It was perfect for riding out on the sand dunes at night, and for taking friends to the honky-tonks to hear one of our classmates wail out his versions of the old standards of Hank Williams and the brand new songs of Jerry Lee Lewis. Orlando: A Harvest Book, 2006. The one I want to tell about my grandfather concerns another man involved in the Zora Neale Hurston saga. Print. 173). Download the entire The Wide Net study guide as a printable PDF! 183). 2023 . The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. As far as living space was concerned, however, the town was strictly divided into white and black, and though the blacks were often seen in the white district, there were few whites who ventured into colored town. Walking down Orange Avenue he stopped in each of the three barber shops to tip his hat and say hello, and then picked up his daily cigar at the post office. 3Though I have spent much of my professional life reading and thinking about southern identity and the historical versions of the Old and New South, I really did not encounter anything resembling a theory of the South as a land of myth and mythmaking before I began my graduate studies at Chapel Hill. Walking down Orange Avenue he stopped in each of the three barber shops to tip his hat and say hello, and then picked up his daily cigar at the post office. New York: A Lisa Drew Book, 2004. The Malones are like horses, and the Doyles are never without their dogs. 25I began this paper with a confession. At the beginning of the story William Wallace catches a small rabbit and acts as if he wanted to take it off to himself and hold it up and talk to it (Welty, 172). the citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. Instead of one of the more conventional pieties, here was a crying out to both God and man against injustice. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume, There were the fairy talesGrimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of. One was the Florida artist A.E. Synopsis It looks like we don't have a Synopsis for this title yet. They talked sometimes about a black giant named Foots. References to babies, for example, can be found everywhere, from the little man on the toy-like train, to the baby alligator, all the way to the corn shuck doll waiting by itself on the bench back in Dover. After all, there were some brilliant minds at work on the subject, minds who could spot a stereotype or a caricature a hundred miles away, and there was much to learn. Print. More important to my purpose here, however, they did help me throw some light on the pluralities of myth and legend that had confused me when I had first read The Wide Net. I realize this is a self-indulgent proposition, but to be honest, I no longer have much faith in finding the definitive myth of the collective South. When he escaped he went back to his native state of Georgia and lived to a ripe old age. The more common it is, however, the less likely it can be seized upon for special consideration. She ends One Writers Beginnings with a celebration of memory that for her has now become a personal creed, and has allowed her to begin her life as a writer. "The Wide Net - Summary" eNotes Publishing William Wallace has done the real catching, unless of course, it has been Hazel herself. William Wallace is beset on all sides by distractions, advice, omens, signs of all sorts. But even children are sensitive to the boundary between the real and the fictional, and would hate to hear their father repeat the soliloquies of Hamlet from breakfast to bedtime even if he made a living as an actor. I realized that the origins of these myths had to be traced and analyzed, not least of all to better understand their impact on American culture and history. 15The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. date the date you are citing the material. deliberately refuses to shy away from vice, racism, pride, self-indulgence, and violence. . They stamped the ground and pawed each other, more like horses than men. Sam wore them around his head, with a knot over his forehead and loops around his ears, and Robbie Bell walked behind and stared at them (Welty. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. 2 Virgil of course is Dantes guide in The Divine Comedy through the Inferno and most of Purgatory. Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of The Wide Net and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South. PBS please bring this back. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. There doesn't seem to be a regularization effect from very high depth in residual net- works as wide networks with the same number of parameters as thin ones can learn same or better representations. After politely answering my questions about the Hurston papers, he turned to me and spoke for a good thirty minutes about my grandfather. When Virgil finds a string of beads in the river, he gives them to Sam and Robbie. eNotes.com William Wallace will soon demonstrate a stronger will in a more heroic gesture than catching a rabbit. Furthermore, wide networks can successfully learn with a . I say this because when The Wide Net and Other Stories came out as a single volume in 1943, Time Magazine published a review that claimed that the stories were about as human as a fish. Eudora Welty was never much affected by reviews, good or bad, but this one raised her hackles, and she wrote to Diarmuid Russell: I saw the Time review but they say those things just because I happen to live in the southbut nobody else had better say I am unhuman (qtd. Robbie worries about lightning. We saw the same films at the same movie theater, even though the whites sat downstairs and the blacks up in the balcony. Ben Forkner, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me),Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 67|Autumn 2016, mis en ligne le 01 dcembre 2018, consult le 02 mars 2023. The workers, all black men, would let us sit on the blocks of ice waiting to be crushed. But they remain children, and act their age. William goes to get his friend, Virgil, with whom he'd spent the night carousing, and the pair of them round up some neighborhood men to drag the river. note:when citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. One day on a summer trip to Homerville, my mother took me to a field in the countryside and showed me two old tombstones under a tree. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. In. What was her first novel and when was it published? I have talked about William Wallace and The Wide Net, but I have said little about the assigned subject, the myth of the South. There is no great central Southern myth in The Wide Net. But I must have half-remembered that the potency of the mythic, including a few old southern folktales or legends, does play a key role in the story, especially by pounding the pedal throughout on the truth that no myth, potent or not, can ever measure up to one mans solitary predicament. He could lift hundred-pound sacks of fertilizer with each hand. The workers filed in, one by one with their lunch bags, and sat down on a wooden bench. Trans. Mendelian randomization (MR) harnesses genetic variants as instrumental variables (IVs) to study the causal effect of exposure on outcome using summary statistics from genome-wide association studies. But even children are sensitive to the boundary between the real and the fictional, and would hate to hear their father repeat the soliloquies of Hamlet from breakfast to bedtime even if he made a living as an actor. He made a sign for me to follow him in what was now a blind tunnel steaming with sweat and humidity. Ben and his brothers continue their voyage while developing different theories about . Shortly after I finished graduate school and began to read more widely about the South I learned that Zora Neale Hurston had lived her last years in my home town, and was buried there. When he surfaces he is still in shock: And when William Wallace came up it was in an agony from submersion, which seemed an agony of the blood and of the very heart, so woeful he looked (Welty. She continues several pages later: It is our inward journey that leads us through timeforward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. 102). Robert Fitzgerald. 28What was missing in this southern town was southern history, or at least any striking display of history. 24But there is an even better reason not to insist too much on the historical significance of names in The Wide Net. Names are chosen for us, not the other way around, and The Wide Net insists upon individual choice as the primary measure of character. 183). Myth and meaning in that book are indivisible. Now us got scales, Sam cried out. She is in her early twenties (an age we might give to William Wallace) when she discovers the gift of memory, and in her seventies when she confirms it: Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. Walker Percy has written somewhere that a boy who has a Hamilton from his grandfather is a true son of the South, and I still have mine. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. The Aeneid. Trans. The narration continues to speculate how (who knew?) 7William Wallace Jamieson, the first words of the story, and a name I will return to, is a young man who has been married to his wife, Hazel, for a year. What I want to single out is not his place in the community, which was central, but his difference from most of the adult white men I knew and observed. Its going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog thats ripe and have fresh meat to eat. Sunlight was scarce and each turn of the river took one deeper into a ripe darkness smelling of frog spawn and wild magnolia. Hickory tree there will be yellow. review but they say those things just because I happen to live in the southbut nobody else had better say I am unhuman (qtd. What I remember most about growing up was the joy of being outside for most of the day in a sort of tropical paradise. Still, casting around for something to say about the way the South (from within and without) seems to have been designed, destined, or doomed, to generate a mythic vision, or visions, often in contradiction with each other, my thoughts could not help going back to The Wide Net.. He goes inside and there is Hazel! When Virgil finds a string of beads in the river, he gives them to Sam and Robbie. William Wallace is beset on all sides by distractions, advice, omens, signs of all sorts. 39These were some of the memories humming in my head when I began reading the books about Southern myth in Chapel Hill. He is holding fast to a little green ribbon of plant, root and all (Welty. In the title story, a man quarrels with his pregnant wife, leaves the house, and descends into a mysterious underwater kingdom where he meets The King of the Snakes, who forces him to confront the darker mysteries of nature. The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is beginning to dawn on him. Just as William Wallace is beset on all sides by a welter of signs, until he forgets the name of the Pearl River and takes his dive to the bottom, the reader is mystified by the dazzling parade of mythical allusions until he too reaches the same place. The last date is today's Eudora Welty: A Biography. William must will himself into a new man, and as a Jamieson, he must cease being a perpetual son, and affirm his status as a father. 27Even as I write, the memories come flooding, but two or three should be enough to make my case. I learned that several young ancestors had been killed fighting for the Confederacy or had died soon after the war from disease. As I have already mentioned, my grandfather lies at the heart of these memories. The thing about this part of the country in the great days is that people like Aaron Burr, J.J. Audubon, Lorenzo Dow, and goodness knows who, were as thick as blackbirds in the pie, and once the pie is opened, they are going to begin to sing (qtd. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and livesthe old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 104). I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. . He towered over the others, who were all big and tough. References to babies, for example, can be found everywhere, from the little man on the toy-like train, to the baby alligator, all the way to the corn shuck doll waiting by itself on the bench back in Dover. Soon, a storm comes, and the lightning strikes trees around the group as they watchit is rather exhilarating. The wide net Adjust Share by Eudora Welty, This article is only available as a PDF to subscribers. The strongest proof of identity is the capacity to change, to slip from one role to another if necessary, to pass through the modes of being that nature and time demand, but always to remain at one with oneself. It was the county seat, so there were a few imposing public buildings. 90). There is no great central Southern myth in The Wide Net. But I must have half-remembered that the potency of the mythic, including a few old southern folktales or legends, does play a key role in the story, especially by pounding the pedal throughout on the truth that no myth, potent or not, can ever measure up to one mans solitary predicament. [] Any day now the change will come. The absence of history serves the same purpose, I believe, as the excessive abundance of symbol and myth the reader must negotiate before setting his sights on the inner spirit William Wallace possesses to exist all by himself. Hazel wands were traditionally used as dowsing rods. 180). And after a few minutes she took him by the hand and led him into the house, smiling as if she were smiling down on him (Welty, What is missing in my account of rereading the story is my misremembering the total absence of southern history, a conspicuous absence. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the C got through the L in a Coca-Cola sign (Welty. There is, however, a simpler explanation, of the South to be sure, but leaving the story still uncomplicated by history. He saw that the bodies of the frozen birds had fallen out of the trees, and he fell down and wept for his father and mother, to whom he had not said good-bye (Welty, First Love,, (and thus the collection itself) concludes with the portrait of a young woman who is rejected, and is forced to face absolute desolation and a serial rape. Packet switching was thought of as a better and faster method to transfer data than the hardware solution to the problem, i.e., the circuitry. In my town there were cattle ranches and orange groves to the west, and a small fleet of shrimping boats chugging back and forth on the Indian River to and from the Atlantic. Then group returns to town, everyone carrying their heavy strings of fish. Perhaps nature itself, the mother of all myth, is the true heart of the story. He walked on. It begins with the story of a deaf boy whose parents have been killed or captured by the Indians and who is left abandoned in the end, completely alone: He did not know how far he had gone on the Liberty Road when the posse came riding up behind and passed him. All necessary dates them to Sam and Robbie the less likely it be. Been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies big and tough Doyles!, root and all ( Welty Dantes guide in the Wide Net into a ripe old age on was. And have fresh meat to eat to turn from hot to cold, and Doyles. Killed fighting for the Confederacy or had died soon after the war to,... 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