Feeling Myshelf

Tears of the Silenced Annotated Bib

511C9DAwXqL

I did not know what I was in for when I decided to enroll in the “How Writers’ Read” course. I had heard absolutely nothing and didn’t bother with looking at the course’s description. The first class I was thrown for a loop. I didn’t understand a single word of the first lecture and sat there baffled as I learned so much in such a short time. Methods and techniques that, until then, I had never heard about. It had opened a whole new world of the English language, literature, writing, etc. I was looking at this whole new world with awe and fear. Awe because it was something I never knew existed. Fear because I didn’t know if I would be able to learn so much of this new world with so little time. I had learned not only new ways to read, but I now I have the knowledge of how to be a better writer. During this course, my reading partners and I were able to dive into these new, complex techniques and methods and come to the conclusion that to be a great writer, you need to be a great reader.

Following Demian, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Complete Maus, my reading partners and I found ourselves following a pattern of being untrustworthy of our narrators. After even our first discussion of reading the novel Tears of the Silenced, we were untrustworthy of the narrator, Misty Griffin. We had our evidence from the very beginning, and maybe our biases did get in the way, but we were all in agreement that Griffin was not to be trusted. By all contributing a different reading method (Reading For, Form and Genre, Intertextual Codes, and Rhetoric of Narrative) within each blog for this book, we were able to dissect it to the best of our ability, find more evidence to support our theories, and understand the mind of Misty Griffin a little better.

Part 1: Reading For

Tears of the Silenced was the last book in my reading group. The book is about the Amish Church and the secrets that go on behind the scenes. It exposes the abuse Amish girls face everyday. It is a small look into the lives of these women and the strength it took the author to leave this community. Having survived and even thrived after a childhood of sexual abuse and brutal betrayal – first at the hands of her parents and then in an Amish community. As a teen with only a 2nd grade education Griffin was able to escape enslavement. According to Mckee in “Structure in Meaning,” “The controlling idea shapes the writer’s strategic choices.” The controlling idea in Tears of the Silenced weaves itself back and forth with the counter idea throughout the entire novel, but in one particular spot it presents itself the most. The controlling idea we came up with for this novel is that “without regulation, groups become corrupt” and this is most prevalent during when Griffin was living with the Amish. Throughout the story, readers see when Griffin is with her family group or the Amish, how corrupt they become without any sort of accountability or regulation. They are able to do what they want and fall under religious freedom. However, without religious freedom, it gives higher authority the ability to become corrupt and control these religious groups. This thought process follows our counter idea which was, “taking away freedoms allows higher authority to become corrupt and control every aspect of life”.

While reading this book, our reading for prompted us on how we read this book, and what already preconceived ideas of the text that we brought with us. We were already filled with untrustworthiness from previous books. However, this was our first autobiography/true crime novel. It was very different from the fiction novels we had already read and were used to. I believe this is what threw us off throughout our blogs. We all had trouble pinpointing exactly what MIsty Griffin was actually meaning and if she was trustworthy or untrustworthy. The book begins right off with horrific trauma Griffin suffered as a two year old, falling witness to her own brother’s abuse in her home when their father kidnapped him and took him away to Kansas. Tears of the Silenced continues to follow a trail of abuse and neglect throughout Griffin’s life way before she even steps foot into the Amish Community. Misty’s stepfather continuously blames her abuse on the Amish system even though the Griffin family is not Amish. I found myself aware that Griffin wanted me to read the story as a triumphant story about surviving abuse and an expose about the Amish for their abusive behavior.

Part Two: Form and Genre

As a memoir, Misty hits the key points that allow the genre to exist. Misty has a story that is worthy of being told. Who wouldn’t want to read a story that has the tagline, “Surviving Severe Child Abuse, Sexual Assault and Leaving the Amish Church. A gripping true story that takes you on the journey of a child abuse and sexual assault survivor turned activist.”Misty’s detailed account showcases an emotional drama. Akin to “A Child Called It” the writing doesn’t matter within the story but, what you have to say matters. In other words, tragedy sells. According to Kenneth Burke’s Lexicon Rhetoricae, “Syllogistic progression is the form of a perfectly conducted argument, advancing step by step. It is the form of a mystery story, where everything falls together, as in a story of ratiocination by Poe” (Burke 124). In other words, the syllogistic progressive form acts as an argument that justifies the conclusion as logical, and even inevitable. The occurrences unfold in a way that that makes sense with the evidence pulled from the plot supporting it, which is why Burke’s syllogistic form works. The actions of all the characters in the books pile up and pile up until finally Griffin does something to change it. From witnessing her own brother’s abuse by her biological father, to being a victim of abuse by her father and mother for years, witnessing abuse on her aunt and her sister, being forced into a religion, being oppressed and looked down upon within that religion and witnessing more abuse happen within that religious group. This all reveals itself through Burke’s syllogistic form, and the abuse unfolds right in front of the reader’s eyes.

Part Three: Intertextual Codes

In our group’s conversations about Misty Griffin and her book Tears of the Silenced, there was always an undercurrent of distrust of her story. Because she blames the society in which “Amish rules outweigh any form of crime” for the abuse she endured and the hands of a few individuals, some members of our group felt that she was being discriminatory and reductive (13). I think this might be due, at least in part, to a cognitive dissonance which we experience when reading this book. What we already know about the Amish in our culture clashes with the horrible misogyny and abuse we are witness to in the book, and we cannot reconcile the two. We don’t want to believe the structure of Amish society could be perpetuating these awful things, so we have to believe that Griffin is a liar or a discriminator.

n the chapter “Re-Writing the Classic Text” in The Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman defines five codes, which “manifest themselves through connotation” and “represent a sort of bridge between texts” (239). Silver defines the semic code as functioning “by grouping a number of signifiers”, or words, “around either a proper name, or another signifier which functions temporarily as if it were a proper name,” (251). A proper name that is signified around in Tears of Silenced is, of course, Amish. Early on in the book, our cognitive dissonance about the Amish is summarized in a section about the general public’s failure to stop Griffin’s mother’s abuse. “The Amish act and the clothes served her well and no one seemed to question that I might be an abused.” (42). In this sentence, the proper name ‘Amish’ is signified by the clothes they wear, and the lack of questioning of their lifestyle by outsiders. Amishness (and other belief systems like it) is in part characteristic of a fear or a lack of will to stop abuse, according to this sentence.

The ideas of outsider/insider and isolated/connected implicit in the previous quotation call forth the symbolic code. The symbolic code is defined by the “formulation of antithesis” or the “articulation of binary oppositions”, such as the connotations of night/day or good/evil. The symbolic codes of isolation/connectivity, outsider/insider, and religious freedom/oppression influence how Griffin sees those who failed to stop her abuse, and how we view the Amish within our cultural code, which “articulates” the “structuring oppositions” of symbolic codes. Griffin’s isolation (lack of connection to the outside), her status as an insider to Amishness (and thus opposition to outsiders), and her parents’ religious freedom to practice as they wish (and thus oppress and abuse their daughters) creates her cultural code which damns the Amish and their patriarchal structure.

Interestingly, this quotation on page 42 also articulates the opposite cultural code, which is at the core of our group’s disagreement on the efficacy of Griffin’s view of the Amish. By describing her and her parents’ way of life as an “Amish act”, Griffin implies that how they live is not, in fact, true Amishness. What we believe about the Amish in our cultural codes is structured by our status as outsiders in the symbolic code. Because we enjoy the quality of their goods and are not privy (because we are outsiders) to the isolation, strictness, and possible abuse their societies are built on, we may view their way of life as quaint and harmless, and, by consequence, see the Amishness that Griffin describes as not true Amishness. When our cultural code clashes with Griffin’s, we may get upset. “Why is she blaming the Amish,” we might ask, “when it was the stepfather and the Bishop that abused her?” Here, we have made the mistake of believing that, as Jonathan Culler fights against in “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative”, that solely the “events [of a story], conceived as prior to and independent of their discursive representation, determine meanings” (173). Griffin is not blaming the Amish for her abuse because people who were Amish abused her (cause->effect->meaning). Griffin blames the Amish because what it means to be Amish allowed and encouraged people to abuse her, and let her abuse go unchecked from the outside (meaning->cause->effect). As Culler writes, “Here meaning is not the effect of a prior event but its cause.” (174).

Part Four: Rhetoric Narrative

As James Phelan describes in his “Living to Tell About It” essay, there is a powerful mechanism of narration that relies on the cultural narratives surrounding the implied author. Cultural narratives create a sense that the author is “a larger collective entity” or “at least some significant subgroup of society” rather than an individual with unique defining characteristics (Phelan). First and foremost, Griffin recalls the cultural narrative behind the sexual assault victim — a youth at the time of her abuse, held captive by the restrictive expectatons of her community and the power imbalance between her and her abuser. On top of this, Griffin’s story taps into a cultural narrative surrounding the tension between religious freedom and secular intervention. The latter of these two most prominent cultural narratives creates the context for how Griffin’s Amish abusers were able to evade government interference due to their protected legal status as a religious minority in the United States. In order for Misty Griffin’s memoir to land with her ideal audience they must immediately agree that: Her status as a victim is an inherent badge of credibility, and culturally segregated religious communities such as the Amish must have some sort of dark underbelly, because they exist outside the realm of government jurisdiction. The second bullet-point also connects to an even more significant cultural narrative in the United States about the ethical dilemmas faced when there is ‘too much’ government involvement in every-day lives versus there being ‘too little’ government involvement when it may actually be needed. Without even opening the book, Tears of the Silenced’s sub-heading already begs its potential audience to follow these cultural narratives about abuse survivors, religious freedoms, and government oversight: “A true crime and an American tragedy; severe child abuse and leaving the Amish” (Griffin). And beyond all of this, Misty Griffin’s narrative also benefits from an assumed given within the genre that she is operating in — that non-fiction narrators are identical to their authors, and that these narrators/authors are only writing this story to tell the truth. Trying to define what really is truth versus what it is not would be too significant of a diversion, but for the sake of this present conversation, I believe that the assumption behind non-fiction authors always telling the truth can be reinterpreted as: “non-fiction authors will narrate these events to the best of their ability, writing what they feel to be true, and being honest about their memories behind what really happened.” There will always be a level of deception at play in non-fiction, but the ideal audience of a non-fiction writer (from my perspective) will often enter the piece trusting that the author is not going to intentionally deceive their readers, and that any deception within the narrative will only come about via the fallibility of human memory and the inherent limited perspective that only a single set of eyes can glean from experiencing any given situation. This works to further bolster Misty Griffin’s authorial credibility — to her ideal audience, her memoir is really just a well-crafted, confessional diary entry wherein the catharsis of emotional expression is the only ‘goal’ behind the writing.

tes

Works Cited

Blog 1: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/12/evil-impact-on-religion/

Blog 3: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/19/misty-griffin-is-not-a-liar/

Blog 4: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/26/sitting-in-the-seat-how-misty-griffins-identity-influences-her-tears-of-the-silenced-memoir-matt-berrian/

Good Omens Annotated Bibliography

by Matt Berrian

Introduction

Reading Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman was a slog. This was unfortunate, because I not only selected this book myself but I also had a mountain of work ahead that relied on me actually finishing it. I honestly wished that I had the hindsight to choose a different book but last semester I read Gaiman’s American Gods novel and absolutely loved it, which convinced me that reading another one of Gaiman’s most celebrated works would be a thrill. But instead, I only felt frustrated and tired.

Good Omens is about an angel (Aziraphale) and a demon (Crowley) trying to prevent the Antichrist (an eleven-year old named Adam) from kickstarting the Apocalypse. They want to thwart God’s plan because their several thousand years spent on Earth made them grow very fond of all that the planet and humans have to offer. There’s also some witches, a bumbling young man who can’t operate technology for the life of him, a convent of babbling nuns, green aliens, and all four horsemen of The End Times thrown in there to spice things up for Aziraphale and Crowley. As you can see, any young man would be frothing at the mouth for a chance to read all of this nonsense for a college-level course.

But I resented it.

#1 – Mimesis and Controlling Value

In McKee’s “Structure and Meaning, he defines the “phenomenon” of something he calls “aesthetic emotion” and how this phenomenon relates to art and storytelling (McKee 111). When I first read McKee’s essay, I didn’t have a clue what the hell McKee was talking about; did McKee just smush the words “aesthetic” and “emotion” together and then call it a day? McKee also states that “whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them” (111). Only later would I realize how these concepts related to my experience with Good Omens: if aesthetic emotions were a central aspect to immersing oneself in a text, via the pleasing experience of marrying meaning to emotion, then my difficulty immersing myself in the text could be chalked up to not accessing the emotion that Gaiman and Pratchett planted into the narrative.

Early on in Good Omens Crowley tries to persuade Aziraphale into helping him prevent the Apocalypse from coming to pass. This moment represents no minor stepping stone along the narrative journey — this is the first proposition made that the angel and demon should openly defy their masters and save humanity themselves. Moments such as this tend to establish what McKee calls a “controlling idea” within a narrative — an expression which describes “how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end” (115). Being the third book on my plate for this course, I wanted to be at the ready to point out any sign of a controlling idea while reading the text. What grand statement about the human condition did Gaiman and Pratchett cook up for this scene in Good Omens? Well… it wasn’t what I expected.

In Crowley’s appeal to his angel buddy, he tries to tempt Aziraphale into sabotaging The Great Plan by reminding Aziraphale of everything that the angel loves about Earth. Without Earth, Aziraphale would no longer have “compact discs,” “Albert Hall,” “Proms,” nor any “fascinating little restaurants where they know you,” and especially no more “Daily Telegraph crossword” (Gaiman and Pratchett 41). As far as grand proclamations about the human condition, or even the beginning of one, Crowley’s talking points rang a little hollow. It’s not that I hadn’t picked up on the humor in it: an angel being genuinely beguiled into defying God’s wishes with concerts, crosswords, and chic restaurants is completely contrary to the inscrutable morals often associated with angels in Christian theology. As far as McKee’s concept of aesthetic emotion goes, moments like this were meant to engage the audience through its humor and quirkiness, allowing them to submit to the twists and curves that the writer has planned for them down the line. But I only felt somewhat grifted. It was impossible to submit to this text on the basis that the plot is going to be driven forward by an angel and a demon who only want the world to keep going just because they liked music and puzzle games.

Why? Why were these things better than both Heaven and Hell? If the novel’s premise relied on archetypal figures of good and evil disobeying their commands for personal reasons, then shouldn’t the novel at least explore what qualities that life on Earth has that Aziraphale and Crowley would lose if the world ended? Good Omens seems to consistently be focused on proving again and again that Earth life beats the divine cosmos by a longshot, but never telling its audience why. When writing my group’s first blog for this novel, I was able to easily identify that the text was centered on the “controlling idea” that putting personal ideals above restrictive values passed down from an anonymous plurality was ultimately a good thing. This is rarely contradicted within the novel, and ultimately wins out when (brace yourself) the Apocalypse doesn’t happen! Adam essentially reverses the entire process of Armageddon prep that he and the four horsemen had been setting up throughout the novel. The world as we know it has survived, and our friendly neighborhood angel and demon end their part of the narrative with a reflective stroll through the park (Pratchett, Gaiman 358-361). The journey was convoluted, whacky, and wrapped everything up in a neat bow.

But what on Earth was anyone supposed to feel through all of this? A reader could understand the ins-and-outs of the novel’s thematic messaging as expertly as they want from beginning to end. Finding a reason to care about how these values are affecting the cast of characters is a different beast itself.

#3 – Intertextuality

In terms of this novel’s relationship with outside texts and codes, I suspect that my understanding of Gaiman’s previous works greatly influenced my approach to Good Omens. As previously mentioned, I chose this novel because I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods several months before the beginning of this course, and loved it; which encouraged me to seek out other works by Gaiman. Although it was written before American Gods, I’ve come to understand that I unconsciously assumed that the mimetic and thematic registers from American Gods would be somewhat replicated in Good Omens, being co-authored by Gaiman. I knew that Good Omens was meant to be more lighthearted and comedic than American Gods, but the novel’s premise felt ripe with the potential of delivering the same emotional and thought-provoking blows as Gods did. Each were concerned with divine figures, prophecies, an archetypal Chosen One, and the impending threat of total annihilation. I now believe that my prolonged inability to enter Good Omens’s mimetic register was largely in part to me projecting my experience with American Gods onto Omens without accepting the latter as its own text.

Beyond my prior experiences with Gaiman’s other works, my experience of the novel also became impacted by my attempt to interpret the text via hermeneutic and cultural codes — as defined by Barthes and analyzed by Silverman. How these two codes influenced my reading are dependent on each other, and cannot be discussed as separate factors that contributed to my reading experience. In my reading, the cultural codes that I had associated with angels and demons tacitly nudged me into believing a hermeneutic code was going to be developed through the narrative. Cultural codes “function to not only organize but to naturalize the field — to make it seem timeless and inevitable” (Silverman 274), which, in the case of Good Omens, means that characters such as Crowley, Adam, and Aziraphale all seem to exist within a specific cultural narrative that will define who they are and their development within the narrative.

From the get-go, it’s clear that Aziraphale and Crowley are not going to adhere to the cultural connotations associated with angels and demons respectively. Neither have been able to follow the duties bestowed upon them from literally the beginning of time: Aziraphale gives away his flaming sword to Adam and Eve when they are cast out of Eden “what with the vicious animals out there and the storm coming up … you (Adam and Eve) might be needing this sword, so here it is,” (4) while Crowley asserts that the roles of angels and demons are nothing more than “a pantomime,” and worries if “the apple thing” was actually “the right thing to do” (5). These two beings are much different than what the audience would expect from an angel and a demon, with each casually circumventing the rules or ideology associated with their respective cosmological kingdoms. The subversion of traditional Judeo-Christian archetypes in this way sets up a question that I spent a significant portion of my reading time trying to answer: what about Aziraphale and Crowley makes them so different from others of their kind since nearly the beginning of the Earth?

Now you might be able to see what I meant when I said that the cultural codes prompted me to assume the hermeneutic code was at play within the narrative, only to be disappointed when I realized that I was taking myself down the wrong rabbit hole when it came to this narrative. Projecting my previous experiences with Neil Gaiman’s fiction work onto the text, I picked out Aziraphale and Crowley’s subversive portrayals as enigmas that the text would eventually snake around to resolving before the story ended. Despite repeatedly behaving very un-angelic or un-demonic respectively — Aziraphale urging Shadwell to kill the Antichrist, a small child (165); Crowley choosing to fight The Devil in order to save the cast of human characters (209) — the narrative doesn’t seem concerned with telling the audience why these two supernatural characters differ so greatly from what the audience may expect of them. I felt that I needed to first establish the dead-ends I ran into in my attempt at locating elements of hermeneutic coding within the text before I moved onto my discussion of form and genre, because when I realized that I was actively seeking out stages of the hermeneutic code, it dawned on me what I was actually reading for: I wanted a full mimetic experience that would help me feel connected to the characters.

So, to summarize the trials and tribulations of the prior hundreds of words spread out above:

I wanted Good Omens to be dark and emotional.
I assumed that Pratchett and Gaiman gave flimsy reasons to explain away Crowley and Aziraphale’s rebellious tendencies to delay the reveal of a ‘deeper’ reason that hid underneath their materialism.
These flimsy explanations were meant to set up a hermeneutic series of developments; culminating in a revelation of what actually made them keen on humanity.
The hermeneutic code was not present in this sense.
I was disappointed by what I perceived as a lack of attention given to fleshing out these two fascinating characters.

In actuality, items 3 and 4 were less indicative of Pratchett and Gaiman’s writing quality, but was more related to my unconscious desire to experience Good Omens through a mimetic register, and nothing else.

#2 – Form and Genre

Only through an analysis of Good Omens’s synthetic elements was I able to conclude that Pratchett and Gaiman likely intended their audience to read the book through a thematic register, not mimetic. While the text is sparse with moments that encourage empathy towards the situations of the main characters, instances of satirical irony are abundant. As Dr. Kopp outlined on our course’s Weebly site, irony can be identified through several cues that are relevant to the ironies found in Good Omens:

The ethos of the narrator, who the reader has learned to expect instances of irony.
Shared background of understanding.
The immediate context.

One of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Famine, is originally introduced as his human alter-ego, Sable. ‘Sable’ owns a world-famous dieting book and is a celebrity nutritionist, convincing millions that restriction is the key to health. At a restaurant, he encounters a fan:

“She (Sable accountant) was interrupted by a skeleton. A skeleton in a Dior dress, with tanned skin stretched almost to snapping point over the delicate bones of the skull. The skeleton had long blond hair and perfectly made-up lips: she looked like the person mothers around the world would point to, muttering, “That’s what’ll happen to you if you don’t eat your greens”; she looked like a famine-relief poster with style.” (34).

Although Sable’s identity as Famine isn’t explicitly revealed in the text yet, there’s a humorous irony in the fan being compared to a “famine-relief poster”, which lends to the idea that a critical, snarky narrator is the one who is conveying this narrative to readers. Throughout the novel, humorous commentary such as this nearly always takes the place of earnest, heartfelt descriptions of the story. Irony takes on the repetitive form (Burke 125) in this way, as — much like the instances of Aziraphale being shown to care about material things more than his duties — the novel is positioning itself as a work defined by ironic subversions, not an attempt to draw out a sense of ‘realness’ from its cast of characters. Sable taking the form of a lifestyle tycoon who’s been convincing humans to gradually starve themselves into the image of famine itself is not only an ironic moment between his skeletal fan and himself, but also in the broader implication that his human fans have been wasting themselves away entirely of their own volition.

Though skewing towards the gimmer side of things, Sable’s exchange with his fan is still mainly serving the function of humorous social commentary propelled forward by the contextual irony of the scene. Moments such as this use the characters to ‘say’ something indirectly about the situation, rather than using the space to provoke a mimetic sort of empathy for readers to place themselves into. While these moments were definitely funny, I initially resented the narrative for not taking the time to convince me why I should care about the conflicts that these fictional people were going through. My limited view of Sable’s bony fan is somewhat sympathetic in a very general sense, but she is mainly portrayed as a parodic figure, becoming more of a symbol for a person than a ‘real’ person. With Crowley, Aziraphale, this fan, and many others within this novel, it is much more difficult to emotionally reflect oneself onto these characters compared to cataloguing them as ironic symbols. These symbols gradually build up to develop a controlling value of: Divine plots and representatives are the simplistic ones, whereas human nature and the human experience are actually the ones that are more difficult to pin down. In this way, the synthetic register reveals to the reader the thematic messaging interlaced throughout the text, which takes priority over establishing a mimetic connection between the text and those who are reading.

#4: Rhetorical Dimension of Narrative

I’ve been talking a lot about “the audience” or “the reader” and the ever-elusive “narrator” for a while so far, but what lies beyond these vague labels? Firstly, I want to establish that the author (the flesh-and-blood human being who wrote down the words and sent them to a publisher) and the narrator are not the same person, and neither are the reader (you) and the implied audience (Seitz 145). It is important to make these distinctions because Pratchett and Gaiman’s intentions within the narrative are not the exact same as the intentions of their narrator, and each of these two parties have a different audience that they are trying to reach. In terms of Pratchett and Gaiman’s implied audience, I was only able to take a stab at who this nebulous group of people could be through realizing that I was not one of them.

My hyper-fixation on my inability to mimetically engage with the text culminates in this final point where the line is drawn between who Good Omens is hypothetically written for, and who I am as a reader. How I’ve come to see the novel is that Pratchett and Gaiman do not actually intend for their readers to mimetically engage with the text at all. Rather, through the lack of hermeneutic coding implanted within the characters’ development, and the priority of ironic contrasts over the craft of aesthetic emotion, I feel that Good Omens is meant to be engaged on a purely thematic level, where the ideal audience will be expected to worry more about the commentary being made than the fictional figures who are ‘living out’ the narrative.

James Phelan describes narration as “an art of indirection” wherein the author is using the character of the narrator to simultaneously communicate with both “the narrator’s and the author’s” audiences (Phelan 1). As far as I have been able to interpret the implied authorial stance that Pratchett and Gaiman took when writing this novel, it becomes clear that they don’t actually expect their implied audience to care much about the apocalyptic stakes that the plot is centered upon. As the novel is reaching its climactic moment where the Four Horsemen are about to initiate global nuclear halocaust, the narrator opens a new paragraph with the following interjection:

“Afterwards, Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger recalled events at the gate as having happened like this…” (Pratchett Gaiman 189).

Afterwards? The use of this time signifier baffled me when I first read the book. On the eve of total annihilation, the narrator tells their narratee (their own audience within the fiction of the novel) that there will be an “afterwards” to these tense events. The narrator seems to inform both the narratee and the implied audience that the world will not end, because there will be humans left to reflect upon this encounter in the past tense. Relating again to my discussion of the thematic versus mimetic reading methods of this text, being told that the novel will not end in disaster well in advance to the upcoming final confrontation removes dramatic tension from the final stretch of rising action before the climax is reached.

Via Phelan’s interpretation of a narrator’s multi-layered methods of communication, I would hazard to identify this indirect reveal on page 189 as a “disclosure function” between the narrator and the implied audience (Phelan 12). This disclosure essentially tells the audience that everything will be okay, therefore, they should be reading this text for another reason besides just wanting to know what happens next. In John’s and Destiny’s replies to Emma’s second blog post on form and genre, they brought up interesting points that lend further credence to the idea that Good Omens is less about the characters, and more about what these characters represent to the overall thematic structure of the text. John pointed out how:

“The narrator took a certain distance to all of the characters, almost like they didn’t take a particular interest in any one of the characters, but in the story as a whole. By the end of the story, Crowley and Aziraphale have barely affected the events at all, almost as if everything was part of a plan already put into place (one that they couldn’t affect or understand even if they wanted to).”

Destiny’s reply supports this when she separately commented on being surprised that “the main characters of the book (which my group largely assumed were meant to be Crowley and Aziraphale) weren’t around for the duration of the novel.”

This is all true — the novel hops around into many different diversions throughout, not lending an exuberant amount of attention on Adam, Crowley, Aziraphale, Newt, or Anathema (the last two have since gone unmentioned within this Annotated Bibliography because there is too much ground to cover in too little time, but they do share equal amount of page-time with the others). This omniscient narrator — who may likely be God, given the religious contexts that the novel exists within — does not care if their narratee is emotionally impacted by the multitude of individuals who comprise this story. They seem to only want their own audience to enjoy the satire, ironies, and seemingly endless diversions that this story can offer.

Reflection

I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface of what this course has to offer me as a writer. This isn’t to say that I haven’t learned anything at all — the intertextual codes outlined by Silverman and the various readings on rhetorical dimensions of a narrative have firmly planted themselves in my mind. With the second core value of the Writing Arts major in mind, I was able to bring the readings on method three into play when I had to create a graphic narrative for my Topics in Literature course. My graphic narrative relied on the semic associations that my narrator held towards a skull, which allowed me to establish a visual shorthand for conveying dread. Our discussions on method 4, the rhetoric of narrative, also influenced my work in Creative Writing II this semester. While it now seems obvious in my mind, I hadn’t considered before this course how divorced the author and the narrator can truly be, and how the narrator should be treated as a character within the fiction just like the other characters that this narrator is talking about. For a piece of horror flash-fiction, I found it much easier to establish a distinct voice for the piece when I envisioned my narrator as a whole separate entity from myself.

Analyzing the first of the core values is where I feel room for improvement in my understanding of methods one and two, analyzing mimesis and synthetic registers. When reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I struggled to come up with a value graph for the ongoing conversation that Jackson was expressing through this story. Attempting to sift through Merricat’s madcap rhetoric in order to identify the tug-and-pull of values proved difficult, in addition to trying to map out the progresssive forms that shaped her struggle against the outside world. However, despite my personal challenges faced dissecting the text with certain methods, I was able to identify where signs of these craft conventions could be spotted across a graphic novel (Maus), thrillers (We Have Always Lived in the Castle), comedy (Good Omens), and memoir (Tears of the Silenced).

While I still have much to learn about what it really means to read as a writer, my experiences in this course have definitely affected how I perceive nearly all texts. Something funny that I’ve noticed since this course is that I have a hard time thinking a text is ‘bad’ anymore — more often than not, I’ve started approaching texts more through the intent of rhetorical analysis than how I personally have interpreted the text’s quality. When I was watching Joker with one of my roommates earlier this month, I found myself continuously making commentary about how the writers and directors were guiding the narrative through repetitive forms, and how hermeneutic coding was being interspersed throughout the text to tease out the truth of Arthur’s real parentage. Even at this stage of my development as a reader and writer, lifting the curtain on the projections that I’ve cast onto texts have helped me more critically navigate how writing accomplishes its near-infinite amount of effects on the reader. Thankfully, reading has become a much more laborious experience — and I mean this sincerely. The thrill of being able to articulate why a magazine article rubbed me the wrong way, or how a novel’s word choice has impacted my expectations makes the experience of reading a much more engaging and worthwhile process.

Personally written blog posts

Blog 1: Good Omens

Blog 2: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Blog 3: Maus

Blog 4: Tears of the Silenced

Blog Replies for Maus

Blog 1: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/01/blog-post-one-maus/

Blog 2: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/03/maus-blog-2-form-and-genre/#comments

Blog 4: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/08/maus-blog-4/

Blog Replies for We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Blog 1: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/15/everythings-safe-on-the-moon/#comments

Blog 3: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/split-personality/#comments

Blog 4: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/24/whose-the-narrorator-anyway/#comments

Blog Replies for Good Omens

Blog 2: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/31/save-the-world/comment-page-1/#comment-83

Blog 3: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/05/good-omens-strange-heroes/

Blog 4: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/07/all-knowing-sure-but-all-good/comment-page-1/#comment-85

Blog Replies for Tears of the Silenced

Blog 1: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/12/evil-impact-on-religion/#comments

Blog 2: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/tears-of-the-amish/#comments

Blog 3: https://feelingmyshelfblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/19/misty-griffin-is-not-a-liar/#comments

We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Annotated Bibliography

By John Reilly

Introduction

I have always been told that reading is one of the essential parts of learning to improve your writing. It made enough sense to me–if you read what other people write, you’ll get better. I thought it must be like osmosis, the more you read, the better your writing gets. It seemed automatic. In retrospect, I think I was mostly wrong. After grappling with some of the terms and strategies in the course, more has been illuminated to me about how a writer crafts a piece of writing than I imagined ever would be. I have never been good at analysis (teachers never gave much more direction than analyze), so giving concrete and specific language to each of these strategies, reading for, form and genre, intertextual codes, and rhetoric of narrative, has helped me find my footing.

Section 1: Reading For

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a mystery thriller novel written by Shirley Jackson. The main character and narrator is an eighteen year old girl name Mary Katherine Blackwood, called Merricat by most. She lives with her sister Constance Blackwood and her uncle Julian Blackwood in a large manor in the woods on the outskirts of a village. Although she has an intense hatred for the village, she finds her isolated life with Constance and Julian somewhat idyllic. Still, the poisoning of the Blackwoods years previous still looms over the remaining members of the family and the rest of the village, and the abrupt arrival of their cousin Charles Blackwood threatens to upend Merricat’s little world. She takes increasingly extreme actions to “convince” Charles to leave their home, until she lights a fire in his room and burns the entire top half of their house down. Charles flees, Uncle Julian dies of heart failure, and the villagers come to torment the girls while their life goes up in flames. In the end, Merricat and Constance return to the house and live their lives in an even more complete isolation than before–happily ever after.

In the chapter titled “Structure and Meaning” in his book Story, Robert McKee defines a “Controlling Idea” of a story as “one clear, coherent sentence that expresses a story’s irreducible meaning” with a “value plus [a] cause” (115). The original Controlling Idea we had derived from the text was If you let hatred consume you, you will cause pain for yourself and others. At the time we wrote that Controlling Idea, none of us had actually finished reading the book, so it doesn’t feel quite right anymore. It’s true that Merricat’s hatred for the outside world seems to bring a lot of pain to her family’s doorstep, but is this the story’s “irreducible meaning”? While that pain exists, the final line of the book seems to contradict this Controlling Idea: ‘…Oh, Constance,” I said, “we are so happy.” (Jackson 146). Throughout the novel, Merricat is “chilled” whenever Constance entertains the idea of returning into the outside world, and thus becoming less connected and less available to her (21). Because this possessiveness of Constance and hatred of the village manifests in exactly what Merricant wants, we must rework the Controlling Idea. Maybe it’s closer to this: If you protect the ones you love, you will be happy and safe. If we have a Controlling Idea, according to McKee, implies a Counter-Idea that expresses “the negative dimension of [the] Controlling Idea.” (118). The negative dimension to this Controlling Idea could be something like: If you allow the ones you love be controlled by others, they will abandon you. Given this context, it makes sense why Merricat would set a fire in order to banish Charles. From the point of view of this controlling value, she must get rid of Charles, or else her way of life and her relationship with Constance will be destroyed.

Originally, I had submitted Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House as one of our books for this semester. One of our group members had already read that book, though, so we settled on We Have Always Lived in the Castle instead. A few of us had also read Shirley Jackson’s famous short story The Lottery in middle or high school, but it was distant enough in my own memory that I mostly forgot about the darkness present in her style of writing. So when I started reading, I was “reading for” an intriguing mystery and not much more. In the first few pages of the novel, I found it very difficult to trust or connect with Merricat at all. As I said in my first blog about this novel, Merricat’s capacity for hatred troubled me. She constantly wishes death upon the villagers while she interacts with them, imagining them “lying there crying with pain and dying.” (9). When Jim Donell, one of the villagers who Merricat especially hates, jokes about her dead family members and then laughs in her face, I finally understood her hatred, but I still found myself resistant to the text. I felt that Merricat was hiding some crucial piece of information to the story, and her seeming disinterest in solving the mystery of “who killed the Blackwoods?” implicated her as unreliable from the first few chapters.

On my first read through of the book, and before discussing it with my group members, the ending confused me. I wasn’t sure why the book continued past the revelation of Merricat’s murders, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about her and Constance’s new sheltered existence in what remained of their home. Until we read closely, I was left reeling.

Section 2: Form and Genre

In “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters”, Jane Gallop defines a reading strategy called “close reading” principally as ‘looking at what is actually on the page, reading the text itself, rather than some idea “behind the text.”’ (7). Essentially, Gallop suggests that the close reader notices the surprising details in a text, and not just those that confirm what the reader already thinks. From the very first pages of the book, I was underlining surprising and strange language choices, ramblings, and non-sequiturs. The underlying mystery of the murder of the Blackwoods was there, but it didn’t feel like I was getting the whole story. In writing this, I also found myself overwhelmed by the options I had available to me in all of the surprising details. But to eat an elephant, you need to start somewhere.

In the opening paragraph of the novel, Merricat provides a small introduction to herself. Amongst other details, she mentions liking “Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom” (1). At first, I only noted that this was a little strange, possibly incriminating, and nothing more. During Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright’s visit for tea, the Amanita phalloides comes back in the form of a long monologue from Uncle Julian on the poisoning of the Blackwoods.

“She might have made a marmalade of the lovely thornapple or the baneberry, she might have tossed the salad with Holcus lanatus, called velvet grass, and rich in hydrocyanic acid… Or consider just the mushroom family, rich as that is in tradition and deception. We were all fond of mushrooms–my niece makes a mushroom omelette you must taste to believe, madam–and the common death cup–”
Jackson 35

In the chapter “Lexicon Rhetoricae” of his book Counter Statement, Kenneth Burke says “Repetitive form is the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises. It is restatement of the same thing in different ways.” (125). First, the mentioning of the scientific name of a plant, in this case Holcus lanatus, recalls Merricat’s favorite mushroom, Amanita phalloides. This repetition calls back deepens the connection the reader has between Merricat and poison, even though Constance is the subject of the conversation. It makes us think that maybe Constance truly is innocent. This passage also calls something I had previously ignored back up again, another example of repetitive form. In the opening paragraph, the common name for Amanita phalloides is spelled as death cup. I thought at first this was just a quirk of Merricat’s language, or simply a printing mistake. But Uncle Julian repeats this mistake in his own monologue–“the common death cup” (35). So, why is this detail getting repeated? With no context, the first instance of this misspelling means nothing to the reader. But once the reader knows that Merricat and Constance’s parents were killed by “Arsenic in the sugar”, possibly the very same sugar that was served at tea with Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright (when this strange detail gets repeated), they might start to connect those two events. This is a part of what Burke calls syllogistic progression, “the form of a perfectly conducted argument, advancing step by step. It is the form of a mystery story, where everything falls together.” (124). Given Merricat’s mispronunciation of death cap, her aggressiveness at tea with Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright, and then Uncle Julian mentioning recalling the same mispronunciation in reference to the poisoning of the Blackwoods, it is only natural for the reader to believe that Merricat was the poisoner. So when Merricat reveals that it was indeed her that poisoned the Blackwoods, it comes as no (or very little) surprise to the close reader.

In that same meeting with Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright, before they overtly discuss the Blackwood deaths, they discuss if Constance should leave the house and go out into the world. During the conversation, Merricat hears Uncle Julian’s wheelchair and announces to Constance, “Uncle Julian is coming,” (30). Helen Clarke continues on the conversation without even acknowledging she said anything. I would think someone that Helen Clarke described as “eccentric” (26) being announced would at least get a reaction from her. Later in this scene, another similar thing happens. “‘I am going to put up wild strawberries this year,’ Constance said to me. ‘I noticed a considerable patch of them near the end of the garden.’” (36). Again, the non-sequitur is completely ignored. The conversation about the Blackwood murder continues on without even a beat. What we are seeing here is an example of repetitive form. When Constance says something to Mary or vice-versa, it seems to be only heard by them. On that same page: “‘There was a spider in it,’ Constance said to the teapot.” (36). Her statement is ignored once again, but in a more significant way. Uncle Julian says the exact same thing Constance just said, as if he didn’t hear her at all. I believe this is an example of qualitative progressive form, as the phrase has been repeated with a difference. This happens again on the next page with the same phrase, “Constance said to the teapot.” (37). What is going on here? Are the sisters simply being ignored in favor of a more interesting exchange with Uncle Julian, or are they actually not being heard by anyone else? If they can’t be heard, how is this possible?

Section 3: Intertextual Codes

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is dripping with mystery from the very beginning. The story seems to be driven by the question Who killed the Blackwoods? In the chapter “Re-Writing the Classic Text” in her book The Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman says that the hermeneutic code “provides not only the agency by which a mystery is first suggested and later resolved, but a number of mechanisms for delaying our access to the desired information” (257). If we look at the mystery of the Blackwoods’ murders, we can see it maps quite well onto the hermeneutic code. Merricat’s visit to the village represents the thematization that “simultaneously defines the central character and establishes that there is an enigma” (Silverman 258). The enigma becomes formulated during the visit from Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright, and Uncle Julian is constantly requesting answers about the enigma from Constance. Finally, the enigma is fully disclosed when Merricat says she is going to poison people’s food, like “the way [she] did before.” (Jackson 110). Or was it?

The disclosure of this mystery comes over 30 pages before the end of the novel, and those pages are some of the most strange and mysterious in the entire book. After the house burns, things move so quickly and without the relative coherence that the rest of the novel contained that I could hardly keep up. The reader is then left at the end with the two sisters holed up in the half burnt and overgrown house, feared by the villagers so much that they leave offerings on their doorstep to appease them. I can’t help but wonder at this point: what the hell is happening? If, through the hermeneutic code, the mystery has been resolved, why is the reader left confused? The only answer is that, if the enigma of the Blackwood murders has been solved and we still crave answers, then that is not the central enigma of the story.

There is a certain duality to the characters of Constance and Merricat, as Emma originally said in her blog post Split Personality. One agoraphobic but motherly, and the other hateful and domineering but incredibly loyal. But what if these sisters were not just two sides of the same symbolic coin, but actually two people contained in one mind? What if the enigma of the truth of the sisters’ identities is the central enigma of the story (or maybe a dual mystery), and not the Blackwood murders? If we treat this as the case, it seems that the hermeneutic code still maps quite well to this mystery, though not as obviously. We can look back to the first paragraph of the novel for our first bit of thematization of this mystery, when Merricat says that “with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf” (1). Silverman says “[Barthes] suggests that the cultural codes function not only to organize but to naturalize that field–to make it seem timeless and inevitable.” (274). Werewolves are a part of a cultural and symbolic code that represents the duality of humanity. From the opening lines, Merricat expresses this connection with duality, a definite thematization of the enigma to come.

Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright’s visit to the Blackwood home can represent equivocation, or the combination of “a snare and a truth” (Silverman 261). As explored in the Form and Genre section, it seems as though Merricat and Constance can talk to each other without being heard by others, and Merricat is hardly referenced at all by Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright, and not at all (in the present tense) by Uncle Julian. It’s almost as if, for them, she’s not there at all until she interrupts Constance. We could interpret this as Merricat simply being out of the way and ignored, or we could see this as Merricat not being physically there, and just inhabiting Constance and speaking through her. We get another equivocation, combined with a possible partial answer on page 93.

“Mary Katherine died in an orphanage, of neglect during her sister’s trial for murder. But she is of very little consequence to my book, and so we will have done with her.”

“She is sitting right here.” Charles waved his hands, and his face was red.
Jackson 93

This can be, again, read in two ways. The obvious way to read this passage is that Uncle Julian has gone a bit senile, and Charles is simply incredulous that Uncle Julian is so unaware of his surroundings. The other way, and what can be read as a partial answer to our mystery, is that Uncle Julian is telling the truth. Mary Katherine Blackwood really did die in an orphanage while Constance was on trial, and she really isn’t sitting there with them. It is possible that Charles is simply humoring Constance’s split personality just so he can inherit their family’s fortune. As far as I can tell, there is no moment of complete disclosure for this mystery. We, the readers, are left to, first, notice the mystery at all, then piece it together through equivocations and partial disclosures. But, if the story’s central enigma is something of this magnitude, why is it that almost no one (save Uncle Julian) directly addresses the mystery?

The cultural code that prevents most of the characters from addressing Constance and Merricat’s dual identity is a fear of acknowledging people with mental health issues. The villagers either walk on eggshells around Constance/Merricat, like Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright, or they treat them as if they are monsters. These two attitudes are represented perfectly by the villagers attacking and taunting Constance and Merricat as their house burns down, and then the fear and reverence the villagers treat them with after they exile themselves. They can never explicitly address this duality because they either hate or fear them for it, and no one ever stops to actually understand them.

Section 4: Rhetoric of Narrative

In “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences”, Peter J. Rabinowitz defines an ideal narrative audience as the audience that “believes the narrator, accepts his judgements, sympathizes with his plight, laughs at his jokes even when they are bad.” (134). Essentially, the ideal narrative audience simply accepts the narrator’s version of the narrative without question. In this novel, it is hard to imagine being part of the ideal narrative audience. Merricat’s hateful imagination and strange superstitious actions make her very difficult to relate to or believe unconditionally. In the beginning of the novel, I found that I could somewhat relate to Merricat’s hatred of the village, but it became harder and harder to entertain the ideal narrative audience as time went on. Although I could not personally get myself to become a member of the ideal narrative audience, one of the characters in the story can show us what it might be like. By the end of the novel, Constance has completely submitted to Merricat’s narrative. She accepts everything Merricat says, and seems to almost under her control.

“I am so happy,” Constance said at last, gasping. “Merricat, I am so happy.”

“I told you that you would like it on the moon.”
Jackson 145

In the course of the novel, Constance is also the ideal narrative audience to another narrator–Charles Blackwood. As he influences Constance, she becomes more distant and cold to Merricat, removing herself completely from her ideal audience.

Constance was working in her garden and Uncle Julian slept in his chair in the sun, and when I sat quietly on the bench Constance asked, not looking up at me, “Where have you been Merricat?

“Wandering. Where is my cat?”

“I think,” Constance said, “that we are going to have to forbid your wandering. It’s time you quieted down a little.”
Jackson 81

Charles Blackwood himself is not a part of Merricat’s ideal narrative audience. He, in fact, seems very resistant to her narrative. He does not seem to submit to Constance either, though. When Charles is introduced, he says that “[his] father left nothing” for him in the way of wealth after he recently died (Jackson 63). Uncle Julian makes no secret of the great wealth their family has left, so it is probable that Charles came to the Blackwood manor to get some of their fortune. This means he is part of the narrative audience, which is the “audience [that] is called upon to judge [the narrator]”, and he is free to question Merricat’s narrative, but still play into it when it benefits him. This way, Charles can string along Constance to get access to her wealth, while still no completely submitting to the narrative that they are separate individuals.

Conclusion

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is an amazing novel. Even after writing this annotated bibliography, I don’t find myself sick of it. Although it is only 146 pages, it feels much longer (in a good way). It is an extremely dense and rich text that I’m sure you could analyze for years. The novel was rife with unreliable narration, strange and surprising details, and opposing forces subtly battling for supremacy. I’m not even close to understanding the full extent of this novel’s complexity, but I feel as though I’m much closer to understanding than I ever would have been without this class or my other group members in Feeling Myshelf. Now, I am going to go see just how awful this movie adaptation is.

Reflection

Writing Arts core value 1 states: “Writing Arts students will demonstrate understanding of a variety of genre conventions and exhibit rhetorical adaptability in applying those conventions.” The main genre we wrote within in this class, blog posts, was entirely new to me, so the entire class was an exercise in learning a new genre. When our group first started to write in this style, we really had no idea how to formulate the information we needed to fit into our blog posts. But, over time and with the help of my group members, I learned to operate within the genre and use the language that was expected.

In my first blog post, the second blog of Maus, I explored how the graphic memoir breaks the conventions of a typical biography.

Vladek frequently berates and belittles his wife for spending money (Spiegelman 136), and Art seems to only care about getting his father’s story. This is especially apparent when he interrupts his father and yells “Enough! Tell me about Auschwitz!” (Spiegelman 207). These moments pulled me out the mimesis, and caused that discomfort I mentioned. In order to push past the discomfort, I had to ignore the things that caused it (as Art had to in continuing through his father’s story). This is part of what challenges what Kenneth Burke calls the conventional form of the biography genre.

In that first post, I struggled to actually use the language of the methodological texts, although I did use it a little bit. Over the course, I grappled with that language more and more, actually trying to understand and use it as the new genre demanded. I still think I have a long way to go in my knowledge and use of many genre conventions, but I think this class gave me a good start.

Writing arts core value 2 states: “Writing Arts students will understand theories of writing and reading and be able to apply them to their own writing.” I feel as though this exemplifies one of the struggles of the entire course. The methodological texts we read were often dense and difficult to understand. Readings like “Re-Writing the Classic Text” in The Subject of Semiotics by Kaja Silverman exemplify this. When I first went through this reading, I took extensive notes but really didn’t understand it much. I had definitions written out and remembered, but no real way to access the meaning behind those definitions. I had no idea how the semic, hermeneutic, and proairetic codes fit into the symbolic and cultural, and I had no idea how to map any of them onto a text. Through experimenting with the terms in the methodological texts, I gained a better understanding. I think this is demonstrated in the final blog post I wrote, Misty Griffin is Not a Liar, where I extensively used and interweaved the terms from “Re-Writing the Classic Text”.

The ideas of outsider/insider and isolated/connected implicit in the previous quotation call forth the symbolic code. The symbolic code is defined by the “formulation of antithesis” or the “articulation of binary oppositions”, such as the connotations of night/day or good/evil. The symbolic codes of isolation/connectivity, outsider/insider, and religious freedom/oppression influence how Griffin sees those who failed to stop her abuse, and how we view the Amish within our cultural code, which “articulates” the “structuring oppositions” of symbolic codes. Griffin’s isolation (lack of connection to the outside), her status as an insider to Amishness (and thus opposition to outsiders), and her parents’ religious freedom to practice as they wish (and thus oppress and abuse their daughters) creates her cultural code which damns the Amish and their patriarchal structure.

Writing arts core value 3 states: “Writing Arts students will demonstrate the ability to critically read complex and sophisticated texts in a variety of subjects.” I believe this core value is exemplified both by our reading 5 very different books throughout the semester, and grappling with the method of close reading with all of those texts. As Professor Kopp has said, we have been trained throughout our educations to do the exact opposite of close reading. Get in, get the main idea, get out. To train myself to slow down and actually look at each individual word on the page was, and continues to be, very difficult. My brain has been wired to understand then reinforce the dominant reading of the text, and nothing more. But with practice, I’ve been able to slow myself down, and closely and ethically read these texts, which I think is necessary to understand complex and sophisticated texts on all subjects. I think my ability to closely read was shown in my reply to Matt’s blog post, Us vs. Them.

In the second chapter, villagers Helen Clarke and Lucille Wright come to visit the Blackwood home for tea. While they discuss if Constance should leave the house and go out into the world, Merricat announces to Constance that she can hear Uncle Julian. The text reads, “‘Uncle Julian is coming,’ I said to Constance.” (Jackson 30). Then Helen Clarke continues on the conversation without even acknowledging she said anything. I would think someone that Helen Clarke described as “eccentric” (Jackson 26) being announced would at least get a reaction from her. Later in this scene, another similar thing happens. “‘I am going to put up wild strawberries this year,’ Constance said to me. ‘I noticed a considerable patch of them near the end of the garden.’” (Jackson 36). Again, the non-sequitur is completely ignored.

Because of this class, I have become a more capable reader, and have seen the strategies I’ve learned bleed into my writing. I have become more aware of what meaning each sentence and word I write creates for my reader, and how that influences the overall text. I have also learned that my writing will not improve simply through osmosis, but that I will have to work at it constantly, and continue to build upon and improve what I have already learned.

Works Cited

Hall AB Maus

When I entered this class I knew that you had to read a lot in order to be a successful writer. A high school teacher once told me that I had to read in my genre in order to excel in my genre. For months I would read anything and everything within the Romance genre. When I walked into How Writers Read I expected it to be like a book club. I was really excited to spend months leafing through Sophie Kinsella, Jane Austin, and Nicholas Sparks. I imagined that it would be akin to my English class where I would learn how to read through texts by analyzing an author’s form and technique.

It’s almost laughable to see how wrong I was.

After reading Demian I realized that my group didn’t like romance too much. I originally wanted to read I Heart New York by Lindsey Kelk which is a story of a woman who goes to New York, gets a total makeover, a new job and of course falls in love. It sounds like heaven to me but, I know that my group would have been polite but secretly bored by the novel. I decided that my group would be more interested in my second favorite genre-graphic novels.

Part One-Reading For

I learned about Art Spiegleman’s novel Maus through a beloved British Youtuber who was gifted the book nearly four years ago. Since January 8th, 2014 this book has been on my Goodreads to be read shelf. Although the book was focused on a heavy topic I knew that this would be the perfect “light reading” that could allow me to focus on rhetorical analysis.

Going into Maus I expected a clear cut story about a family understanding each other through recounting tragedy. The graphic novel is a memoir about Art’s father telling his story about surviving Auschwitz and recounting memories of the Holocaust. Art works as a deuteragonist who attempts to make sense of his father’s stories. The most exciting twist of the novel is that certain groups of people are portrayed as animals. Within the text Jewish people are portrayed as mice, Germans (predominantly Nazis within the story) are portrayed as cats, the French as frogs and so on. Because of the innovative storytelling and the premise I was looking for a clean-cut take on the Holocaust. Nazis are bad, the Holocaust was horrible and we have to prevent events like this from ever happening again. This isn’t to say that I was looking for the Hallmark version of the Holocaust but, I wanted more closure from the story than what I was left with.

In Mckee’s Structure and Meaning, he describes a controlling idea as an “ idea {that} may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes a change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.” (Mckee 116). In other words, a controlling idea is something that shifts the story from one principle to another by the end of the text.

One of the strongest controlling values within the text is honesty. My conflict while analyzing the book is the extent that I could believe Vladek’s recount of the Holocaust. As readers, we know that Vladek went to Auschwitz and lived through the Holocaust. However, Art makes a point to know that Vladek’s memory is faulty. This is shown through Art challenging the amount of time that he was in the Holocaust as well as small details that Art notices to be untrue. In fact, the narrative ends with Vladek calling Art by the wrong name calling into question if any part of the story can be taken with 100% accuracy.

I also was perplexed to see that Vladek’s racism was left in the novel as well. There’s a scene in the book that had Art picking up an African American hitchhiker. Vladek immediately clenches up and starts swearing racial slurs in Hebrew when the man is picked up. Art’s wife acts as the audience and reacts harshly against Art’s racism. Wouldn’t a man who survived the Holocaust be sure to not villainize a group of people?

I was confused until I realized that leaving this section into the story allowed Art to tell a rounded version of his father’s tale. Vladek was a Holocaust survivor and a racist. These traits are not mutually exclusive. Despite muddling the reader’s relationship to Vladek Art achieves his purpose in making his controlling value more known: you have to tell the whole truth in order to accurately tell someone’s story.

Part Two-Form and Genre

I wasn’t acquainted with the form of writing that involves a graphic memoir before this text. I knew that the conventions of a graphic novel is to get a story across with the aid of pictures and a memoir is to inform the reader about a person’s life events. Going into the narrative I felt like I wanted to be attached to Vladek and Art. I read another book The Unwanted: Stories of Syrian Refugees by Don Brown that was a graphic memoir about a month after I put down Maus. It depicted struggles of Syrian Refugees and was used as a call for readers to aid refugees in any way that they could.

The Syrian refugees were portrayed as sympathetic and one-dimensionally good. This was very different from the portrayal of Vladek. However, the formula of telling the story was almost identical. Within Maus Art strives to tell the story in the most straightforward way in order to achieve a direct purpose within the novel. This concept is called, syllogistic progression it “is the form of a perfectly conducted argument, advancing step by step…given certain things, certain things must follow, the premise is forcing the conclusion.” (Burke124). In other words, the author is meant to goad you into a reading of the novel. When I first read the novel I ended up disliking Vladek (despite feeling bad for him) and dislike Art (with a little less sympathy).

On my second run around with the novel, I realized that I had the wrong idea about Art’s intentions with the novel. Art wanted his father’s story to be human. He wasn’t trying to cater to an audience for people who wanted a simple Holocaust story but rather an honest one. He wanted to humanize the event by giving a character that was human instead of a stereotypical Holocaust survivor.

I realized this after realizing that there was parallel storytelling within the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Art establishes the fact that his father and he are not very close. However, Art was closer to his mother who committed suicide some years ago. Art muses during the novel that he wishes that his mother was still alive because he would interview his mother rather than his estranged father.

Art realizes that his mother had written diaries throughout the Holocaust and a little bit after the war. Art is ecstatic and asks his father about the diaries. However, Art is answered with a nasty surprise.

On first reading I was frustrated. Vladek destroyed his wife’s diaries even after she wrote, “I wish my son when he grows up, he will be interested in this.” (Spiegelman 151). This leaves the reader into a bias against Vladek. I could understand Art could be so estranged to a father who was so careless. Why would I feel bad for someone who destroyed his son’s only connection to his deceased mother? The answer was found in the next installment of Maus when Art asks for portraits of Vladek’s family.

Vladek’s family was killed because of the war. As he goes through the pictures and memories of his family we see him looking despondent. Despite Vladek being portrayed as a mouse, he has a human quality of despondence about him. One characteristic about Vladek that I realized is that he doesn’t dwell on things. A syllogistic reading of the text would lead you to believe that after years of mourning after his family Vladek snapped. Perhaps his destroying Art’s mother’s journals was an act of kindness and not selfishness. Perhaps destroying his late wife’s journals was the only way to spare Art of heartache. After all, she committed suicide. Maybe some of her darkest secrets should remain just that–secrets.

Part Three-Intertextual Codes

It’s important to note that the idea of truth within the text follows the hermeneutic code which is described as, “…the desire for closure and “truth.”. This code provides not only, “..the agency whereby a mystery is first suggested and later resolved, but a number of mechanisms for delaying our access to the desired information.” (Silverman 21). The real mystery of the novel surrounds the main character Vladek. How much of his story is factual? Why is he the way that he is? We, as readers, realize that he isn’t a reliable narrator isn’t a kind person and we don’t have a reason to relate to him at all.

As I returned to the novel I realized that Art left clues within the second book to humanize his father. The first instance is on page 64 that showcases why Vladek is so stingy with his money and refusing to throw out broken items. When I first read the novel I was perplexed at Art’s choice to portray his father as stingy because it’s a Jewish stereotype. However, I realized that Vladek and his wife’s survival of the Holocaust were credited to his resourcefulness. While in Auschwitz Vladek would barter food for favors, quit smoking so he could trade cigarettes and would pick up trades just to send food to his wife. In order to survive Vladek had to learn how to be frugal. It’s hard to imagine changing the habit after he was able to survive the Holocaust.

In other words, the cultural code for survival within the Holocaust was to be frugal. Vladek watched people die because of their hunger and even saw a woman beaten and killed because she dropped her soup. Living within a stressful environment and having to change yourself in order to survive within a dangerous environment.

Part Four-Rhetoric of Narrative

There is a brief period within the novel where Art writes about his inability to continue the story. The characters are no longer depicted as animals but are humans wearing animal masks. Art uses this humanoid period of the novel to describe his reaction to criticism within the first publication of Maus. This reception plays with Rainbowitz’s idea of the author’s intent. He remarks, “Like a philosopher, historian or journalist, he can not write without making certain assumptions about his reader’s beliefs, knowledge, and familiarities of conventions. His artistic choices are based upon these assumptions, conscious, or unconscious and to a certain extent, his artistic success will depend on the accuracy.” (Rainbowitz 126). Art receives constant criticism after publication because he decided to remain so truthful with his father’s story. Art receives criticism because of his choice to stay so close to his father’s story.

Although I like the idea of a son honoring his father’s story I think Art made a mistake by being “completely honest” in his narrative. Although Art meant to tell his father’s story he didn’t do his father’s justice. He wasn’t ready for people to ask what was the point of telling his father’s story? Was it ethical to portray Vladek is stingy because it’s a stereotype? Is the truth worth leading people to unethical conclusions?

Within the next section of Maus Art works towards humanizing Vladek. Maybe it’s contributed to the fact that Vladek died before the second installment’s publication but, Art does heavy lifting trying to make sure that his father is humanized. As mentioned before, Art’s humanization of Vladek allowed readers to conclude that Vladek’s personality is because of the Holocaust. All of the humanizations of Vladek occurs within the second section of the book. Art is trying to defend his artistic intentions by settling into his audience’s… beliefs, knowledge, and familiarities of conventions. (Rainbowitz 126).

By the end of the story as Art mourns for his father’s death I couldn’t help but understand his sorrow. We, as a reader, begin to understand the complexity of Art and Vladek’s relationship. We are turned from a story of a son trying to understand his father’s life to a mourner finally at peace with a previously severed relationship.

Conclusion

Maus might not be an ethical story nor is it entirely factual but it’s a biography that holds true to the truth of Vladek’s story. At the start of the novel, the reader is greeted with the quote, “The Jews are undeniably a race, but they are not human” by Adolf Hitler. Although the precise allows Art to use mice in order to portray Jewish humans I find that by the end of the novel it’s hard to ignore that the story is entirely human.

Reflection

I had a hard time settling into this class. I didn’t think that you could understand and discuss a book because of a few cultural codes. I won’t lie I still struggle with the concept. I like to blame the fact that because I’m partly an English major I was trained to read a book in a certain way. This class breaks a lot of rules within this type of reading a text. Perhaps it’s simply my cultural code as an English major.

However, I found success in thinking of “reading” the text as looking at patterns and trends rather than directly reading the text. I realized that I could have an easier time analyzing the story when I looked at it as an analyzing genre rather than an overall theme. I asked myself what is the genre of someone who is in Auschwitz and filling in the answers from there instead of solely looking at the text.
I’m grateful to switching a graphic memoir because it lead to my “Eureka!” moment within the class. I realized that I would be challenged by Core Value 3– “Writing Arts students will demonstrate the ability to critically read complex and sophisticated texts in a variety of subjects.”. By the end of this class, I was able to achieve an understanding of genre, particularly a memoir. While reading Tears of the Silenced I was indignant about Misty Griffen’s story. She lied about belonging to a group of people in order to persecute them as a community. When I read the book my first reaction was to slander the text as a whole. Then I realized that as heinous as Griffen was she fit the conventions of a memoir because she told her truth. This is akin to Art telling his truth within Maus. I learned that the conventions of a genre aren’t as black and white as I perceived it. The implications of this are dangerous–that anyone can have their truth cited as fact. In a strange twist to this class, I realized how much power words had.

My Log-

Blog One Blog Post One Maus

Blog Two Who’s the Narrator Anyway?

Blog Three “Good Omens, Strange Heroes”

Blog Four “Tears of the Amish”

Responses to Maus

Blog 2 Form and Genre

Blog 3 Intertextual Codes

Blog 4 Maus Blog 4

Response to We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Blog 1-Everything is Safe on the Moon

Blog 2– Us Vs Them

Blog 3– Split Personality

Responses to Good Omens

Blog 1-But How Does that Make You Feel

Blog 2– Save the World

Blog 4-All-knowing sure, but all good?

Responses to Tears of The Silence

Blog 1-Evil Impact on Religion

Blog 3– Misty Griffin is Not a liar

Blog 4-Sitting in the Seat: How Misty Griffin’s Identity influences her tears of the silence memoir

Sitting in the Seat: How Misty Griffin’s Identity Influences Her “Tears of the Silenced” Memoir – Matt Berrian

Marketed by Misty Griffin as a survivor’s tale — a memoir recounting the horrific abuses that she has faced at the hands of members within her Amish community — Griffin already possesses a level of sympathetic credibility that will maintain the integrity of her memoir. As James Phelan describes in his “Living to Tell About It” essay, there is a powerful mechanism of narration that relies on the cultural narratives surrounding the implied author. Cultural narratives create a sense that the author is “a larger collective entity” or “at least some significant subgroup of society” rather than an individual with unique defining characteristics (Phelan). First and foremost, Griffin recalls the cultural narrative behind the sexual assault victim — a youth at the time of her abuse, held captive by the restrictive expectatons of her community and the power imbalance between her and her abuser. On top of this, Griffin’s story taps into a cultural narrative surrounding the tension between religious freedom and secular intervention. The latter of these two most prominent cultural narratives creates the context for how Griffin’s Amish abusers were able to evade government interference due to their protected legal status as a religious minority in the United States. In order for Misty Griffin’s memoir to land with her ideal audience they must immediately agree that:

Her status as a victim is an inherent badge of credibility.
Culturally segregated religious communities such as the Amish must have some sort of dark underbelly, because they exist outside the realm of government jurisdiction.

The second bullet-point also connects to an even more significant cultural narrative in the United States about the ethical dilemmas faced when there is ‘too much’ government involvement in every-day lives versus there being ‘too little’ government involvement when it may actually be needed. Without even opening the book, Tears of the Silenced’s sub-heading already begs its potential audience to follow these cultural narratives about abuse survivors, religious freedoms, and government oversight: “A true crime and an American tragedy; severe child abuse and leaving the Amish” (Griffin).

A “true crime”? What other narrative style is so immediately drenched in scandal and intrigue? But the scandalous can only be created by breaking some kind of value that the ideal audience should share, which could therefore be: “an American tragedy”. Distinctly American, it seems, for the next clause tugs on values which are arguably fundamental to the American identity — “severe child abuse” and the defiant “leaving the Amish” as an assumed cause and effect for the aforementioned child abuse. At stake in this second half of the subheading are the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (victimized children) and the separation of church and state is inherently moral and fair (leaving the Amish as if the Amish caused this child abuse; as if government intervention could have saved this child from harm; and as if unregulated religious communities actually put an individual’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at risk rather than protecting these rights).

And beyond all of this, Misty Griffin’s narrative also benefits from an assumed given within the genre that she is operating in — that non-fiction narrators are identical to their authors, and that these narrators/authors are only writing this story to tell the truth. Trying to define what really is truth versus what it is not would be too significant of a diversion, but for the sake of this present conversation, I believe that the assumption behind non-fiction authors always telling the truth can be reinterpreted as: “non-fiction authors will narrate these events to the best of their ability, writing what they feel to be true, and being honest about their memories behind what really happened.” There will always be a level of deception at play in non-fiction, but the ideal audience of a non-fiction writer (from my perspective) will often enter the piece trusting that the author is not going to intentionally deceive their readers, and that any deception within the narrative will only come about via the fallibility of human memory and the inherent limited perspective that only a single set of eyes can glean from experiencing any given situation. This works to further bolster Misty Griffin’s authorial credibility — to her ideal audience, her memoir is really just a well-crafted, confessional diary entry wherein the catharsis of emotional expression is the only ‘goal’ behind the writing.

Drawing on Phelan once more, it is important to keep in mind that the author and narrator cannot be exactly the same person, even in “autobiographical narrative” such as Tears of the Silenced. The “I” narrator can often shift in perspective from their current to their past self, diluting the idea that the narrator and author always share the same voice and values (Phelan). The assumption that the narrator and author in nonfiction are always the same allows Misty Griffin to tug at the values underpinning the cultural narratives that this memoir relies on to convey meaning. At the age of ten, Misty and her family uproot themselves to live on a desolate mountain in eastern Washington, isolated and shut-in on their new farm. Misty and her sister are put to work non-stop to prepare the new house and land for winter, all while her newly converted mother and step-father beat the children for not following Amish traditions closely enough. Worked to the bone, “all ten” of Misty’s toes are “bloody” from her labor, but her mother “was not worried about getting in trouble for her neglect” (41). As Misty summarizes, “The Amish act and the clothes served her well and no one seemed to question that I might be abused” (41). It is worth noting here that Misty is ten years old at this point in the narrative, and that she claims several times throughout the novel that her critical bias against the Amish began in her late teens. And yet, the ten-year old child indicts her mother’s Amish “act” as a performative and pathetic shield to hide her cruelty behind.

Here is where the incongruence between author and narrator can be used to highlight how the implied author is attempting to communicate values to her authorial audience. Should page 41 have been written as purely autobiographical, the ten-year old Misty Griffin would have had no inkling that her parents were Amish ‘frauds’ who used the security of religious freedom to mask their abuse and legal offenses. It is only from the present-day Misty Griffin that this insight shines through. Why, then, would present-day Griffin interject her narrative with an observation out of sequence from the chronology of real-life events? To make an assumption myself, I would argue that this is Misty Griffin wrinkling her own narrative to craft a larger indictment against the Amish community and the notion of their inherent innocence. As an implied author, I view Misty Griffin as an embittered woman looking to enact justice on the community that so gravely wronged her by galvanizing mainstream American culture into tearing down the belief that religious freedom should also equal legal immunity. Being a victim of abuse, Misty holds a power over her implied and actual audiences — whether or not the reader is able to say that they stand with Misty and other victims of abuse hinges on the implicit demand that readers should also agree to believe that religious freedoms help shape patriarchal oppression, and that the former must be devalued for the latter to lose control.

Me Too marchers move along Hollywood Blvd Sunday to end sexual harassment in the workplace. The #Metoo movement has empowered girls, women and other sexual abuse victims to share their stories of abuse. ( Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

The pressure to fall in-line with Misty Griffin’s own bias is strong, given the cultural narratives that structure this memoir. As twenty-first century Americans, waves of social pushback against patriarchal oppression such as the #MeToo movement have created a mainstream awareness of the dangers behind turning a blind eye to systemic abuse. Who would want to feel like they are giving power to the abusers of society by not completely believing in everything that an abuse victim has to say? This pressure — which creates an ethical dilemma — pushes readers to follow Griffin’s narrative unquestioningly, trusting her every word as the first, last, and only witness to her story. Undoubtedly this unwavering trust also encourages the ideal audience to take her word on potentially questionable values laced within the narrative, such as the amorality of the Amish as a religious community, and the idea that her experiences should inform the readers with all they need to know about the issues faced by Amish people who challenge their community’s expectations.

Misty Griffin is Not a Liar

In our group’s conversations about Misty Griffin and her book Tears of the Silenced, there was always an undercurrent of distrust of her story. Because she blames the society in which “Amish rules outweigh any form of crime” for the abuse she endured and the hands of a few individuals, some members of our group felt that she was being discriminatory and reductive (13). I think this might be due, at least in part, to a cognitive dissonance which we experience when reading this book. What we already know about the Amish in our culture clashes with the horrible misogyny and abuse we are witness to in the book, and we cannot reconcile the two. We don’t want to believe the structure of Amish society could be perpetuating these awful things, so we have to believe that Griffin is a liar or a discriminator.

In the chapter “Re-Writing the Classic Text” in The Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman defines five codes, which “manifest themselves through connotation” and “represent a sort of bridge between texts” (239). Silver defines the semic code as functioning “by grouping a number of signifiers”, or words, “around either a proper name, or another signifier which functions temporarily as if it were a proper name,” (251). A proper name that is signified around in Tears of Silenced is, of course, Amish. Early on in the book, our cognitive dissonance about the Amish is summarized in a section about the general public’s failure to stop Griffin’s mother’s abuse. “The Amish act and the clothes served her well and no one seemed to question that I might be an abused.” (42). In this sentence, the proper name ‘Amish’ is signified by the clothes they wear, and the lack of questioning of their lifestyle by outsiders. Amishness (and other belief systems like it) is in part characteristic of a fear or a lack of will to stop abuse, according to this sentence.

Interestingly, this quotation on page 42 also articulates the opposite cultural code, which is at the core of our group’s disagreement on the efficacy of Griffin’s view of the Amish. By describing her and her parents’ way of life as an “Amish act”, Griffin implies that how they live is not, in fact, true Amishness. What we believe about the Amish in our cultural codes is structured by our status as outsiders in the symbolic code. Because we enjoy the quality of their goods and are not privy (because we are outsiders) to the isolation, strictness, and possible abuse their societies are built on, we may view their way of life as quaint and harmless, and, by consequence, see the Amishness that Griffin describes as not true Amishness. When our cultural code clashes with Griffin’s, we may get upset. “Why is she blaming the Amish,” we might ask, “when it was the stepfather and the Bishop that abused her?” Here, we have made the mistake of believing that, as Jonathan Culler fights against in “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative”, that solely the “events [of a story], conceived as prior to and independent of their discursive representation, determine meanings” (173). Griffin is not blaming the Amish for her abuse because people who were Amish abused her (cause->effect->meaning). Griffin blames the Amish because what it means to be Amish allowed and encouraged people to abuse her, and let her abuse go unchecked from the outside (meaning->cause->effect). As Culler writes, “Here meaning is not the effect of a prior event but its cause.” (174).

Tears of the Amish

Tears of the Silenced by Misty Griffin is a memoir about Griffin’s severe abuse underneath the Amish religious system. The novel begins with Griffin reporting her sexual abuse against her Bishop. She then descends into her childhood and the sexual assault and physical abuse that occurred throughout her childhood. Misty’s stepfather continuously blames her abuse on the Amish system even though the Griffin family is not Amish. I found myself aware that Griffin wanted me to read the story as a triumphant story about surviving abuse and an expose about the Amish for their abusive behavior. If this was a typical memoir I would be strapped into my seat ready to read Griffin’s story. There’s only one problem.

Griffin was abused by her stepfather. Not the Amish.

This isn’t to take away the fact that Griffin had a horrific childhood. She’s an abuse survivor and should be respected as such. However, I had issues knowing that Mistry was not Amish. In fact, Misty admitted herself that she didn’t join the Amish until years after the abuse started. Her stepfather “converts” them to the Amish culture and blames his behavior on the Amish despite not belonging to the community until later in life.

I found myself repulsed by Misty and her book. It seemed xenophobic and attacked a group of people who, for the most part, are harmless in society. It reminded me too much of racial scapegoating that took place during times in history such as the Holocaust and the Jim Crow era.

However, as a memoir, Misty hits the key points that allow the genre to exist. Misty has a story that is worthy of being told. Who wouldn’t want to read a story that has the tagline, “Surviving Severe Child Abuse, Sexual Assault and Leaving the Amish Church. A gripping true story that takes you on the journey of a child abuse and sexual assault survivor turned activist.”. Misty’s detailed account showcases an emotional drama. Akin to “A Child Called It” the writing doesn’t matter within the story but, what you have to say matters. In other words, tragedy sells. But that’s showbiz baby!

Do I like what Misty has to say? No. I actually hate it. But, she remains in the convention for a memoir that traditionally relies on emotion and the recount of an author’s life events. No matter how misconstrued these facts may be. The importance lies within the fact that Misty can view these events as factual and formative for her. Within her account, Misty survived this abuse and became an activist who speaks against the Amish. Therefore Misty’s memoir can only be questioned within ethical dilemmas rather than legitimacy within a genre.

Evil impact on Religion

Tears of the Silenced by Misty Griffin is the true story of an isolated and abusive girlhood. Griffin recounts the details of a life of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and her redemptive re-entry into modern society. It is a story ultimately about the triumph, as Griffin transforms from the victim to the victim’s advocate. Before reading the novel, I had predicted the book would be about similar abuse many people may see and hear within the Catholic community. However, I was very wrong. The book begins right off with horrific trauma Griffin suffered as a two year old, falling witness to her own brother’s abuse in her home when their father kidnapped him and took him away to Kansas. Tears of the Silenced continues to follow a trail of abuse and neglect throughout Griffin’s life way before she even steps foot into the Amish Community. It is a very easy read, but with the tragic topics it covers, it became difficult to move on with the story of her life. Due to these topics and the easiness of the read, the author became a trustworthy one, with the question lying behind it, “who could ever lie about such serious events?”

Tears of the Silenced - Audiobook

Unlike in the last novel, Good Omens, readers are not “lulled” into being a submissive reader, they are forced into as tragedy after tragedy awaits for Griffin. Griffin employs the use of pathos as an “artistic proof” to have her readers dive into the story. Authors use pathos to invoke sympathy from an audience; to make the audience feel what what the author wants them to feel. The common use for these proofs are for persuasive essays, however in Grrifin’s case, the readers are swayed into believing every word she puts on paper. Because of this, as readers, we are also become just as her, during her early life. We become hopeful when Aunty Laura comes to visit, we become despondent when Griffin gets back into the truck with Brian when she tries to escape her own hell, we enjoy the little things Griffin enjoys such as selling crafts in town. As McKee says, “Expressing an idea, in the sense of exposing it, is never enough. The audience must not just understand; it must believe” (page 133). Griffin excels at making her audience believe in her story.

This novel was unlike any True Crime memoirs I have ever read, I was even surprised to see it in the section at Barnes and Nobles. I wouldn’t expect such a controversial topic to be in the True Crime genre. Right away it is very clear that this book did belong in this section after reading just the first ten pages. Tears of the Silenced touches on the topics of pure evil in the world, is anyone born evil or do their surroundings make them evil? A better way to describe evil would be to enact truly horrific acts upon another person, just as the Amish community and Griffin’s parents

do throughout the novel. The premise surrounding this novel would be what constitutes as an explanation for performing such horrible crimes? The novel circulates between religion relies on traditional values to stay relevant and to continue to have its own freedom but on the opposite side, t

hese traditional values are used as an excuse to execute these horrible crimes.

All-Knowing, Sure, But All-Good?

Good Omens, written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, has possibly the strongest narrative voice I have ever experienced in a novel. That is to say, the narrator’s voice was extremely present in the text. In reference to the confusing situation that led up to the antichrist accidentally being misplaced, the narrator says, “The text will be slowed down to allow the sleight of hand to be followed.” (Gaiman and Pratchett 30). The narrator both references that you, the reader, are reading the text, and is alerting the reader that their style is about to change. Very early on in the novel, it is established that the narrator will have a complicated relationship between the addressees and the actual reader.

In “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences”, Peter J. Rabinowitz defines four types of audiences that encounter a text: actual audience, authorial audience, narrative audience, and ideal narrative audience (Rabinowitz 126-127, 134). The authorial audience is defined as “a specific hypothetical audience” that “the author of a novel designs his work rhetorically for” (Rabinowitz 126). Essentially, the authorial audience is whoever the author is writing to; whoever would understand their work completely. In order to understand this work completely, you need to be either a Briton or very well versed in British culture and humor. There are frequent references to Britain that will likely not be understood by non-Britons. For example, there is a reference to a city called Milton Keynes, which, described in a footnote headed with “Note for Americans and other aliens”, “was built to be a modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.” (Gaiman and Pratchett 50). This is the author(s) recognizing that a large part of their actual audience (Americans) will not have access to the references they are making for the benefit of the authorial audience, and they are trying to bring them in.

Another possible gap between the actual and authorial audience is humor. Simply put, the authorial audience must find the author (and the narrator written by the author) funny. This may be generally true of any authorial audience dealing with a humorous text, but it is heightened to incredible peaks in this Good Omens. Frequently, the narrative is diverted for something that isn’t incredibly relevant to the conflict. Page 124 and half of page 125 is dedicated to describing a paintball game amongst office workers that turns into a real gunfight (Gaiman and Pratchett). While this is relevant to the plot in that moment, not as much detail as is given is needed to get the point across. This section, and many sections in the novel, seem to be elongated or added mostly for humor’s sake. For the most part, I found myself in line with the authorial audience on this. I found this diversions worthwhile and funny. But at times, like with the story of the “Chairman of the Lower Tadfield Residents’ Association”, R. P. Tyler, I just wanted the narrative to move on (Gaiman and Pratchett 387-399). The authorial audience both has to find these diversions funny and worthwhile to the overall story.

The narrative audience, as defined by Rabinowitz, is an “imitation audience which… possesses particular knowledge.” (Rabinowitz 127). The narrative audience, essentially, knows what the narrator is talking about, to an extent. The understand the story. In order to “pretend to be a member of the imaginary narrative audience for which [the] narrator is writing”, we have to have a certain knowledge of the Bible and western history (Rabinowitz 127). While having knowledge of British culture allows the reader to understand some of the humor, this biblical and historical knowledge allows the reader to understand the story on the mimetic level. This does not mean, however, that the narrative audience cannot disagree with the narrator’s assessment of the story, as I sometimes did. I found myself, a few times, wondering why the narrator was focusing on certain events. Like my struggle with the implied author’s focus on humor, I questioned the narrator’s motive in telling the story. Were they trying to relay something they thought was important, or were they just trying to be funny? This doubt of the narrator’s efficacy brings into existence the fourth type of audience.

The “ideal narrative audience accepts uncritically what [the narrator] has to say.” (Rabinowitz 134). The ideal narrative audience, in the case of Good Omens, would simply read the story as a “true” account of how the apocalypse didn’t happen. Something that strikes me (as the narrative but not ideal narrative audience) strangely is the narrator’s complete nonchalance with this nearly world ending story. In the very beginning of the novel, the narrator describes the current religious theories as to the actual age of the Earth. After describing the mysterious and horrifying ways that God works in, they joke that the “Earth’s a Libra” (Gaiman and Pratchett 14). From the start, it is clear that the narrator doesn’t take the possible consequences of the story entirely seriously, or, alternatively, they are very far removed from them. Although I enjoyed the story, and did find it funny, this prevented me from remaining in the ideal narrative audience, and kept me skeptical of the narrator while reading. In “A rhetoric of reading”, James E. Seitz quotes Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, “the implied author of each novel is someone with whose beliefs on all subjects I must largely agree if I am to enjoy his work.” (Seitz 141). Just as the actual reader cannot connect with an implied author’s work if they refuse to accept their beliefs, a narrative audience cannot enter the ideal narrative audience if they do not agree with the narrator’s beliefs and attitudes about the narrative.

Good Omens, Strange Heroes

good-omens-4-700x351

Good Omens is a novel written by Niel Gaimen and Terry Pratchett. Throughout the text, the main characters have to fight to save the world. One of the most prominent aspects of Good Omens is the unlikely friendship between Aziraphale and Crowley and a demon and an angel, respectively. This relationship between metaphorical evil and good is a common theme. This is adjacent to the overall theme of the novel that there is a rather blurred line between what’s good and evil. Rather, the world is split up of the desires and actions and what a being is willing to sacrifice to get to this point.

good-omens-amazon-tennant-sheen-poster-promo

This dynamic between the two characters and the underlying message that there is no good and evil is like the show Invader Zim. Within the show the main character is Zim an Irken invader that came to earth in order to destroy it. Zim like Crowely is less of a mastermind and more of a bumbling creature worried about minuscule details. Crowley is shown to care about little things such as creating discomfort for humans rather than stealing souls. He proudly states, “I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime,”(Gaimen, Pratchett 8). He genuinely believed that this mix up with the phone calls would cause more trouble with London than swaying a Priest or leading other humans to evil.

zim_still_41_wide-8b5d4564bf36d9cb8ac3854a4255f7870dc5fa5c-s800-c85

The difference between the two mediums is that Crowley and Aziraphale understand the earth. In a strange way, they respect humans for their ability to do good and evil respectively. However, Zim is more of a lackluster colonizer. He doesn’t respect humans and doesn’t attempt to. This lack of connection to the earth leads to Zim only begrudgingly saving people rather than as opposed to Crowley and Aziraphale attempts to save the earth.

This purpose of the character is shown in Robert Mckee’s book, he describes character as being,“revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure–the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature” (Mckee 101).” This is evident in Crowley and Aziraphale’s choice to save the earth. This notion is further described as, , “character’s deepest concerns are concealed until the appropriate occasion arises that calls or solicits a choice to be made to cope with the pressure present within an immediate crisis–where things might go one way or another.” (Kopp 1). This section allows the reader to figure out the main character’s intentions or feelings about a topic through how they interact with it.

goodomens_106_19958_2_fnl_1558023351.0

by Matt Berrian

By John Reilly

Introduction

Section 1: Reading For

Section 2: Form and Genre

Section 3: Intertextual Codes

Section 4: Rhetoric of Narrative

Conclusion

Reflection

Works Cited

Book 1: Maus

Book 2: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Book 3: Good Omens

Book 4: Tears of the Silenced