Lori and Anthony: I’m glad you decided to showcase Chapter Four of MMMD. To my mind, it is in the top 5 chapters in the whole book for a variety of reasons. First, in describing her mother, Vera is also describing the book she is writing, with the assistance of a universal memory bequeathed her by her maker, that is, Marguerite Young: “all things changing their forms, their shapes, all things blurred as if seen under water.” (79) Next, the chapter contains two of the most quotable lines in the book. First, “I did not dream I live in marble halls, for I lived in marble halls,” and “I had tried to write a book by the wavering light of the sea, but I could not compete with four snails crawling across the open pages, crawling into the sea, for their writing was more beautiful than mine. So I left the book by the tide.” (81). Next, the arresting image of “frozen flames” which you correctly intuit is one among many images in the book bringing contraries together. (82). Next, Vera’s rapturous idealization of “interior” America with its common sense, picnics, and all things “hard, certain and finite”, the “promised land” which in “reality” is the land of the dead, from which people returned only to kill themselves and where the denizens were stone deaf, all the clocks broken, and the golden bowl was broken and the wheel broken at the cistern. And all this is done in ten pages. And written with such clarity and vividness as to give the lie to the notion that Miss Young is willfully obscure and indecipherable. Her skills as a historian and journalist are all on display here in a lucid, riveting chapter in which there is not a single superfluous word. Whenever I encounter a reader who is troubled by the book’s less than direct route, I recommend that they read or re-read this chapter which is, in effect, the whole book in miniature, including a premonition of the narrator’s obsession with deafness, culminating in her romance with the “stone deaf man.”
Chapter 4 is indeed amazing! And thank you for highlighting something that I've been thinking about in the context of this and previous chapters--Young's fixation with characters who are deaf or blind (or so we are led to believe).
There is Catherine's mother, who suffered from hereditary blindness and her husband, Catherine's father, who, when his wife died, was "caused to feel" that he could not see without her and got a Seeing Eye dog.
And yes, the lady on the train out of Grand Central Station who warns Vera against going to Indiana where "all the young people had fled from, and the old were half in their graves, and nobody remained but the old, and nobody could hear a word that was said...All the old people, those who remained...were deaf as door knobs."
But being that this is MMMD, we know that those with deprivations of the senses, the body, and the mind, are more acutely aware than their healthy counterparts: Catherine knows Mr. Spitzer's every move in and around Boston, though she never leaves her bed; Catherine's mother is blind, yet she can thread a needle; Catherine's father, too, is blind, but so is his Seeing Eye dog, with whom he maneuvers the circuitous house and gardens.
The worlds of the novel are enchantingly haunted. Reality and perception turned inside out!
Wonderful!
Lori and Anthony: I’m glad you decided to showcase Chapter Four of MMMD. To my mind, it is in the top 5 chapters in the whole book for a variety of reasons. First, in describing her mother, Vera is also describing the book she is writing, with the assistance of a universal memory bequeathed her by her maker, that is, Marguerite Young: “all things changing their forms, their shapes, all things blurred as if seen under water.” (79) Next, the chapter contains two of the most quotable lines in the book. First, “I did not dream I live in marble halls, for I lived in marble halls,” and “I had tried to write a book by the wavering light of the sea, but I could not compete with four snails crawling across the open pages, crawling into the sea, for their writing was more beautiful than mine. So I left the book by the tide.” (81). Next, the arresting image of “frozen flames” which you correctly intuit is one among many images in the book bringing contraries together. (82). Next, Vera’s rapturous idealization of “interior” America with its common sense, picnics, and all things “hard, certain and finite”, the “promised land” which in “reality” is the land of the dead, from which people returned only to kill themselves and where the denizens were stone deaf, all the clocks broken, and the golden bowl was broken and the wheel broken at the cistern. And all this is done in ten pages. And written with such clarity and vividness as to give the lie to the notion that Miss Young is willfully obscure and indecipherable. Her skills as a historian and journalist are all on display here in a lucid, riveting chapter in which there is not a single superfluous word. Whenever I encounter a reader who is troubled by the book’s less than direct route, I recommend that they read or re-read this chapter which is, in effect, the whole book in miniature, including a premonition of the narrator’s obsession with deafness, culminating in her romance with the “stone deaf man.”
Dear Michael,
Chapter 4 is indeed amazing! And thank you for highlighting something that I've been thinking about in the context of this and previous chapters--Young's fixation with characters who are deaf or blind (or so we are led to believe).
There is Catherine's mother, who suffered from hereditary blindness and her husband, Catherine's father, who, when his wife died, was "caused to feel" that he could not see without her and got a Seeing Eye dog.
And yes, the lady on the train out of Grand Central Station who warns Vera against going to Indiana where "all the young people had fled from, and the old were half in their graves, and nobody remained but the old, and nobody could hear a word that was said...All the old people, those who remained...were deaf as door knobs."
But being that this is MMMD, we know that those with deprivations of the senses, the body, and the mind, are more acutely aware than their healthy counterparts: Catherine knows Mr. Spitzer's every move in and around Boston, though she never leaves her bed; Catherine's mother is blind, yet she can thread a needle; Catherine's father, too, is blind, but so is his Seeing Eye dog, with whom he maneuvers the circuitous house and gardens.
The worlds of the novel are enchantingly haunted. Reality and perception turned inside out!
Fondly,
Lori