From: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com (aml-list-digest) To: aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Subject: aml-list-digest V1 #169 Reply-To: aml-list Sender: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Errors-To: owner-aml-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Precedence: bulk aml-list-digest Wednesday, October 11 2000 Volume 01 : Number 169 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 09:58:19 -0700 From: "Dorothy Peterson" Subject: Re: [AML] Authors at School Jana, Do you know about PWOC (Professional Writers of Orange County)? They have a web site and you can add yourself to their mailing list (they are not accepting new members for some reason). I'll bet they could help you. I haven't looked in my archive of email to see, but if you do not know about them let me know and I'll conduct a search for some contact information. Dorothy ________ Dorothy W. Peterson http://www.lds-index.org dorothy@lds-index.org Read Dorothy's Novel at: http://www.lds-index.org/windows/windows.htm - ----- Original Message ----- From: jana bouck remy To: Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2000 9:08 AM Subject: [AML] Authors at School > > I've just been put in charge of the Fine Arts assemblies at my son's > elementary school and would like to know how I can incorporate > author visits into our program. Does anyone know if there is a > website that lists authors in a particular area and their assembly > fees? > > Jana Remy > > > > > > > - > AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature > http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2000 20:30:30 PDT From: "Jason Steed" Subject: Re: [AML] What Should the Critic Critique? >I used the word "dictate" broadly and in a loaded fashion, as I set up >the comparison to totalitarian regimes. But the fact is that the critic >_is_ attempting to dictate what he thinks good art should be. The only >reason his dictation is classified as opinion is because we have a First >Amendment and he has no armies at his disposal to enforce it. Can't the >censorship of a totalitarian government be considered a form of >criticism which judges the subject matter the artist chooses? It gets >called censorship because the government has armies to enforce their >critical opinion. To me, that seems the only meaningful difference, if >we allow the subject matter chosen by the artist to be a valid part of >artistic criticism. But subject matter is always a part of criticism--it all depends on where you draw the line delineating "subject matter" (content) from, say, "form." IMO, the two can't be wholly separated, because they inform and shape one another. If I criticize the use of the sonnet form (which is ok, according to you, because it is criticizing the "how" of the art, not the "what"), saying that the material would have been better suited for a ballad or an ode, then I am likewise criticizing the "what"--because writing the "what" with a different "how" will change the "what" and vice versa. And it might be important to point out here--because I'm noticing some confusion--that "criticism" is not altogether the same as "review." Serious criticism of art, literature, film, is far more sophisticated than your average newspaper review (which basically just says "this was good/bad, and here are some basic reasons why"). And almost ALL criticism, throughout literary and artistic history, addresses subject matter in one way or another, almost ALL the time. > > > You are, > > in fact, doing now precisely that which you're abhorring: as a critic of >the > > critic, you are attempting to "dictate" the material a critic can >critique. > > > If the artist is free to write > > about anything, why isn't the critic free to do the same? Art and >criticism > > are not so mutually exclusive, you know... > >The critic isn't free to do what the artist does because an artist and a >critic are two separate occupations. A brain surgeon is not allowed to >to do root canals--it's a different occupation from a dentist, even >though there are overlapping characteristics of the two. An artist is >supposed to create and communicate. A critic is supposed to react and >judge. A critic has no more business telling the artist what to write >about than a judge has any business telling a lawyer what approach to >take in defending a client. The lawyer should be completely free to >choose his approach, and the judge's only duty is to criticize how well >the lawyer does at it. (Or the jury, if it isn't a bench trial.) The >artist should be free to choose whatever subject he wants to write >about, and the critic should only judge how well he wrote about it. I fundamentally disagree with this. Your analogies are false analogies, because they take professions that have little or nothing to do with one another (none of the training for one overlaps with the training for the other), and they compare the relationship between the two with the relationship between two facets of the same profession. Artists and critics are just that--two parts of the same profession. Both center themselves on art, they just come at it from slightly different angles. In fact, I would go so far as to say that serious criticism is another genre of literature (and I'm not alone in this notion--most anthologies of lit will contain excerpts of poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction, and often a portion of the works of nonfiction are works of criticism). Furthermore, serious criticism inspires and influences and shapes entire movements in art (e.g. the Russian formalists and Modernism, or Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Romanticism); and reciprocally, art often motivates and affects and produces new aesthetic theory, or criticism (i.e. readers get creative with how to read a given work in order to get meaning out of it). Separating the two into opposing camps is, frankly, a reductive act that constructs a binary that, along with most binaries, has been and ought to be deconstructed. As I have said before: all art is in some ways critical, and all criticism is in some ways creative. In the end, it's all WRITING (or "literature"). If the artist is free to write about whatever he/she wants, then so is the critic--and you, as a critic OF the critic, are likewise free. I only wish to point out that you're using your freedom to limit the freedom of another. Of course, you will quickly point out that the critic who criticizes subject matter is doing the same thing--and you're right: it all comes down to persuasion. Can the critic convince his audience to agree with what he/she is saying? In your criticism of the critic, my answer is "no"--your arguments for why the critic should be limited in what he/she can write about are not convincing. >If you think otherwise, try this as a critic: no one should write >romance novels, because I think they're silly and irrelevant to life. >See what reaction you get from Barbara Hume and others. Just because I may get a violent reaction from others does not mean I cannot say what I say. Critics have dealt with whole populations disagreeing with them for centuries. You don't want the opinion of the critic to limit the artist, yet you expect the opinion of the artist to limit the critic. It just doesn't work that way. Jason _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com. - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2000 20:01:24 PDT From: "Jason Steed" Subject: Re: [AML] Moral Issues in Art >The truth is, all art does teach something, and all artists >have a message they convey in their art, whether intentionally or >otherwise. The difference is whether the art has one message and one >message only--and that's the one you'd better get to get an A in your >literature class--or whether there are many possible messages at many >levels. 1. I completely disagree that "didactic art" is art that just has one meaning, vs. "good art" which has multi-meanings. Meaning is constructed, subjective, contextual--how could you ever judge a work to only have "one" meaning and then label it didactic? 2. I also completely disagree with the comment about literature classes. There may be profs out there who are stodgy and bent on one particular interpretation of a work, but by and large--especially these days--nobody is so reductive as to believe works have a "right" interpretation, and I do everything in my power to try to convince my students that there's no such thing. >Which message you as the audience get--or even if you create >your own message Rorschach-like in the art that's there--depends >entirely on what level you're at when you approach a work of art. What >makes good art good (or non-didactic) is that the reader is left open to >discover his own message in the art, whether the artist planted a >specific message or not. The reader ALWAYS "creates" meaning in the text. The reader is part of the context in which the text exists, and from which the text gets its meaning. The text cannot have any meaning without the reader (even if the reader is the writer). >God's art has a message, sure. But it's still open-ended because he >doesn't beat us over the head with the message. We are free to detect >whatever message we are able to detect from it. If you don't get that >_Animal Farm_ is about the tyranny of the Soviet Union, you've missed >"the" message. But there are myriad other valuable messages you can get >out of it, even if you miss "the" message. Just because God doesn't beat us over the head with his message does not mean it's open-ended. There are certain things God WANTS us to get. Just because we don't get them, or we're free to ignore them, does not mean they're not there. Our ineptness as readers is not what makes good art "good." On the other hand, it is sometimes our *creativity* as readers that makes a mediocre work better. Jason _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com. - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 13:10:18 EDT From: Pup7777@aol.com Subject: Re: [AML] Writing Groups In a message dated 10/10/00 8:49:35 AM Pacific Daylight Time, glennsj@inet-1.com writes: << Travis Manning wrote: "I'm busting at the seams here wanting to get published, but know I could really use some quality feedback, critiques, mentoring, encouragement. If anyone knows of a quality group in the downtown Salt Lake City area that is allowing new group members . . . please let me know. . ." Travis, I'm not sure how far you are willing to travel, but there is a very active picture book critique group that meets once a month at the Orem library. Rick Walton, Toni Brown, and a number of other published writers are regulars. Let me know if you are interested, and I can give you the particulars! >> I also have a middle grade/ YA critique group in Orem that meets at my house once a month. We don't have the famous professionals as Sharlee's group, but we do have well read members who are serious about the craft. Sharlee, I would love to hear more about your group. What days do you meet? Lisa J. Peck Lisa J. Peck - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 11:03:19 PDT From: "Jason Steed" Subject: [AML] Mormon Writers Reference I know that there are bibliographies out there, but I'm wondering if anyone knows of a reference source on Mormon writers. I was in the university library the other day and found a "Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Catholic American Writing," and I'm looking for something along these lines--information not on Mormon works published, but on the Mormon authors themselves. Any help? Jason _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com. - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 12:31:13 -0600 From: "bwillson01" Subject: Re: [AML] Writing Groups Travis, Have you tried the League of Utah Writers? Look them up on the internet if you're interested. They have a website and a chapter that meets in SLC. PS: Sorry folks, since the end of August I've just been a lurker. I'm back in school, this time to finish! Bill Willson To: Subject: Re: [AML] Writing Groups > Travis Manning wrote: > > "I'm busting at the seams here wanting to get published, but know I could > really use some quality feedback, critiques, mentoring, encouragement. > If anyone knows of a quality group in the downtown Salt Lake City area that > is allowing new group members . . . please let me know. . ." > - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 12:19:48 -0600 From: "J. Scott Bronson" Subject: [AML] J. Scott BRONSON, _Stones_ (Reading) Just a reminder that you are invited to a play reading: Stones: Two Plays About Sacrifice by J. Scott Bronson Provo Theatre Company will present the reading in their theatre which is located on the corner of 100 North and 100 East in Provo at 7:30 pm on the evening of Tuesday, October 10th. Admission is free, and you are invited to attend with anyone you would like to bring with you -- it will be a unique theatrical experience. scott - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 14:53:09 MDT From: "Marianne Hales Harding" Subject: Re: [AML] HUGHES, _Children of the Promise_ Vol. 5 He doesn't have to do the typing himself! He could dictate it into a little tape recorder and *I'd* do the typing. :-) Marianne >In August I emceed and played for a musical program at the LDS Booksellers >Convention where the Indepent Booksellers (all the various one- and >two-store mom/pop book businesses) gave Dean Hughes an award. > >Afterward we chatted briefly and I noticed he was wearing wrist braces on >both hands. I said something brilliant and witty like, "you've just been >writing too much," to which he replied quite seriously, "Yes, exactly." > >Sorry Marianne, I guess we'll just have to give the guy a break and let the >series be over for now. > >;-) > >Occupational hazard--too bad. > >Steve > >-- >skperry@mac.com >http://StevenKappPerry.com > >"Outside of a dog, man's best friend is a book; >inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx > > > > > >- >AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature >http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com. - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 15:27:50 -0700 From: harlowclark@juno.com Subject: [AML] Death of the Author (was: Moral Issues in Art) Continuing my reply to Jason Steed's thoughtful Mon, 02 October post. (I can see from Jonathan's new thread title that breaking the post where I did gave the impression I was going to talk more about Wolverton. I only broke it there because of length. I'll have to talk more about Wolverton after the RMMLA conference (which, when I wrote this last week, was next week but now is this week). [MOD: Poor Harlow! And now I've given this part of the reply a different thread title yet again...] Jason said, > As Barthes has proclaimed, "the author is dead." Once a work of art > is created, the author can have nothing to do with it--he or she > (or at least his or her intent) is severed from the text. In practice this is simply not true. For example, when Grant Speed creates a statue for Texas Tech he retains certain rights to that statue even though the university owns the physical object. They don't have the right to, say, dismantle it (as an administrator at UVSC did to a sculpture a few years back). We acknowledge artists' authority over a work every time we edit a collection of their letters or essays--or compare drafts to each other and the published work--in hopes of illuminating the work and the author. Indeed textual criticism--the discipline that attempts to define, restore, recover an accurate, correct text of a literary work--would be impossible without assuming the author has certain kinds of intentions and that those intentions are important. When I want to see whether an edition of Shaxbeard is any good I look at Othello, III, iii, 385 (line numbering varies in some editions) where Othello is reacting to Iago's accusations against Desdemona. The most common reading is I'll have some proof. Her name, that was as fresh As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black As mine own face That reading is from the quarto, but the folio reads, My name, that was as fresh As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black As mine own face The folio variant says something dramatically different about Othello than the quarto variant. It tells us that he's mainly concerned about his own reputation. An editor's choice of variant depends partly on what the editor believes Avon's beard wants us to believe about Othello, based on the textual evidence. In this case there's textual evidence for both readings. 'Her name' and 'Dian's' occur within five feet of each other, or one line length, so they belong together. Further, Diana is the goddess of chastity. To have "her name" on one line and Dian's name on the next makes a very nice parallel between Diana and Desdemona, and parallelism is one of the commonest rhetorical tools for emphasis. But there's another parallel within the same three lines, 'My name' and 'mine own face.' One textual critic argued that the word 'own' doesn't make sense unless Othello is talking about his name as well as his face. The natural comparison is her name / my face. Othello would only emphasize that it was his own face if he was talking about something else that belonged to him, like his name. When you're choosing between two variants that affect the meaning so differently and there's good textual evidence for each variant, how do you decide? One way is to examine what you think the author intended to convey with those lines. The variant closest to that intent goes in your edition, the other in the footnotes (if you use footnotes). > We don't read a text asking "what is the author _trying_ to say" And yet this question can be exceedingly valuable. I treasure the insights that question allows Reynolds Price to show us in "A Single Meaning: Notes on the Origins and Life of Narrative," the introduction to _A Palpable God_. Discussing the story of Jacob's wrestle at Penuel Price says, "a modern reader, religious or not, faced with the final text, whatever its vicissitudes and earlier forms, is likely to ask the central question first--_What does this story ask me to believe?_ Either kind of reader would surely say _It asks me to believe precisely what it says_" (32). Of course, Price is using a rhetorical device. He's well aware that many modern readers don't ask what the story wants them to believe, that there are readers who accept the story as scripture but don't believe it records an actual event. He's also well aware that there are people who don't believe the story precisely because they recognize that it asks them to believe that what is says happened happened. Asking what a story wants you to believe allows Price to examine how Bible stories and held him (and millions more "over nearly four millennia" (33)) in "helpless belief." Which is dream of any storyteller, to give the readers the deep satisfaction and comfort of belief in truth. Price uses this technique of asking what a story, and its teller, wants us to believe in his second book of translations, _Three Gospels_, to show how astonishing are Mark and John's claims that Yahweh actually came down to earth and lived and died here and took up his body again. (This is a wonderful book. The third gospel, Price's own narrative of Jesus' life is a fine work too, as is his account of why he wrote a gospel.) Thanks for your posts Jason. I'm preparing a paper for RMMLA next week about how critical theory has taught us to relate to literature, and how that teaching affects (badly) the way artists are able to function in society. I don't know how much of my recent posts will make it into the paper, but it's good to have a place to sound out my ideas, and serendipitous to have a thread arise that's congenial to exploring issues I care about. Harlow S. Clark ________________________________________________________________ YOU'RE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR THE INTERNET! Juno now offers FREE Internet Access! Try it today - there's no risk! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 15:27:50 -0700 From: harlowclark@juno.com Subject: [AML] Death of the Author (was: Moral Issues in Art) Continuing my reply to Jason Steed's thoughtful Mon, 02 October post. (I can see from Jonathan's new thread title that breaking the post where I did gave the impression I was going to talk more about Wolverton. I only broke it there because of length. I'll have to talk more about Wolverton after the RMMLA conference (which, when I wrote this last week, was next week but now is this week). [MOD: Poor Harlow! And now I've given this part of the reply a different thread title yet again...] Jason said, > As Barthes has proclaimed, "the author is dead." Once a work of art > is created, the author can have nothing to do with it--he or she > (or at least his or her intent) is severed from the text. In practice this is simply not true. For example, when Grant Speed creates a statue for Texas Tech he retains certain rights to that statue even though the university owns the physical object. They don't have the right to, say, dismantle it (as an administrator at UVSC did to a sculpture a few years back). We acknowledge artists' authority over a work every time we edit a collection of their letters or essays--or compare drafts to each other and the published work--in hopes of illuminating the work and the author. Indeed textual criticism--the discipline that attempts to define, restore, recover an accurate, correct text of a literary work--would be impossible without assuming the author has certain kinds of intentions and that those intentions are important. When I want to see whether an edition of Shaxbeard is any good I look at Othello, III, iii, 385 (line numbering varies in some editions) where Othello is reacting to Iago's accusations against Desdemona. The most common reading is I'll have some proof. Her name, that was as fresh As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black As mine own face That reading is from the quarto, but the folio reads, My name, that was as fresh As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black As mine own face The folio variant says something dramatically different about Othello than the quarto variant. It tells us that he's mainly concerned about his own reputation. An editor's choice of variant depends partly on what the editor believes Avon's beard wants us to believe about Othello, based on the textual evidence. In this case there's textual evidence for both readings. 'Her name' and 'Dian's' occur within five feet of each other, or one line length, so they belong together. Further, Diana is the goddess of chastity. To have "her name" on one line and Dian's name on the next makes a very nice parallel between Diana and Desdemona, and parallelism is one of the commonest rhetorical tools for emphasis. But there's another parallel within the same three lines, 'My name' and 'mine own face.' One textual critic argued that the word 'own' doesn't make sense unless Othello is talking about his name as well as his face. The natural comparison is her name / my face. Othello would only emphasize that it was his own face if he was talking about something else that belonged to him, like his name. When you're choosing between two variants that affect the meaning so differently and there's good textual evidence for each variant, how do you decide? One way is to examine what you think the author intended to convey with those lines. The variant closest to that intent goes in your edition, the other in the footnotes (if you use footnotes). > We don't read a text asking "what is the author _trying_ to say" And yet this question can be exceedingly valuable. I treasure the insights that question allows Reynolds Price to show us in "A Single Meaning: Notes on the Origins and Life of Narrative," the introduction to _A Palpable God_. Discussing the story of Jacob's wrestle at Penuel Price says, "a modern reader, religious or not, faced with the final text, whatever its vicissitudes and earlier forms, is likely to ask the central question first--_What does this story ask me to believe?_ Either kind of reader would surely say _It asks me to believe precisely what it says_" (32). Of course, Price is using a rhetorical device. He's well aware that many modern readers don't ask what the story wants them to believe, that there are readers who accept the story as scripture but don't believe it records an actual event. He's also well aware that there are people who don't believe the story precisely because they recognize that it asks them to believe that what is says happened happened. Asking what a story wants you to believe allows Price to examine how Bible stories and held him (and millions more "over nearly four millennia" (33)) in "helpless belief." Which is dream of any storyteller, to give the readers the deep satisfaction and comfort of belief in truth. Price uses this technique of asking what a story, and its teller, wants us to believe in his second book of translations, _Three Gospels_, to show how astonishing are Mark and John's claims that Yahweh actually came down to earth and lived and died here and took up his body again. (This is a wonderful book. The third gospel, Price's own narrative of Jesus' life is a fine work too, as is his account of why he wrote a gospel.) Thanks for your posts Jason. I'm preparing a paper for RMMLA next week about how critical theory has taught us to relate to literature, and how that teaching affects (badly) the way artists are able to function in society. I don't know how much of my recent posts will make it into the paper, but it's good to have a place to sound out my ideas, and serendipitous to have a thread arise that's congenial to exploring issues I care about. Harlow S. Clark ________________________________________________________________ YOU'RE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR THE INTERNET! Juno now offers FREE Internet Access! Try it today - there's no risk! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2000 08:32:40 -0500 From: "jana bouck remy" (by way of Jonathan Langford ) Subject: [AML] Marion SMITH, _Riptide_ (Review pt. 1) Marion Smith. Riptide. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999. 199 pp. $14.95. ISBN 1-56085-131-7 Review by Lavina Fielding Anderson In what has to be one of the most gripping and tension-filled opening chapters of any Mormon novel, Laurel Greer, sixty-three-year-old mother of five and grandmother of seven, crouches on the floor of her ex-son-in-law's car, forces him to drive to an abandoned road in Parley's Canyon above Salt Lake City, makes him stop the car, puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger, then curls his fingers around the butt. Then another son-in-law takes her to her car and she drives south toward Las Vegas where, to establish her alibi, her daughter has already gone with Duncan, Laurel's husband. The journey south through the night reveals the motive for Clint's murder and draws the reader into its moral dimensions. Laurel had been driving her seven-year-old granddaughter Elizabeth to her piano lesson when a chance comment about "the baby videos" triggered such a panicky reaction that Laurel cancelled the piano lesson and took Elizabeth and her just-younger brother Shawn to a therapist the next day. A flood of sickening revelations followed: of "parties" where Laurel's grandchildren, including infants, were required to perform or endure sex acts, were given treats for not crying, and were terrorized into silence by the slaughter of a kitten. At some of these parties, Clint danced wearing only the tops of his temple garments and had intercourse with his mother. Another regular male participant was the other counselor in the bishopric in which Clint served. This second man's wife, the daughter of an apostle, ran the video camera. Many men who were strangers to the children also participated. The children's revelations were only the beginning. Also among Clint's victims were the children of Laurel's other married daughters and son, and her two youngest daughters, Jeanne and Jasmine. At one point, Laurel and Duncan count up thirty victims that they know of from personal knowledge. They give up guessing how many more there might be, including Clint's two stepdaughters by his second marriage and the two children he has fathered in that marriage. And he seemed untouchable. The police aborted their investigation, suspiciously soon after they found out that an apostle's son-in-law was involved, even though Duncan is from an old Church family. A lengthy list of bishops and stake presidents, including Clint's current Church leaders, promises to investigate, to take action, only to withdraw their interest and never return phone calls. Clint's bishop even paid his rent from fast offering funds. After confessing and apologizing to his children, Clint recants, once he figures out that he will not be prosecuted. He even sues for custody of the children. This litany of institutional failures completes the motive for murder. Innocent and on-going victims are revictimized by institutional inaction until an individual, Laurel Greer, takes action to restore justice. But this formula is only the beginning. The interior action of the novel is a moral education, first in a monologue as Laurel drives south to Las Vegas where she meets Duncan and sends her car back to Salt Lake City with daughter Jeanne, then in a dialogue as she and Duncan continue on to their condo in Palm Springs. In dense, richly allusive prose (Laurel quotes Yeates and Star Trek, T.S. Eliot and Wuthering Heights, plus dozens of others), Marion Smith explores the complexities of the human tragedy of child sexual abuse. Laurel's sickening hatred of Clint is coupled with her involuntary compassion for the misfit boy being raised and trained by his incestuous mother. Her passion for her children and her eagerness to embrace the stability and solidity of the whole of Duncan's Mormon heritage, given her own partially active family's dysfunctionality, lead directly to her bitter disillusionment as she perceives that this very Mormonness, rather than providing protection, made her children and grandchildren more vulnerable to sexual abuse. It also leads directly to doubts about God. Duncan's journey is parallel but not identical. He communicates the rage of a man whose entire life has been an effort to protect and provide for his family. His trust in the church that had been his whole life shatters into bitter shards, but he cannot give up his allegiance, even when his faith is gone. As a result, his peculiar crucifixion is his bone-deep conviction that he has put his soul in jeopardy by yielding to Laurel's enraged determination that she must kill Clint; by teaching her how to use the gun and working out the plan, he becomes an accessory to murder. The novel reveals the stresses placed on a marriage by the discovery of child sexual abuse -- another manifestation that the ripples of abuse never end. As they drive through the night, deeper into an uncertain future, they return repeatedly to the anguish of their past. This novel goes far beyond the simple formula of frontier justice, where a right-thinking vigilante removes a loathsome danger to the community. Conspicuous by its absence from the intense discussions and images is any reference to righteous Nephi standing over drunken Laban and hearing the Spirit command that the slaying. Instead, the murderers whose names come to Laurel's mind are Raskolnikov and his unmotivated, almost experimental, murder of a helpless old woman, Lady Macbeth violating her fealty to a sleeping king, and Medea drawing the blade across the throats of her own children. These images provide a deeply ambiguous answer to the question of justice worked out in this novel. If this were a vigilante novel, then the happy ending would be that Laurel gets away with her murder and the world is well rid of another pedophile. Instead, Laurel makes a final decision and takes a final action in the novel's conclusion that redresses the scales of an impossibly complex justice. (to be continued...) - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2000 08:35:17 -0500 From: "jana bouck remy" (by way of Jonathan Langford ) Subject: [AML] Marion SMITH, _Riptide_ (Review pt. 2) (continued from previous post) In my opinion, however, Marion Smith's chief contribution is to draw into the reader's consciousness an understanding of the horror of child sexual abuse. This statement may seem both over-obvious and even faintly ludicrous. Is there anyone, except for pedophiles and the truly uneducated, who doesn't already believe that child sexual abuse is horrible? Haven't the experiences of abuse survivors already plowed that dark and painful ground thoroughly? I don't think so. At three points in the novel, lists appear: (1) a list of victims, (2) a list of the types of abuse the children were forced to endure (this is what the children told their therapist that Clint had done to them: "Cunnilingus, object rape, enforced fellatio, digital penetration of anus and vagina, sodomy, fondling of breasts and genitals, the making and showing of pornographic films, intercourse and other sexual acts with adults including his mother, which he forced the children to witness"; (p. 60), and (3) a catalog of abuse symptoms ("panic attacks, nightmare, sexual dysfunction, dissociation, amnesia, flashbacks, rage, terror, depression, . . . body memories like numbness or terrible pain, . .. eating disorders," p. 158). The clinical language and the sheer pile-up of multi-syllabic nouns are ultimately numbing. Survivors' stories never fail to shock and galvanize sympathy that connects listener and speaker; but that completely appropriate response of sympathy is by its very nature outwardly directed. It separates the sympathizer from the object of sympathy, and the space in between is a sometimes too-comfortable distance. What Marion Smith has done throughout Riptide is to create a series of images, dreams, and events that erase that distance, creating an experience with the emotional reality of abuse that will, I believe, leave no sensitive reader unchanged. I counted a score of such distance-erasing images, beginning with the scene that gives the novel its title. Clint and little Jasmine are playing in the waves when they are caught by the riptide. Duncan immediately tries to rescue Jasmine, but the tide "would sweep them out again like straws." Tina, another daughter, is the strongest swimmer and understands how to work with, not against, the riptide. Laurel gives her permission to go out and save her father and sister. They all survive, including Clint, but Laurel wonders whether her son and daughter, parents of more of Clint's victims, would have "sacrifice[d Duncan and Jasmine] . . . to . . . let Clint drown and their children be saved from him." Meanwhile, she is haunted by the image of "Clint luring everyone into the riptide" (173). Some of the images are those reported by the children: Jasmine dreams of a blender in which her loved ones are "ground together by whirling . . . . blades" (13). In another one, a shark circles her and Jeanne underwater, its "huge red penis, dripping in the ocean water" (13). Jeanne pumps up on the cabin swing, flying high in the air, when the chain snaps on one side. Laurel's daughter Katherine, who had been married to Clint, stands before the wooden clock Clint had brought back from his mission, pushing the hands "around and around the face." It is an image of her own terrible desire that enough minutes will pass to signal that they have survived (33). This same daughter terrifies Duncan when he finds her methodically smashing every piece of her Royal Copenhagen china on the tiled floor of her kitchen. He is sure she is crazy. Laurel understands that it is normal to be crazy. Some of the images are Laurel's nightmares. She dreams of a tornado funnel sweeping toward them, its winds so powerful that they can't yank up the door that would lead them into the safety of the storm cellar; the wind catches the baby's body and batters it against the door "like a ball on a yo-yo string, breaking" the fragile bones (30). She dreams of a cozy miniature living room inside a decorated Easter egg where her family is "safe"; then she picks up the egg and shakes it. She is simultaneously tiny, inside the egg, crashing into the furniture with her bruised and bleeding family, and outside, doing the shaking (160). She is a moth, blending into the soft dust, a pile "of gray cinder-block bricks placed on top of me--neatly stacked--no one know that I am here." She can still breathe, barely, but the bricks keep stacking higher, crushing her (163). Her best-beloved doll falls out of the car window; her father refuses to go back for it (51). She dreams of her family on strings being dipped into a volcano and being "pulled out twisted and grotesque with lava crusting on us" (57). She repeatedly thinks of rocks --"black, deformed, lava, habitable only to black crags and bare bleeding feet" or "smooth stream-rounded pebbles, wet and sensuous, their curvings indifferent to human fingers" (118). On a family trip, a berserk Moroccan had run through the ferry to Tangier "stabbing strangers" until a tourist "hit him on the head with a bottle" while Laurel searched desperately for four-year-old Jasmine who had gotten separated from the family (83). One night, she hears a young elk, trapped in their metal gate in the deep snow. It screams and screams "like Cathy at the window" in Wuthering Heights, "trying to come in . . . a child who must scream alone in the cold night" (98). In a game of musical chairs at a birthday party, "a giant male foot in a brown polished shoe" appears above the children, then smashes down, grinding the children and the chair splinters into the carpet "while Tina goes on trying to announce who's won and I bring in the hot dogs and the red Jell-O and the potato chips" (111-12). A hangman's noose dangles from the branches of a dead tree, enlarging itself until Laurel can seat herself in it as if it were a child's swing (115). Clint is a huge "black crab" crawling after the "miniature" family, his enormous claws picking up the child that Laurel had "forgotten to hide" (159-60). A little boy is sinking in quicksand and can't hold on to the stick Laurel reaches to him from the side (160). A granddaughter swings out over a cliff edge, then dives straight into the "dark pool" below. She doesn't come up. "None of us could jump to her. We stared at the water and couldn't move" (160). And there are more. These images recreate the emotional reality of sexual abuse--the helplessness, the insanity, the nightmarishness, the meaninglessness, and above all, the terrible, unending pain. I could not read them unmoved, unchanged. I could not read them with only admiration for Marion Smith's technical facility and her skill with language. Reading them is an experience with the riptide of sexual abuse. Smith was not well-served by the publisher's production. Although the novel's action is dated precisely to 1994, seven years after the discovery of the abuse, the cover, in muddy shades of greenish-yellow and gray, misleadingly shows a woman with a short waved hair style from the early 1950s, flanked by young daughters with bangs and pageboys from the same period. Ellipses are shown unspaced, making eye-jerking clots on the page. M-dashes have been rendered as N-dashes, making it virtually impossible not to read some as hyphens. Typographical errors abound: both "MacBeth" and "Macbeth" (correct), "grey" (British spelling), "Mommie/Mommy," and "their's." But these defects in presentation should not be allowed to detract from this remarkable journey in moral education and in the emotional realities of sexual abuse that Riptide provides. In an image pivotal to the action of the novel, Laurel recalls lying on the edge of the Grand Canyon at dawn when she was fifteen, feeling the world turning under her, unable to tell where the sandstone stops and her cheek begins. "Perhaps lying there alone at dawn was the best single moment of my life," she thinks. To get there she had followed a path through the Kaibab forest: Over and over during the past seven years, I watch myself walk that path. . . . There's no hurry, but I have to keep moving. I go to the rim and its purple shadows. There's no fear or pain in that. I don't want to die, but perhaps there'll be no choice. One step and I'll be part of the shadow. It feels good to have that option. It's my biggest comfort. I must go to the very edge and look down and then decide. No one can come near me there, alone. Two German tourists disappeared from that path this summer. I envy them. Over and over this scene is my escape. It's beautiful and awesome and obsessive. Sometimes it's irresisble. I know I can't turn around on the path to the canyon. I can stop on the edge but not turn around. I try hard to think if there are other choices. I concentrate while I look at the ever-changing light and shadow. (45) Marion Smith puts the reader on that path with Laurel Greer. The precipice is not just the hunger for oblivion and surcease from pain; it is also the decision of each reader whether to accept his or her own culpability in a world where innocence is violated in terrible ways. We can plunge over into the obliterating answers of denial or we can "stop on the edge" where rescue can occur, but we "can't turn around on the path." [Lavina Fielding Anderson] - - AML-List, a mailing list for the discussion of Mormon literature http://www.xmission.com/~aml/aml-list.htm ------------------------------ End of aml-list-digest V1 #169 ******************************