Poland, Czechoslovakia , and other helped countries? This name is a fancy of the poets, surely!

He then goes through all sorts of “coincidence” of all sorts of names and events — all true, but all “too good” to be real.  It is a lovely parody of how the Higher Critics can spin serious theories out of silly ideas.

I have often thought what will future historians do with the two George Bush presidents and two Iraq Wars? Did he serve one term or two? Did he overthrow Sadam or not? Did he hold office before or after the war? And some PhD student will propose the outrageous theory that there were two George’s father and son and there were two wars!

How someone in a study can tell me confidently what sentence was written by Hosea and which was written by Hosea’s redactor is beyond me. But then again, there was no such thing as World War II either.

Edgar Allan Poe — A Tale of Jerusalem

12 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, Uncategorized

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A Tale of Jerusalem, Edgar Allan Poe, Short Story

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This is a strange and wildly ahistorical tale. It speaks of three Jewish temple workers, one identified as a priest, who are upon a battlement looking over the army of Pompey surrounding the city. They have made  deal with Pompey to purchase a temple sacrifice. They let down the money in a basket. The Romans mock the Jews and claim that Phoebus is a true God. The basket become enshrouded in a mist, indeed the entire world outside the city walls seems enshrouded in mist.

While they wait, they moan that they shall lose their positions and their service. Finally, something of weight is felt on the basket and they begin to haul.

They pull up the basket and cannot make out what it is until it is quite close. They at first each think the Romans have provided something wonderful. Only at the end do they realize their error, they have been hauling up “a hog of no common size”:

Now, El Emanu! slowly, and with upturned eyes, ejaculated the trio, as, letting go their hold, the emancipated porker tumbled headlong among the Philistines, “El Emanu — God with with us — it is the unutterable flesh!”

The historical details are all wrong. The Jews of the city have nothing in common with the actual human beings of this time — who would have been far more sophisticated and understanding of Romans and their customs. The men speak of a world 1,000 years old (for the most part), the Romans are not even contemporary with Rome of the time (beyond their contempt). The Romans come across as powerful and crass.

Yet, that “fault” actually helps to make the point of the story: First, the men of the City are described as extraordinarily outwardly pious. They seem obsessively so as a matter of pride. Their concern as they wait for the basket is for their own position.

The men are then abused of their hope: they are to be put out of their positions. Their poker is “emancipated” (which is a nice comic touch in this instance).

The effect of the story is a parable how the prideful men — who gave the temple money to  their enemies — are then surprised that their enemies have treated them so. They consider whether the Romans (“worshippers of Baal” among other inaccurate descriptions), are generous, fickle or merely conducting good business.

In the end, it is a story of foolish men who misplace their trust, waste their treasure, and are rewarded with injury.

The tale is a parody of a popular novel from 1828, Zillah, a Tale of Jerusalem, by Horace Smith (1777-1849). Poe incorporated whole phrases and sentences from Smith’s story: “Poe’s story is more than a parody; it is literally a collage of snatches of the Smith novel, cut out and pasted together in a new order. Read immediately after Zillah, it is very funny. Read without Zillah it is merely a puzzling and even offensive anecdote” (Levine 352).

I have not read Smith’s story, and so I cannot comment on the parody.

For the text of this short story and notes on the allusions and references in the story, see here.

Brief Notes on a Short Story by Bret Harte

05 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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Literature, Short Story

Brett Harte’s short story, “The Outcasts of Poker Flats” begins thus:

As Mr. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker Flat on the morning of the 23d of November, 1850, he was conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. Two or three men, conversing earnestly together, ceased as he approached, and exchanged significant glances. There was a Sabbath lull in the air, which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous.

Everything in this paragraph works. The scene itself is pedestrian, a man steps into the street. Mr. Oakhurst is identified as “gambler” — which explains his character throughout the remainder of the story. The city is named “Poker Flats” which sounds appropriate for a gambler, until it is no longer.

The last sentence works perfectly. First, there is a “Sabbath lull”. Now such a thing during the 19th century would be unextraordinary: indeed, the sentence works precisely because a “Sabbath lull” would be immediately understood and even expected.

Harte then draws out the proposition with a stammering series of causes,

“which” — a relative pronoun whose compliment must now wait
“in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences”: Note first the accumulation of “s’s” in the sentence, which all start to pile up here. The rhythm of the phrase slows the reader down: there is no lilting way through the words. The phrase also ends in a series of unaccented syllables followed by a pause. The effect is to increase the importance of the next word

“looked”. The word “looked” immediately puts us into Oakhurst’s point of view: He is the one who stepped into the street. It was his point of view that the other men stopped talking. Now it is Oakhurst’s opinion that the situation looks, “ominous”. It is a good trick to write in a third person POV and yet slide into the position of a single character.

“ominous” is a great word here: First, it is accented on the first syllable created a stomp at the end of the sentence, “looked ominous” three accents in four syllables. Moreover, “ominous” is exactly what a Sabbath lull is not: a Sabbath lull is a safe, perhaps boring pause. But in the morally inverted world fo Poker Flats, it is ominous.

Harte continues:

Mr. Oakhurst’s calm, handsome face betrayed small concern in these indications. Whether he was conscious of any predisposing cause was another question. “I reckon they’re after somebody,” he reflected; “likely it’s me.”

The detachment and irony in these words matches the almost comic detachment of Oakhurst: Someone is after him and “likely it’s me.” Harte also ties the comment and the thought together with the repeated “r”: reckon, reflected.

The register of the narrator differs from the register of the character’s thoughts. Mr. Oakhurst would never have said, “conscious of any predisposing cause”. This creates a detachment between the reader and the characters.

Harte also works out the irony at the level of plot. The people of Poker Flats eject a four persons of questionable morality on the basis of the sudden change in “morality”. The charge against the Oakhusrst primarily motivated by the fact that Oakhurst had won handily at poker:

Mr. Oakhurst was right in supposing that he was included in this category. A few of the committee had urged hanging him as a possible example, and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets of the sums he had won from them. “It’s agin justice,” said Jim Wheeler, “to let this yer young man from Roaring Camp—an entire stranger—carry away our money.” But a crude sentiment of equity residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough to win from Mr. Oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice.

We later learn that Oakhurst had been beaten a young man at poker, took all his money — then gave it back (in secret), warning the young man to never play poker again.

Joining Oakhurst in the ejection were two prostitutes and a drunk. While the drunk shows himself a vicious scoundrel, Oakhurst and the prostitutes show themselves of the highest moral caliber. It is not right to say that Harte has the characters redeem themselves; the characters all stayed in their character.

As the quartet leave town they stop from exhaustion at the behest of the drunk. Into their “camp” come a couple running away from the town over the mountain to come to marry in Poker Flats. The couple are identified as the “Innocent” and a young lady whose father runs the temperance house. Thus, the morally pure find themselves encamped with the scoundrels. Indeed, they are cared for by the very persons rejected by the settlements of morality.

In time, the virgin and the prostitute find themselves alone and snowed in in a cabin, where they starve to death:

They slept all that day and the next, nor did they waken when voices and footsteps broke the silence of the camp. And when pitying fingers brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told, from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had sinned. Even the law of Poker Flat recognized this, and turned away, leaving them still locked in each other’s arms.

The words “Even the law of Poker Flats” sting viciously at this point. The “morally” upright people of Poker Flats lead to the death of these women.

Harte also works the inversion of the hero. The city is not the hero — and it seems that it might be Oakhurst. But even Oakhurst fails in his rush to save the camp. He was found to have committed suicide, after writing his tombstone in the bark of a tree:

And pulseless and cold, with a derringer by his side and a bullet in his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.

Imagination & the “bitter lapse”

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens

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Edgar Allan Poe, Imagination, poem, Poetry, reality, Short Story, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Plain Sense of Things

There is a fascinating conflict and paradox in this introduction. Poe works for the mysterious: In just a sentence after the quoted section he will write, “What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered.” He creates the effect by means of a prose which avails itself of poetic effects: alliteration, “during, dull, dark, day, dreary”; assonance, “dull, autumn, hung”. The sheer intensity of the description which piles gloom upon gloom.

And yet the brutality of the image lies in its intense realism “a mere house and the simple landscape features”. The bite is that is a real place, “the bitter lapse into everyday life”, rather than an opium fueled revelry. He complains that there is no poetic imagination which could attach to the building; which is ironic, because this house could actually exist nowhere. It reminds me of Stevens’ poem “The Plain Sense of Things”

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Poe’s oppressively real house exists only in the imagination — indeed, it can only be had and held by means of imagination, which makes it even more intensely real:

“DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.”

Edgar Allan Poe. “The Fall of the House of Usher”

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