frozen flames

Dear Anthony,

We enter Chapter 4 with Vera recalling the years following Miss MacIntosh’s “disappearance or death.” Vera’s mind and body during this time become slothful, she ceaselessly dreams of Miss MacIntosh, and longs for the ever elusive “normal” life. So despondent is Vera that even Catherine, that most negligent of mothers, notices and urges Vera to join her in succumbing to the opium paradise. Although Vera considers this offer of oblivion to be her mother’s greatest act of love for her, she rejects it.

We pull up abruptly from these recollections to find ourselves once again in the present, on the careening bus with Vera and her two fellow passengers, the pregnant girl, and her beau. But what is Vera doing traveling around on these Indiana roads when Miss MacIntosh hailed from What Cheer, Iowa? Vera’s reasoning for being in Indiana is heartbreaking:

“To have gone to Iowa direct, to have inquired at every door with a hopeful face—had anybody seen Miss MacIntosh, my darling, she whose face I could not quite describe after these years of oblivion…”

“…Iowa, that ultimate realization which I dared not face, the fact that I should inquire for no one.” 

“Indiana…as near as I could go without being confronted once again by the bitterness of the facts, by the cold, the lonely, the unfulfilled, the unforgiving, the unforgiven, the murderer, the murdered.”

In What Cheer, Vera would have been forced to see plain the truth--that Miss MacIntosh is truly gone. 

These pages revealing Vera’s rationalizing mind feel so true to how we experience pain or fear—when we know something but haven’t yet the courage to face it. 

However, I want to pause here to write about something on these pages that impressed me even more: the wonderful description of Miss MacIntosh’s frozen What Cheer (pp. 82). 

This is not the first time that we’ve experienced Young’s stylistic flourish of repeating the same word in just a line or few lines of text (ex: p. 24, “white;” p. 28, “rabbit;” p. 35 “reality;”), and there are many more ahead. It cannot be the case that this represents a lack of imagination or limited vocabulary on the part of our author—the very fact of this abundantly descriptive novel contradicts it.

Young asserts the word “frozen” or “frosty” fourteen times in quick succession in the single paragraph describing What Cheer. Why? How does this emphatic choice and repetition of this single word affect our experience with the text?

“…She had said that the winters were cold, that the children’s ears were frozen, and that was why she wore earmuffs. One must break through the frosty ground with his hoe, and the ice creaked like a glacier moving. The sun was frozen in a cloud. Sometimes the sun was small as a pumpkin seed. The children’s toes were frozen. The horses were frozen to their plows in the frozen fields. The carts were frozen to the frozen roads. The beards of men were frozen. The snow piled up in the great billows even in the spring, and the early birds were those who died, frozen to the crystal branches. The cherry buds were nipped by snow. The smoke was frozen in the chimneys. There were frozen flames. Once a farmer driving his wagon with a team of four horses went through a hole in the ice of a frozen lake, and in the spring when the ice was melting, when the great boomers were booming, he was brought to shore with his hands frozen to the reins….” (italics added).

This passage certainly vivifies a prior statement by Miss MacIntosh in the same paragraph: 

“She had said that Iowa was very ordinary, that the life was hard, certain, finite…” 

Indeed, what is more hard, certain, and finite than ice?

With these “frozen” sentences we have both rigorous specificity and exhaustive description. In my mind, I see Young writing this passage wildly, ecstatically, conjuring images and matching them to words that will not be tamed, moderated or thesaurusized! The repetition of “frozen” heightens the energy of the reading experience. It also layers or thickens our visualization of this wintery place, giving it a tangibility, similar to what John Berger in Seeing says an oil painting can do. 

Two additional points: might Young’s word repetitions here and elsewhere in the novel be an intentional aesthetic choice to impose a contrasting concreteness to the ambiguities, illusions, and slippages always present throughout the text? Second, might word repetitions like this further illustrate how stuck our characters are in their personal, physical and psychological spaces?

From a very unfrozen late-July Dallas,

Lori

Dear Lori,

What an insight to identify the novel’s repetitions as a solid footing among so much that is nebulous. In this regard, her writing has had an effect on my own writing. I’ve felt greater permission for repetition. It’s a lesson to other writers out there—the rules they’ve received are not frozen in place. In the passage you cite the repetition of the word frozen is so frequent as to become conduplicatio. Whatever other images and ideas are communicated within it, through so frequent repetition frozen becomes the primary idea conveyed.

It’s striking how frequently the words Young employs in this technique are adjectives, in many ways a secondary part of speech. We’re able to hold onto characteristic, a feeling more than any object, place, or person, more than anything they did.

You point out the way this characteristic matches Miss MacIntosh’s description of Iowa as “hard, certain, finite,” though even within that very description we see the ice start to crack as she uses multiple adjectives in a way that, formally, is exactly opposite “hard, certain, finite.”

What’s more: what things does she describe as frozen, a particularly fitting word for memories in their presumed unchangingness? Plants, animals, means of transportation, parts of the human body, sources of heat. All things that suggest movement, aliveness, and frozenness’s very opposite. Ears, toes, beards, hands, branches, cherry buds, fields, birds, horses, carts, a wagon, roads, flames, smoke, the sun. In one respect we feel a greater cold as we read this passage if those few things which could counteract the winter winds are themselves made of ice. In another, just as these objects take on the trait of being frozen, being frozen takes on the trait of being lifelike and burning. What does frozen mean when it describes a flame?

—

This seems not unrelated to me to the normal and the concrete Vera searches for in the person of Miss MacIntosh. Her mother offers opium’s oblivion, but in turning it down Vera also repudiates the materiality of the existence around her by seeking an absence.

How hard is the concrete in our imagination?

Anthony