The Foundationalist Vol. VI, Issue II

VOLUME VI | FALL 2021

VOLUME VI | ISSUE II

THE FOUNDATIONALIST FALL 2021

The Foundationalist is a literary journal edited by undergraduate students at Bowdoin College, University of Iowa, and Yale University. This issue is made possible by support from the Bowdoin College English Department and is published semiannually in the Spring and Fall.

Copyright © 2021 by The Foundationalist All Rights Reserved.

Our print edition is available for purchase and the digital edition is complimentary on our website, thefoundationalist.com website for full submission guidelines and deadlines. All contributors must be current undergraduate students.

• Cover Design by Emerson Peters

ELEANOR AMBLER OLIVE AMDUR MEREDITH H. BENJAMIN TABITHA CHILTON NATHAN CHU SEAN ETTER NICOLE FAN MAYA GELSI MAKENZIE HALLSTROM ANNA KALABUKHOVA

JOSHUA LEE NINA MERKOFER NATSUMI MEYER PADDY QIU ANDREA RODRÍGUEZ KIRA SANTANA GRETA SCHMITZER BASIA SIWEK RACHELLE CLAIRE STRUB KATE TAPSCOTT A.J. VITIELLO CAITLIN WOODFORD

TABLE OF CONTENTS •

F ICT I O N Housewife's Third Eye

P O ETRY 2 | 50

BASIA SIWEK

The Haunting of Bai Gui PADDY QIU

Scream

GRETA SCHMITZER

4 | 53

Up North

MAYA GELSI

The Hunt 10 | 54 That School in Athens MEREDITH H. BENJAMIN

SEAN ETTER

Joy Palace 20 | 57 the sea and all the grief i've stored there

NATHAN CHU

MAKENZIE HALLSTROM

Those Left Behind 34 | 59 Altar Boy JOSHUA LEE

A.J. VITIELLO

61

Out of the Water

63

Serenade: A Childhood Dream

KIRA SANTANA

ELEANOR AMBLER

• TABLE OF CONTENTS N O NF ICT I O N The Scars We 65 | 100 Leave Behind ANDREA RODRÍGUEZ

Baba, Mama, and Me 77| 106 NATSUMI MEYER

E S SAY “She Menaced Him with Reality”: Aversion to Women in The City and the Pillar KATE TAPSCOTT

The Anthropocene Flâneur: Reading the Self, the Other, and the Environment Between OLIVE AMDUR

Swimming in Circles 84 | 122

Painting with Words: The

TABITHA CHILTON

Lighthouse Waves

To the The

NICOLE FAN

A Storm Passes Over 88 | 140 CAITLIN WOODFORD

Making New Out of the Old: The Manifold Purpose of Gothic Elements in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland NINA MERKOFER

To My Mother 94 | 162

ANNA KALABUKHOVA

The Postmodern Neo-Sensation Novel: Metalepsis as Narrative Strategy in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and its Filmic Adaptation RACHELLE CLAIRE STRUB

STAFF EDITOR-IN- CHIEF KYUBIN KIM, Bowdoin College LILY POPPEN, Bowdoin College RACHEL YANG, Bowdoin College AZZURRA SARTINI-RIDEOUT, University of Iowa ANYA RAZMI, Yale University

A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R CLAYTON WACKERMAN, Bowdoin College BRETT ZACH, University of Iowa HANWEN ZANG, Yale University

WEB EDITOR & DEVELOPMENT DIREC TOR ELLA JAMAN, Bowdoin College EMMA SIMPSON, Bowdoin College

E D I TO R I A L B OA R D Bryant Blackburn Hanna Cha Andreea Ciobanu Madeline DeCoste Cathy Duong Melina Hegelheimer Christina Howell Ella Jaman

Abbey Kim Hannah Kim Madelyn Lemons Callum Lingenfelter James Lu Malcolm MacDougall Shayley Martin Jessica Meiwen Annalise Nehmer John Nguyen Emerson Peters Di Phung Grace Pignolo Bailey Prete Dex Provido Rachel Reyes Kieran Ruder Elena Unger Jack Wellschlager

•

DE SIGN Logo Cover Art EMERSON PETERS Back Illustration LILY POPPEN

EDITOR'S LETTER In this issue, authors explore the connective, generative relationships that make us human. One author and narrators who weave themselves into the environment, another crafts a story about intergenerational recollections of Japan and fragments of mothers we inherit, and yet another ruminates on the grief we store and return to as a way to remember those we love and lost.

As editors reunited on campuses, we coming together again. We welcomed new leaders in our University of invaluable support and brought an invigorated vision of what The Foundationalist could become. During board meetings, masks and social distancing could never deter the closeness we felt when coming together to read the incredible submissions we received.

It is an obvious statement to make, that relationships change in response to trying times, global crises, and iso-

lation. But nonetheless, it is important to articulate and remind ourselves how grateful we are for The Foundationalist and more generally, literature, as possibilities to preserve the ever changing ways we are connected to people, places, and things.

As always, The Foundationalist is indebted to our readers, contributors, and supporters. Although we are a publication and a platform for undergraduate writers across the world, we are, at our core, a community that will nurture and celebrate the idea that humans do not read and write alone. We invite you to meet us in this issue, to feel touched by our authors’ love of language, and to relish in this changing world we are coming together in once more.

❦

F I C T I O N

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Housewife's Third Eye Basia Siwek Emerson College

C

ome home to the pretty, blonde, and problematic. Come home to the women who scoop you a dollop of Daisy and dream for Dolly Parton’s waist. The women of the apocolipstick, whose hot honeypot heads hear voices.

O

h secret society of husband hexing — who is next in line to the throne for the vicious, vivid dimension of

the brink of explosion from exploitation — you left the dirty underwear on the carpet. Next time you go scum shopping in a tin can forest, I ask you to cradle me into my next life, for I will never cry again. I will bake my own bread and befriend the couture girls.

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omen who telecommunicate with Jane Fonda’s picture on the wall and manifest the once tenacious matriarchy to make a comeback, I ask that you keep your maiden names and split the bill. They say mothers know best because of mother’s intuition, but have you met the housewives with overactive third eyes?

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elcome. Run back to the womb before blonde vultures like Lisa Rowe and Nancy Spungen — born out of the gynocracy — Ina May Gaskin, Mary Wollstonecraft, come to get revenge. Slurring the anthem of sad shocks, cursing the germs of love, here they come to teach the angels in training how to not be so angry when a man stands up above you, pats your

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head, and sits back down to your level. Soon is the season of girls on dominant sprees will feel fueled for operation over obedience.

S

ometimes, if you sit long enough, you can see the spiraling whirlwinds of effeminate love and light as they make way to kiss you on your forehead. Did you know the real reason women have bangs is to hide the third eye on their forehead?

Sometimes their bangs whisk in lieu to let the sun in, and then a mere tear slides down slow enough to leave a cold trail on dull, dry skin and the cracks on their lips seethe red.

S

urrendering to an oasis of emotion and carrying the weight en of feeble lives ruminate in their divine sensibilities. What to give in reparation of an overlooked voice and an under-loved heart — the passionate wails of Patsy Cline were made for someone. In a heavenly sense, red roses are a gesture to return home.

D

id you know that our angels never leave us? Transcending standard deviations of time, they speak sounds of blue. Blue whispers not of anguish, yet of the vast, alchemistic

ancestral vision; blue rays of wisdom that seep into the yellow teeth of stingy men. And on Earth we see the green; the granulation of gratitude. It is the grass of miracles and the awakening of songs and shouts. Green is the host to tears at birth and moans of death. Do not forget the supernatural wisps of earthly love we feel when the eyes release and the nose snifnascency. Do not dismiss the exuberant sedulity of soft-eyed matrons that fuel the bright blue whispers of life.

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Scream Greta Schmitzer University of Florida

I

carefully adjust the knives I have set on the table one more time to make sure they are straight. The legs of

glasses to make their portions exactly even. The dinner I cooked is laid out neatly on the table. I tug the tablecloth to remove any wrinkles and then, when that moves the silverware, I adjust them again. “Robert! Dinner is ready!”

I call.

Robert stumbles out of our bedroom, rubbing his eyes, wearing a crumbled suit jacket and athletic shorts.

His hair is gelled but still sticks up in multiple places, like he attempted to make it look professional but just could not stop running his hands through it. He grabs the wine bottle before sitting down, pouring until his glass is nearly full. We each dish our own portions, sitting silently for a few moments. I pour a light amount of dressing onto my salad.

“How was work today, darling?” I ask him.

“Yes, dear,” he says without looking at me.

“Enjoying your dinner?” I ask.

“Yes, dear.”

“Good.” I pause, clinking my fork against my plate.

When I stop, I can hear the hubbub of the neighbors upstairs. “The neighbors are being a bit noisy, aren’t they, darling?”

“Yes, dear,” he says, dousing his salad in the dressing.

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“I bet quarantine and online schooling is driving those poor kids mad. They must be bouncing off the walls. And oh, their poor parents….”

Robert continues to stuff his face, crunching on the lettuce.

“I really don’t know how long the government expects us to stay home like this,” I continue. “You and I just have this one-bedroom apartment. What are we supposed to do in here? I miss the park, and the food, and the fresh air, and the festivals, and the sunshine! What about you, darling?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Don’t you miss all that, darling?”

“Yes, dear.” family in the apartment above us. I clean up the dishes, each making a light clank as I set them in the dishwasher.

The dishwasher begins to hum as it starts. I can hear Robert already snoring in the bedroom.

As I climb in bed next to him, I try to come up with new hobbies to occupy myself tomorrow. Painting? No, I I don’t have any plants, and I have nowhere to put them, even if I did. Knitting? I may be able to— Robert is no longer snoring. I listen for the hum of the ten for the ruckus from our neighbors above us. Nothing.

The world is silent. The silence is deafening. I quickly roll out of bed.

In my rush to the kitchen, I stumble over an uneven I stomp on it, and it moves back into place, and I stomp and stomp and stomp on it some more. I stomp on it one more time. Then I run to the kitchen and start the dish-

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washer again. When I hear its hum, I take a breath, before returning to my bedroom. On my way back, I stomp on When I wake, I bask in the morning glow coming through our window. The birds outside chirp joyfully in welcome. The family above us is creating quite a commotion again, and now so are the neighbors on our sides, too. I skip into the kitchen. On the way, I throw my pajamas into the washing machine and start it. Robert sits on the couch and reads a book, somehow undisturbed by our neighbors’ hollering and my own noise as I prepare breakfast. Outside our window, I hear a construction truck beeping loudly nearby. I place Robert’s plate of scrambled eggs in front of him, although he continues to just read as I eat my own portion, smiling softly.

“The neighbors are being a bit noisy, aren’t they, darling?”

“Yes, dear.” you going to just read your book?”

“Yes, dear.”

After starting the dishwasher, I pull out a jigsaw puzzle that depicts a gorgeous autumn landscape. According to hard. I lay the puzzle pieces out on the table and begin to work.

The corner pieces are not so hard to put together once the rest of the picture. Eventually, I am able to start assembling part of a tree. Now, this one piece looks like it is part of a tree, but I wonder if it belongs to the tree I am already working on, or an entirely different tree in the picture?

The lights go out. The dishwasher stops. My back straightens. I listen for the washing machine. The washing machine has stopped. Outside, the birds have stopped chirping, and the construction truck has stopped beeping.

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The neighbors are quiet. I rush for the dishwasher, tripping onto my hands and knees in my haste, and try to start it again. It won’t start.

Breathing heavily, I turn to Robert. “Robert!” I shout at him.

“Yes, dear.”

“Robert!” I scream.

“Yes, dear.”

“Robert!” I shove all the soap into the dishwasher and slam it shut. It still won’t start. I slam it shut one more the silence.

“Yes, dear.”

“Robert!” I scream until my throat becomes hoarse.

I scramble for the cupboard, the room now lit only by the sunlight streaming between the blinds of the window. my feet, and begin to bang the pots together in a frenzy. I stomp my feet one by one and jump on them at the same time. The neighbors begin to make noises again, rising in their intensity. I can hear their dogs barking, their appliances beeping, their speakers blasting, their televisions blaring, their footsteps booming. I throw the pots in the With thundering footsteps, I run back to my puzzle.

This puzzle piece here, and that one there….I shove the shove and I shove and I shove, shaking the table. I climb on top of the table to stomp on the pieces. I stomp and I stomp and — my head smashes against the chandelier, neighbors are shrieking now. My ears begin to ring.

“The neighbors are being a bit noisy, aren’t they, darling?” I yell.

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Yes, dear,” Robert says, still reading in the dim light.

Suddenly, the clamor of the neighbors begins to recede. No! I need to hear them — I need to reach them! underneath the chair and rip it up, toppling the chair over. bang them together, but they make little sound, especially over the ringing in my ears, so I toss them aside. When I

“The neighbors are being a bit noisy, aren’t they, darling?” I shout.

“Yes, dear,” Robert says. cord on the blinds to bring light into the room. Aha! The vent!

I fall in front of the vent and yank on the metal cover.

It won’t move! The neighbors are getting even quieter, and gernails to remove the screws holding the vent’s cover in place and try to shove my head inside. But my head slams The ringing gets louder and louder again.

I smash my hands against the wall, hitting until I hear the snap of bone against brick. When that noise fades away, I rub my hands against my ears. I see Robert on the couch, still reading his book.

“Robert!” I scream.

Yes, dear.”

I rub my hands more vigorously against my ears. My them against my head.

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Bang! Bang! Bang! The shouting, it’s coming back! It’s coming back! Bang, bang, bang! It’s coming closer, I can hear it again! Bang!

Another pair of hands is suddenly ripping the pots from me. “Robert!” I scream.

“Yes, dear,” he says across the room.

“Robert!”

“Yes, dear.”

The hands grab my face now, trying to pry my eyes open. The person in front of me is blurry, but I can tell he is not Robert. I shove him away, reaching for the pots he stole from me.

The ringing begins to recede again. I shake my head and try to rub my ears again, but the man grabs my wrists scream, until my voice dies in my throat. As the ringing quiets, I can hear the man speaking through his mask.

“Got quite a few noise complaints from the neighbors.

What’s wrong? I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong. Have you been paying your bills? Did they cut off your power?”

I try to scream, but nothing comes out. I look to Robert, still reading on the couch, and try to scream to him.

He does not see me. The man in front of me sighs and leads me out of the apartment. I try to resist him, but I’m too dizzy. I look desperately to Robert, my last hope. I try to shout to him. I want him to look at me, to speak to me.

Robert continues to read on the couch.

As I am led into the hallway, my neighbors linger in their doorways. Some look at me furiously, eyebrows arched above their masks. Others look at me pitifully before slowly receding inside. I hear a few televisions, a bit of commotion, but not the shrieking as I heard before.

I try to scream again. Nothing comes out.

Nothing at all.

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The Hunt Sean Etter Emerson College

M

aurice took me hunting a few times each year, the only times I was allowed to venture beyond our village and into the frozen wilderness. The rules were that I had to stay close to him, the large imperious had to follow all of his instructions to a T. My curiosity always got the best of me, though, and I’d go around touching every branch, stone, rabbit (although they always ran away if I got away the game, Maurice would scold me for disobeying the rules and I would receive less food at dinner as punishment.

But my fascination with the wilderness never subsided; there were some nights I went without any food at all.

These early hunts were to train me, to prepare me for the day I would join the others in defending our village from the wolves that roamed the snow-swept wild. The savage beasts that stalked the edges of our struggling civilization were vicious, heartless, and remorseless killers. The village elders told us stories of the days before the hunts, when the wolves would descend upon us come nightfall and steal our people from their beds, drag them through the snow and into the us, the wolves would cause our fragile society to collapse. That is why, when wavering sunlight illuminates the world, our strongest would venture out into the wild to hunt.

It was with Maurice, a kind-hearted yet stern man no older than forty, that I spent most of my days. My parents both died

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when I was young: my father from an illness, my mother from the bone-biting cold of a blizzard, a common way to go out in the endless winter that gripped the land. Maurice was a close friend of my mother, and he vowed to look after me after she had passed. Over the years, he became a second father to me.

He was the best hunter in our lonely village. He would always come home from a hunt with fresh meat to eat and new stories to tell of his expeditions out into the wild. He was a talented sharpshooter; I remember one time he told me a story while we ate dinner about how he’d managed to shoot the sky. One shot was all it ever took for him to bring down a target, no matter the size or speed.

U to be patient and kind to me, taking his time to make sure I how to steel my nerves before pulling the trigger. If he had become my second father, then I had become his only child.

He wanted to see me succeed, to help me grow into the man he thought I should be. He would get angry with me, usually when I would disobey his rules or my hesitation to pull the trigger on a rabbit or fox cost us a perfectly good meal. But even then, his anger came from a place of love. When I made color in a white-washed world — he made sure we celebrated like it was the most important event in the world. He broke out his meager supply of alcohol — an old whiskey he’d been hiding for years — and we drank it all. Or rather, he drank it all. I could barely hold down what little I drank.

❦ The day I turned seventeen was the day that things changed. As was custom in our village, Maurice brought me

a weapon to call my own until I proved myself capable as a

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wolf hunter: one more of our village’s customs. We searched among the dense trees for a time, looking for any signs of our prey. He found tracks, and we followed them; Maurice in the lead, and me following closely behind until we reached the den to which they led. Inside we found her, a snow-white wolf with icy eyes and a broken paw. A trail of blood led inside the

aim, remembering that this was one of them, one of the beasts that threatened our existence. A remorseless killer who’d probably devoured dozens of people.

But I couldn’t take the shot. There was something in her stare that stopped me. I thought I saw… emotion. Just like I saw in the eyes of people back home.

Take the shot,” Maurice whispered to me. There was violence dripping from his words, a hatred for the wounded animal that whimpered before us. But I still couldn’t do it. “Kill it, Cassian!” he shouted. His sudden outburst startled me, and Bang!

She was gone. Nothing left but blood and an empty shell of the life I had taken.

Maurice held me close, telling me how proud he was of me. But I didn’t feel pride. I stood there, staring at my work in disbelief, shock, confusion, and guilt. She didn’t even put up a I thought sadly.

We walked back to the village after he skinned the wolf.

I was awarded extra rations of the meat for dinner, but just looking at it made me sick. I went to bed with an empty stomach. I saw her in my dreams that night, her pleading eyes begging for mercy, Maurice shouting at me to end her life, night.

❦

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T later, we went out again, this time to a different area of the wilderness. Trudging through a foot of snow, I tracked the wolf until we found him resting in a clearing. With a great It felt heavy in my hands. When I raised the gun, the wolf growled and leaped at me. Its claws were raised to attack, its muzzle opened to reveal a row of sharp teeth. I locked eyes with him and registered a look I never thought I’d ever see in the eyes of a wolf: fear.

I lurched to the side to avoid him, but I was too slow.

His claws made contact with my skin, leaving a deep, painful gripped in my hand. Maurice shouted and drew his hunting knife from his belt. He rushed at the wolf and violently wrestled it away from me. I saw cold steel catch the sunlight and looked away. There was a high-pitched whimper, and then silence.

Maurice helped me to my feet, saying that we needed to get me back home to treat my wound. He dragged the wolf’s lifeless body with one hand and held my arm to steady me with the other as we hiked back through the deep snow.

I looked down at the wolf, sadness tugging at my heart. I thought of the fear I’d seen in his eyes. It dawned on me that he hadn’t wanted to hurt me. He was acting in defense. I was unsuspecting creature who’d done me no harm. I grew cold, colder than I should have been beneath my coat. I crumpled to the ground.

❦ Strange dreams and visions swam before my eyes. I was had descended on the land. Shadows danced unnaturally between the bare trees, but they moved so quickly that I

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couldn’t make out their shapes. Maurice was nowhere in sight; I was well and truly alone. I was hunting but couldn’t shake the feeling that I was the one being hunted. I was surrounded by whispers. Fear the wolves.

Something moved to my left, just beyond my sight. I searched frantically for whatever was out there but could not tighter. The wind picked up, and with it the whispers grew louder. Fear the wolves.

A The shot was deafening. A shadow fell, lifeless. I slowly apsnow. I could not tell what creature I had slain; its shape shifted back and forth between a wolf and a human. When I leaned in closer to inspect its face, I saw my own lifeless eyes staring back at me. The wind had grown into a howl. Fear the wolves.

I awoke two days later. Maurice hugged me when he saw me, telling me how worried he’d been, how I’d picked up an infection when I’d been wounded by the wolf, how he’d feared that I would never wake again. I barely spoke, the vision of my lifeless eyes haunting my waking hours.

Two weeks after I recovered, we hunted again. Maurice stayed close to me this time and led the way. He seemed to think I was fragile, like I would shatter if he left me alone could give me some space without worrying, but he insisted on playing protector.

He found us some tracks that led us farther into the forest than I’d ever traveled. Something seemed off about them.

I couldn’t make out what creature had left the prints. They seemed to shift in and out of focus, constantly changing their shape. Not sure what was happening to me, I wrote it off as some lingering effect from the infection that was fooling with my perception.

We heard movement in the bushes around us. A man in

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rags burst from the underbrush. He had a look in his eye — a wild, untamed freedom — and he radiated life. And he was did before, and I froze, gazing into those piercing ice-blue eyes.

“There it is,” Maurice whispered. “You know what to do, Cass.” I stayed rooted in place, staring at the man. He cradled a number of red berries in his hands. Maybe he was like us, just trying to survive the winter. Every muscle in my body tensed up. I couldn’t pull the trigger or drop the gun. Maurice noticed my hesitation. “What’s wrong? It’s right there. This is the perfect opportunity. Kill it.” There was no hesitation in his voice. Only the same, violent hatred he’d used for the wolves.

“N-no,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

“What?” Maurice asked, shocked by my response.

“No,” I said again, my voice shaking with every word. I shoot a person, but I was so afraid that all I could manage was a feeble, “I can’t.”

“Why not? It’s just like all the other beasts.”

“H-he’s not,” I stammered. Nothing was making sense to me. We were hunting wolves, not people. Maurice had always been so caring, but here he was urging me to shoot an innocent person in cold blood.

The wild man took advantage of my hesitation and bolted, but he was still in our line of sight. Without hesitation, MauThe man fell instantly. I ran to his side hoping that I could still save him, but he was already gone. It was done.

I stared at Maurice in horror, unable to believe what just happened. He saw my look and reached out for me. I backed away from him, tripping and falling into the snow now stained red with the man’s blood.

“What’s gotten into you?” he asked, making his way toward me.

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I choked down a frightened sob. “W-why?”

“Why what? Cassian, talk to me. Are you feeling alright?”

“You killed him. How could you?”

Maurice dropped to one knee so we were eye-level. “There was no ‘he,’ Cass. It was a wolf. Are you feverish?” He reached out to feel my forehead, but I scrambled back, kicking scarlet snow onto his coat.

“You killed a man!” I screamed.

Maurice’s hand darted out and grabbed my wrist. He held me tight, so tight that I was worried my bones would shatter.

“You’re speaking nonsense, Cassian.”

“He was scared and defenseless, and you murdered him!”

He yanked me to my feet, nearly pulling my arm from its socket. “You need to calm down,” he ordered. His voice was iron. I tried to free myself from his grip, but he held me still.

“You’re not well. You’re seeing things that aren’t there. I will skin the wolf, then we’ll get you back home so you can rest. In a few weeks, I’ll try taking you hunting again.”

Was he right? Was I just seeing things? With uncertainty growing in my heart, I needed guidance. So I asked Maurice, the man who’d promised to always love and guide me, a dangerous question.

“Are the wolves really heartless?”

He looked at me, puzzled by the question. “What do you mean?” wolf, I saw something in her eyes, a look that begged me not to kill her.”

He shook his head. “You must have imagined it. Plenty of mind probably made up that look to justify your hesitation.”

“But the other wolf we tracked — I saw fear in his eyes.”

“Fear? That beast attacked you.” attacked if I hadn’t raised the gun.”

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“It would have tried to kill you either way!” Maurice was raising his voice, losing his patience and his temper with me.

“Why are you defending them? They are animals. Dangerous ones that need to be put down.”

I pointed at the dead man at our feet. “That man wasn’t a ran! And you —” “Enough!” Maurice yelled. He glared into my eyes with an unfamiliar look in his own: a burning anger that stole the air from my lungs, silencing me. “There’s nothing human about those creatures. They are beasts: savage killers. Nothing more.

I won’t let you indulge in these ridiculous fantasies about the ‘innocence’ of these killers.” He stopped a moment, looking me up and down. He shook his head. “I am so disappointed in you.

I thought I raised you better than this, but it’s clear that you’re not cut out for the hunt. When we get back home, you can forget about ever leaving the village again. End of discussion.”

I looked to the corpse one last time, trying to see the wolf that Maurice spoke of. All I saw was the man, his vacant eyes staring back at me. I looked away as Maurice skinned the “wolf,” then we trudged back through the snow to the village looming beyond the trees.

❦ That night the man haunted my dreams, begging me for mercy as he bled out in front of me. Maurice appeared and bled. My own blood pooled on the ground as Maurice came to skin his freshly killed “wolf.”

❦ I woke up in a cold sweat. It was still night, the moon above a sickle-shaped blade of light. I could hear Maurice’s breathing from across the room. He was sleeping soundly, as if the events in the woods had never happened.

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Everything had changed. Why were we killing people? I curled up beneath my worn blanket, but it no longer offered me warmth. I looked outside the window, but the buildings of our neighbors, once a reassuring sign that I was never alone, only made me feel more isolated.

Nothing seemed right anymore. The wolves were supposed to be evil. Maurice was supposed to make me feel safe. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was imagining it all. I looked at Maurice, hoping for comfort and reassurance in his familiar face. But the sight of him only gripped my heart in cold fear.

I knew what I saw. That wasn’t a wolf he’d killed; it was an innocent man. I’d seen emotion light up the eyes of the wolves we’d hunted. Each time, it had been Maurice that snuffed that light out of them. Each time, he’d shown no remorse.

I looked out the window to the distant tree line, the edge of the wild. I knew what I had to do. I crossed the room, opened the door, and ran. I heard shouting behind me. In spite of myself, I looked back, and there I saw Maurice standing in the doorway of our house. I heard his desperate cry for me to stop, to come back, but I was already gone.

Running through the dark forest, bounding over fallen branches and logs, straying from the path I was warned never body, so hot and raw that I threw off my coat and shirt, yet my body didn’t register the cold. In that moment, a heavy weight that had been tied around my neck had suddenly been thrown off and my heart and soul soared to the sky.

I didn’t grow tired or exhausted. I just ran and ran and ran, until I came to the edge of a lake. I walked over to the

myself clearly. My image was blurry and shifting, like my face was unable to decide on a form it liked best.

I suddenly grew very thirsty and longed for a drink from the crystal waters. I bent my head down and drank, cupping my hands to get as much water as possible. But that wasn’t enough.

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thrust my head under the surface of the water and drank in as much as possible.

I re-emerged when the blaze died out and my lungs ached for air. As I shook out my hair, I noticed the water was still as ice, as if I’d never touched it. I saw something on its surface and leaned closer to inspect it. Staring back at me was a wolf with ice-blue eyes. I was startled but didn’t retreat. I bent my head closer, and it did the same. I moved my head to the side, and it mimicked. Our movements were in perfect sync. It dawned on me what I was looking at.

I looked down at my hands, but they still looked like me:

except there was something new in them. Something wild and untamed, free and joyful. I smiled.

I heard noise behind me, a rustling in the woods. I turned around to see Maurice standing at the edge of the clearing.

“Maurice,” I said, standing up and turning to face him.

wolf, the one that he’d used to end that man’s life. I looked into his eyes, searching for any sign of recognition, any sign of the man who’d raised me as his child. I found nothing but fear and the cold gaze of a hardened killer.

“Maurice, wait —” I tried to say. My breath caught as he raised the gun, without hesitation, and took aim at me.

I ran for the trees. forest fell silent, save for the distant howl of wolves.

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Joy Palace Nathan Chu Kenyon College

I

’d like to imagine that for a few, very brief moments in our lives, we can slip out of ourselves and view the world through someone else. It’s a ridiculous thought, being able to truly understand things from another person’s point of view, and wonder.

For instance, my mom and dad have very different views about healthcare. My mom believes that it should be universal.

She’s not a big fan of big government, but she believes it’s a human right to live healthily. Considering how she’s had to watch her mother and father go and how she’s growing old herself, it’s not hard to imagine why she thinks that way.

I think out of all the people in my life, my mom might have come the closest to understanding another person. She started practicing medicine back when being a doctor meant you could take the time necessary to care for your patients as people. She’s retired now.

My dad, on the other hand, works as an ER doc. Here’s his take: What did I see last night? Oh, the usual. Headache, abdominal pain, tiredness, anxiety, diarrhea, vomiting. ‘I’m depressed, I’m suicidal, I’m hallucinating because I’m on acts out the last bit with hands raised and eyes rolled, voice pitched a little higher, mocking.

I think that’s why I’ve never wanted to be a doctor, because my parents would always come home and complain about their day, their patients, their workplace. All I ever heard was

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frustration and confusion. And I can never tell if it’s that my parents are frustrated by their patients or themselves.

I want to know why. Why my parents continued to practice despite it all, despite feeling so pinned by paperwork and charting, patients’ complaints and lab delays, call and night shift. I want to know why my sister followed in their footsteps.

It seems masochistic, submitting yourself to all that pain, your patients’ pain, their families’ pain, the pain of endless forms, and never seeing your children. I can’t bring myself to think about it.

That’s why my girlfriend broke up with me. She dumped me on Christmas Eve over text. She told me that I didn’t get it, that I would never get it, and that I would never care enough to try to get it. Then she broke it off right there. I don’t remember what “it” was, but I know that she broke up with me because I could never understand her pain.

And as I write this, I wonder if I will ever understand my own pain. I’m scared of it being a thought — that it’s just another line of text that I tell myself I felt instead of what I actually felt. I honestly can’t remember which it is.

What I do remember is feeling empty on that Christmas Eve, like a bell that was ringing with everyone else’s emotions.

I thought that maybe, maybe if I could help someone, maybe I’d understand my parents and my ex and my sister, and maybe I’d stop feeling so empty. Maybe there was a sense of victory, a kind of accomplishment in watching someone walk back into the world. So rather than learning how to be a single, complete person again, I buried myself in other people. I tried to understand their pain and forget my own.

That’s how I was when I met Barry Kerning.

My sophomore spring, I had been hired as a course tutor was the only one who had applied. I wasn’t a philosophy major or even a minor, but apparently my résumé was acceptable, and they hired me. I had hours every Tuesday and Thursday from seven to ten.

Every Tuesday at exactly seven, Barry would march into the room reserved for tutors and waggle his head around looking

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for me. I always sat in the same corner. It became a kind of greeting between us.

❦. day on the “job.” This morning I had attended their third lecture and been paraded around by the professor. “Tell me what the heck happened in class today.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I take it you didn’t do the reading?”

Barry shook his head. “No, I did the reading. I just don’t understand any of it. Isn’t this the kind of stuff they’ve been trying to rip out of science classes? Hey! Don’t roll your eyes at me! Whoever this Cleanthes guy is, he sure sounds like an ‘evolution isn’t real!’ kind of guy.”

“Well, yes and no. I mean, Hume died before Darwin was born, so there wasn’t really the idea of evolution like we know it.”

“But I mean his whole deal is that capital-G God created the planet, right?”

That’s true, but that’s not really his argument; that’s what they all kind of think.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” He threw his arms down, just missing the table, and rolled his head back to gaze at the ceiling.

“I won’t, I won’t!” I tried to wave my hands to settle him back down. It was only a week into the semester; I didn’t want to have someone walk out on me already. “Look, what Cleanthes really wants to say is that we, as humans, can know what kind of God made the universe. That’s what the Argument from Design is.” I was glad my voice was under control. It wasn’t annoying or lecture-y at least.

“I don’t get how that’s different from saying God created the universe. Why are they teaching something like that in college?”

I laughed. I had had the same reaction freshman year. “Just entertain me for a bit. Let’s say that you were walking down Carmen beach on the weekend and that you found a camera, right?” Barry nodded. “And one of the things you could suppose about that camera is that it had a creator, right?”

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“Sure.”

“And why would you think that?” Barry shrugged. I sighed.

“Because it’s too intricately made. It has too many parts to have been arranged there naturally.”

“So?” “That’s the argument.” I shrugged. “The world is so complex and interactive that it has to have a creator. It couldn’t have just gotten here without some sort of plan, and not only that, but that planner is someone like us.”

“Well, what about evolution? We know that things can evolve from single-celled things.” Barry folded his arms and screwed up his face into ball of wrinkles.

I smiled. “Well, natural selection, but yeah. Think of it like this: isn’t natural selection a wonderfully organized and systematic process? Don’t you think that the process had a designer too?”

Barry groaned, “Oh c’mon! That’s stupid.”

“I’m just saying,” I shrugged. “It’s possible that it could have been.”

“So you’re telling me that God created the earth?”

“Well, no. That’s what the argument’s trying to say.”

“But you’re telling me there’s some kind of design that the world runs on,” he persisted, leaning in and setting his elbows gave him a burnished glow. “You’re telling me that things like death and divorce and illness are all part of a plan and that that plan was made by someone like you and me.”

I closed my eyes. “I’m not going to say if I believe in that or not … but that’s the argument in the text, alright?”

Barry leaned back and shook his head. “Unbelievable. What kind of person would want to believe that?” he spat. “If I were God, I’d settle for something simpler. Maybe just the good I silently agreed.

❦.

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and the buildings your classes are in. Then you start routing your weekday: where do I go to study on campus, when do I wake up, when is it okay to crash in a study room? Is ever acceptable to be caught crying in a toilet stall?

I never saw Barry cry, but thinking back on it, I’m not sure if I was ever able to cry that semester either.

In some ways, I was glad for craziness of starting classes.

It kept me from thinking about anything too deeply. In that case, is our academic calendar a blessing or a woeful mess of school year?

Like Barry’s God, would I be able to make a perfect calendar, be able to excise all the bad parts of education? No. The thought is laughable, though perhaps my sister, who has become a famous surgeon now, would be able to lay out the whole year in front of her and trim away all the days that hurt.

Her services come at a steep price, but a few lucky patients can go under the gas and wake up with one fewer problem.

The rest of us will have to bear our pain.

Doctors are probably the closest things to God in our world. There is a term in the medical community: “The God Squad.” My dad abhors the thought of participating in such a group. I think it’s because his father was killed by one.

When you’re on the God Squad, you decide who gets the hospital beds; you decide who gets the ventilators, and, in my grandfather’s case, who gets the prototype dialysis machine?

This answer is not my grandfather.

Sometimes, though, I genuinely ask myself that calendar question. How would I organize the school year? How would I decide what goes where and who gets the time to matter? And inevitably I think back to that spring when I met Barry and wonder what his response would have been. Unfortunately, I have no idea how he would have responded.

Again, the onus for this lies squarely on my shoulders.

Wasn’t I his tutor? Shouldn’t I have been listening? That’s what sets good doctors apart from bad ones — they listen. My mom loves that phrase.

Here’s what I did know about Barry: he was from New Jersey but didn’t have a Jersey accent. He was a second

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semester freshman. He and his parents weren’t on amicable terms. He had an aunt and uncle who lived in the next state over whom he had spent Thanksgiving break with. He had a large nose, claimed that it was Jewish but that he himself wasn’t, and that he wished it wouldn’t get so oily because it was always disconcerting when he blew his nose and the tissue paper was see-through.

From this it’s clear why my girlfriend broke up with me.

❦.

“So do you understand?” I scanned Barry’s face, which was as drained of blood as it was of comprehension. Pale enough to see a red dusting of freckles in the usual places. Freckles — those were always the things people seemed to focus on.

Blemishes and dark spots. I guessed we liked seeing those to remind ourselves that everyone else wasn’t as perfect as we thought.

“So … There’s this guy named Miller.”

“Yes,” I nodded.

“And he says that he has a hand.”

“Yes, go on.”

“And he knows he has a hand because he can show his hand, and he can see it. And other people know he has a hand because they can see it. Right?”

I must have screwed up my face because Barry groaned and threw himself back into his chair. I quickly glanced around the room, hoping the other tutors weren’t throwing dirty looks over their shoulders at us.

“I don’t get it! Just hurry up and tell me!”

“Hey now,” I laughed, “you’ll get it. Don’t worry. It’s not because people can see it that they agree his hand exists. It’s that because they agree that it exists. That’s basically Miller’s Social Epistemology.”

“Epistatic-what?” Barry shook his head. He had been letting his hair grow out, and his bangs tossed themselves about, a sort of soft straw whirlwind. Whirlwind seemed like

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was often furrowed now, too, shoulders tense, as if preparing for an actual storm to break around him.

“Epistemology. It’s just the study of how we know things.”

I shrugged and leaned back in my chair. We were making good time tonight. It was only eight.

“Sounds needlessly complicated,” Barry huffed.

“I mean, it is. But you’re the one who took philosophy.”

“Well, just because my parents made me.”

I frowned. “You didn’t want to take it? Why didn’t you just … not?” I took a drink from my water bottle to shut myself up.

“Yeah well…” Barry sighed, shoulders sagging. “I just — ” He clapped a hand over his face. “I’m only taking this class because my mom and dad told me I needed to take it. Just about the only thing that they agree on anymore. If I wasn’t taking this course, I think one of them might have killed the other. That’s the kind of state they’re in nowadays.”

“I mean, that’s kind of how Miller’s theory works.” Damn me and my stupid mouth. That was another thing my ex ragged about. I didn’t know when to shut up and give up.

Barry just looked at me.

“I mean, social epistemology is when you know something when people agree on it. So like when both of your parents say that philosophy is important, then that’s the nature of your reality. So like when people agree, what they agree on is what’s the truth for them,” I stammered over myself. “ … So I guess I should just do whatever people tell me to do, right? Does that mean that they really should go at each other’s throats if they’re both dying to? I guess if we all agree that we’re happy, and we say that we’re happy, then we’re happy even if we’re lying, is that it?”

“No! I’m just — Barry,” it was my turn for shoulders to slump, “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to say it like that!”

Barry turned away to slide his notes back into his bag.

“Sure. Yeah, I get told that a lot. I just wish when people said they’re sorry they meant it. All it really means is ‘I feel bad,’ not ‘I won’t let it happen again,’ not ‘I’m sorry,’” he hissed.

“Barry!” I set both of my hands on his shoulders and tried to look him in the eyes. He wouldn’t look at me. “I really am sorry.”

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“Yeah … I know.” He brushed my hands off and walked out of the room.

❦

How do we know what we know? During my freshman year, my professor explained philosophy in three branches: metaphysics, epistemology, and morals. Metaphysics is unfortunately not an awesome form of physics that utilizes lasers to cut into the deep reality of our world and extract knowledge in its purest form (though I’m certain my undergraduate roommate who now has a PhD in cold clear cut — if you can ignore the egoists, utilitarianists, and Kantians yelling in the background. Epistemology, on the third hand, asks how we know what we know. Is there any kind of guarantee that the thoughts we think are real?

I have heard that living in an unstable household or with one parent or moving around multiple times is likely to make a child more imaginative. I have also heard that most creative types tend to have depression. There is also a very weak correlation between artists and weird working hours.

Barry told me these things in between paragraphs, eyes Barry said they were true? If they were, I think Barry and my ex Most of these creativity factoids were mentioned while we worked through his Nichomachean Ethics essay, the prompt being: what about a person who is unable to participate in normal life? How are they supposed to be ethical and develop virtue?

Naturally, that begs the question: what is normal? And to Barry, what is unstable and stable? And what is creative? And to me, how do you know that?

Of course, we didn’t ask each other these things. We didn’t really talk much at all. What I knew was that Barry came to my tutoring hours every Tuesday at seven p.m. and that I needed to help him through the week’s readings. I didn’t really hear him at all. If I had been paying attention, maybe I could have removed “through the week’s readings.”

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Perhaps I was too sensitive. I was too scared to ask him directly about home or his parents or any number of things. I hated when people asked me how I was doing, how I felt about the breakup, if I was dealing with classes alright, did I need an extension on my essays? I knew how questions hurt, how they needled you in that tender way. A question cuts you quickly, and the question asker uses the tip of their question to lift that I didn’t want to hurt Barry. But I didn’t know what to do or what to ask or what was really going on.

Primum non nocere. First do no harm.

Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that doctors will never have all the relevant information and sometimes you just need to set a treatment course. My dad, as an ER doc, very rarely has enough information between poor records, patients’ faulty memories, and the crush of the waiting room.

❦ “Hey, mind if I sit here?” Barry pulled out a seat across the dining table from me.

“Sure, what’s up?” Shame made me say this. Barry hadn’t been coming to my tutoring hours for the past couple of weeks. I had seen him around campus but only glimpses.

Once, I had thought about waving to him, but my body froze, and he rounded the corner of McAlister. Why did I freeze? Was it because I didn’t want to talk to him? To ask him how he was doing and get in another tirade about his parents and their squabbling and their lawyers? Or was I worried he would ask me the same question?

“Well, uh,” he dodged my eyes. I noticed he hadn’t brought any dinner.

“You already eat?”

“No,” he shook his head. “Listen, I just — I … ” I nodded. “It’s okay. Take your time.” It was almost seven, but it was Wednesday, so I didn’t have any tutoring. “If you don’t want to say it then don’t force yourself, okay?”

He nodded.

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chair, eyes always downwards as if he could see his shoes his knuckles, I said, “You wanna go down to the beach this weekend? We can just hang out. It might be good to just take a day off…” It was all I could think of.

“Thanks … ” Barry nodded once and continued playing I slid him my plate with the rest of my fries on it. “Come on. You should at least eat something.” I tried to smile and give a small laugh, anything to lighten the mood.

“Don’t you think it would be great if we could just push back time?” he started suddenly.

I cocked my head and frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean every time I wake up, it seems like there’s something new and horrible. Like a war in the East or a new wouldn’t it just be nice to just wake up somewhere different, sometime different. Some place where we didn’t have to worry about everything around us.” to joke. “ … Remember the day we met? That day way back in January where Professor Boren had just started teaching Hume?”

“Yeah?”

“Wouldn’t it — wouldn’t it be great if that God they were talking about, if he made a little house with everything happy in it? Wouldn’t it be great to wake up there? I’d like to go there. I’d like to have a party and invite everyone I know, and there’d be enough for everyone, and we could all agree to be happy, and we would be! Why didn’t God make the world like that? That seems like a much better design than the one we have now!”

“Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay.” I tried to lay a hand on his alright?”

“I miss not knowing things. I wish I hadn’t taken

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philosophy. I don’t like thinking like this.”

“Hey, man. You’re strong. You can get through this. Life isn’t easy, but you can do this.”

“I don’t want to do that! I just want to forget!”

I felt my body start to crumple. “ … Barry, it’s not your fault. No is going to — no one can blame you for what’s going on.”

“It’s over. It’s not going on anymore. They signed it, and they’re over! Marriage, done, divorced.” He chucked it out.

It was an attack, an “I told you so.” One he knew I couldn’t answer. “ … Barry … ” “I gotta go!” Barry scrambled out of his seat and vanished out the dining hall doors.

❦ Doctors often make the very worst patients and the very worst doctors for their family. In the former case, it’s because they think they know what’s going on, and in the latter case, it’s because they think they know what’s going on. As you can see, the problem is a conceit of knowledge, that you as the mother or father or sister or brother or doctor know your patient better than anyone else. Another way to look at it is that they care too much.

Sometimes, I wonder if my girlfriend was trying to avoid this with me. Was cutting me off a way to keep herself from treating me? Was I already empty back then? It occurs to me now that she was also pre-med. I think I have been cursed to be surrounded by doctors, both medical and of philosophy.

If I am being honest with myself, I should have followed her example with Barry and referred him to a counselor. I wasn’t a doctor and wasn’t planning on being one. I thought upperclassman who could help him. But the truth is I took apart his problem like a doctor. I thought I saw a cause, his symptoms, and a treatment method. Of course, the sad thing is, I’m not a doctor, and so I had no idea exactly what I was doing.

There is another golden rule of medicine. Do not treat

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your patients when you yourself are sick. I have seen this rule broken more times than I can count.

❦ “Hey, let’s talk today. I’m worried about you.”

“Ah, sorry. I’m not really here for that. I’m more worried about this paper. I’ve got to get a good grade on this if I want to pass.”

“Barry, I don’t want to push you, but I think it’s better if you vented a little, okay? Y’know, I can stay late and work with you too.”

“Well, I don’t want to. And you are pushing, y’know?”

“I’m sorry, okay? Look, you’re going to live whether you pass the class or not, but I don’t like seeing you like this, with all these thoughts eating away at you. They’re just going to keep hanging over you.”

“And what would you know about that?” “ … Barry, I just want to help you.”

“Then help me with my essay!” “ … Alright.”

❦ half-staff for a day.

❦ I raced along the concrete wall towards the closest stairs down to the sand. Just past the shore, the storm had swallowed up everything else. If I could just get closer, maybe I could catch sight of him and bring him back. Someone had told me that they had seen him wandering around the beach.

Tuesday.

Sand crushed under my heel. I tripped, face skidding into the wet muck. It was soft and squelched when I yanked my arms out of the beach.

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The tide wall disappeared from behind me. Everything was solid fog, and the only thing I could see were his footprints.

They had to be his. A storm warning had been issued this morning. No one in their right minds would have gone down to the beach. He wasn’t in his right mind. Both of his parents had sent him letters, and he had thrown both of them at me, unopened, that Tuesday, as if he had been warning me to follow him.

The clouds parted a little — enough so that I could see the shoreline — right up to where the footprints were being swallowed by the tide. I stumbled forward. At the edge of the expanse within the storm’s cage, like the eye of a hurricane.

A mansion rolled along the surface of the sea, above glassy waves and under the gray sky. Amber rays spilled out from its puppet show. Splayed against wax paper screens, they danced and laughed and seemed to sing.

It was so quiet. Even at the edges of the clouds, I could see little sparks of blue lightning but no thunder.

The dark wood of the house cut across the clouds, and the light bursting from the windows made the whole thing seem voices drifted out to meet me at the shore.

I felt that everything I wanted, everything a person could want, was in there. Warmth, light … love. A place you could drown in and forget everything.

I could hear laughter, even individual voices. A girl in her teens, the deep bass of a black man, a high-pitched giggle, and then — I even heard her voice, my girlfriend’s, or really, my ex’s.

And for a minute, I stood staring out across the water, wondering, wondering if I could go back. And I felt weak.

I felt stupid. Everything I had been working on the past four months, was I really going to throw it away? I thought I had moved past her. I hadn’t thought of her a single time in the past month, had I? I didn’t need to think about her — I needed to think about Barry! I didn’t need help; Barry needed help. I needed to help Barry, not feel sorry for myself for being

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dumped.

I felt anger boil up in my stomach, only stoppered by that familiar aching. I was alone. I really hadn’t done anything. If I had, then I wouldn’t be out here in the storm, chasing Barry, who wouldn’t be out here if I had actually been helping him.

What had I done? I had set up my tutoring hours and let Barry talk and used his problems to drown out my own, and now I was alone on the shore.

Soon it wasn’t just laughter leaking out of the house or the waving shadows. I could smell food. The smell of sizzling meat and smoked wood, alcohol, and whatever else was being roasted, maybe beets or parsnips.

It really was a perfect little party across the waves.

I wonder if Barry made it.

❦ I blink and the palace vanishes.

I’m tempted to follow Barry into the lake. For a brief second, I imagine how he felt wading into the cold waters, muscles freeze and cramp, and then the sudden spasm of warmth as the water swallowed him whole.

My feet are wet, but I stay on the shore.

Is this how my parents felt when they lost a patient?

Is this how my ex felt when her mom died?

Is this how Barry felt when his parents divorced?

Is this how I felt when Barry Kerning committed suicide?

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Those Left Behind Joshua Lee University of Washington BREAKING:

By Allison YeunThe Weekly Edit May 15, 1988

from Meadowbrook, Wisconsin. After a lengthy and extensive effort from the Meadowbrook Police Department, Sheriff Emile Barlow has called off the search.

Blackhawk Technical College in the fall.

county-wide search for Hughes began. His car was discovered been found since.

“Without his car, there’s only so far he could have gotten,” Barlow said. “He probably bought a plane ticket, but there’s no

“I hope that wherever he is, he’s safe,” Marsha Hughes, Blaine’s mother, said. “He didn’t even say goodbye. And I can’t believe they’re giving up so soon.”

T H O S E

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B E H I N D

With graduation in less than a month for Meadowbrook High’s their classmate. Over Hughes’ many years of volunteering and community service, he has undoubtedly left a legacy in Meadowbrook.

“I think about him every day,” Lucy Kwon, Hughes’ girlfriend, said. “Things will never be the same.”

If you have any information about Blaine Hughes’ whereabouts, call the Meadowbrook Police Department at

❦

July 14, 2013

The domed gym of Meadowbrook High loomed high over Allison’s car. Looking at the strange building, she wore a face she would be face to face with this building again, she would have laughed, punched them, or both.

As she got out of the car, she wondered: Why did I come here? Am I overdressed?

Will she be there?

Couples both familiar and unfamiliar entered the gym.

Even before it was her job, she developed a knack for reading people. She could feel the nervous energy coming from the place. Excitement is close to anxiety, after all.

Walking up to the double doors of the gymnasium, she saw elaborate fairy lights strung up across the ceiling. Coolers and dinner platters dotted the long cafeteria tables. Onstage, above it, at the far end of the room, hung a banner that read:

“Welcome Back, Class of 1988!”

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Of all the places to go, she decided to start at the beer coolers. It was Meadowbrook, after all; what better “Could you get me one, too?” a familiar voice whispered in her ear as she reached in.

Allison jumped and turned to see a face known only to her deep recesses of memory. “Lucy Kwon.”

Lucy raised her left hand with a smirk, revealing a wedding ring. “Lucy Johnson now, actually.” She stepped back and took “Thank you, you look great yourself. How have you been? I haven’t heard from you since, well—” “Lucy!” called a voice from the bleachers. Allison could see guy that Allison had never seen before.

With a smirk, Lucy took Allison’s hand. “Hold that thought,” Lucy said as she dragged Allison over to the group, where Allison gave the “how have you beens” to Michael.

When it came to the mystery man, Lucy took a seat next to him and took his hand.

“Allison, meet Douglas, my husband. Douglas, this is my old friend, Allison.”

Allison knew who he was before she said it, but even still, “Nice to meet you,” she said, extending her hand.

“Likewise, Allison,” he replied with a smile, taking it.

He was a good-looking guy, but collected, put together, calm. Not what Allison expected Lucy to end up with.

“Did you guys hear they’re rezoning Uncle Pat’s Farm?”

Michael said, a continuation of their last conversation.

Allison’s blood froze. “Wait, what?” Her wide eyes met Lucy’s in a shared panic.

“Yeah, the whole lot. Oh, I guess you guys didn’t know.

There’s been a lot of development on that side of town. It’s strip mall city down there.”

Fidgeting in her seat, Lucy scooched closer to her

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husband, which Allison watched curiously. “I mean, that place is haunted, right?” Lucy said.

“Target Corporation doesn’t care,” Michael replied.

Her heart was racing. This had to be dealt with soon.

The sound of tapping on a microphone interrupted the conversation. The whole group scanned the room, eventually landing on a skinny, blonde woman with a piece of paper in her hand. It was the old class president, but Allison had forgotten her name.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Thank you for coming back from all corners of the country to this little town of ours. It has been so nice seeing all these familiar faces,” she read robotically. Behind her, Allison heard Lucy giggle under her breath.

“First, I would like to hold a moment of silence for Blaine Hughes.” That shut Lucy up. “He was a role model and beacon of support for Meadowbrook, and we hold him close in our memories tonight.”

Later, after the speech, Michael broke the silence.

“Would you believe me if I told you I hadn’t thought about Blaine in years?”

Allison glanced at Lucy, who was looking Michael in the eyes with deadly seriousness. “I think about him sometimes.

He’s like an old ghost.”

The group stood in a solemn, awkward silence. “I know what you mean,” was all Allison could muster.

April 24, 1988

❦

the quiet of Allison’s upstairs bedroom. While her parents were reading in the living room downstairs, she was sitting at her desk, planning out the three articles she had due for The Weekly Edit’s Graduation Edition. A loud knock on the door sent her upright — she knew who it had to be. Only one person ever knocked instead of ringing the doorbell.

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“Ttal, you expecting someone?” She heard her mother yell in a thick Korean accent.

"Ani, umma,” she replied politely, rushing down the stairs to open the door. Outside was a rain-soaked Lucy, decked in was a red cut under her lip and the skin underneath her right eye was starting to swell.

“Oh jeez,” Allison mumbled. Lucy immediately began to tear up and fell into her arms.

“Who is it?” her dad yelled from inside.

“It’s Lucy!” Allison called back as she took her inside. She could feel Lucy shivering. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she whispered.

“Oh! Hi Lucy! Next time, tell her to —” her mom began.

Lucy upstairs. Reaching her room, Allison planted her on the bed and went to the bathroom to grab a towel. When she came back, she saw that Lucy hadn’t moved an inch.

“Are you alright?” Allison asked, going to dry her hair from behind.

“I broke up with Blaine. He didn’t like that,” she said through a shiver.

Allison took off the jacket and wrapped the towel around her. “That fucking prick … ” she began, sitting in shock.

“Don’t be like that.” Lucy turned to face her, rubbing her red nose with the towel.

“He just knows you’re going to Ann Arbor and he can’t face the fact that you’ve always been too good for him.”

“I know that,” Lucy said, more to herself than to Allison.

“You’re gonna be alright. You should probably get out of those wet clothes. Get something out of the closet.”

Lucy stood and began to take off her tank top, which made Allison close her eyes.

“God, you’re such a dweeb,” Lucy said. From her voice, Allison could tell she was smiling.

“It’s just simple courtesy.”

“You can open your eyes now.”

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Allison did as instructed and saw her wearing a different pair of jeans and a Journey baseball T-shirt. The towel was wrapped up and around her hair. She looked, simply, beautiful.

visceral emotions of her yearning, her longing to be closer to her best friend. Maybe it was just that, wanting to be better friends, she’d think to herself, in some desperate attempt at rationalization. A part of her deep down knew better.

“How do I look?” Lucy asked.

The rain was beginning to let up, and they could see the sun was hanging low in the sky.

“Wanna get out of here?” Allison offered.

“Sure. Uncle Pat’s? We can probably get there before sundown.”

“You bet. I’m not driving.”

❦

July 14, 2013--two hours later

In her dark car, Allison watched the time tick away on

discreetly parked near Lucy’s childhood house, where Lucy and Douglas were staying for the reunion. Around half-past ten, Lucy came out of the house, rolling a carry-on suitcase behind her. After throwing the suitcase into the trunk of the hatchback, she slid into the passenger seat.

“Christ, what took you so long?” Allison asked.

“I told Doug that I was going out for drinks with you. Nice to see you too, by the way.”

“This is important, do you want people to know — ” “I know it’s important! Listen, I’m sorry I’m late, let’s go.”

Allison started her car and headed out of the burbs.

Against her will, she started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Lucy asked, curiously irritated.

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“I can remember a period in your life when you would time your boyfriend visits to coincide with when your mom wasn’t home.”

“Yeah, well … we’re all a little older now. I’m married.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“What did you think of Doug?”

“He seems nice. Better than any of the others.” Allison under the suburban streetlights.

“He is. He really is,” Lucy said contentedly.

After a pause, Allison decided what to say. “I’m happy for you. I’m glad you ended up with a good one.”

A smile formed under those streetlights. The car made a turn out of the suburbs, past the old houses and into the diner/ gas station section of Meadowbrook.

“This place has changed so much,” Allison murmured to herself.

“You ever been back?”

“No, never saw a reason to after my parents moved. You went to Michigan, right?”

“Yeah! I studied architecture.”

“Is that what you’re doing out in San Francisco nowadays?”

“It’s what my husband’s doing … ” Lucy trailed off. “You know how it is, though.”

“Easy for you to say, Miss Washington Post. You know, I always knew that you’d succeed at whatever you ended up doing. I never could have imagined that you’d become an editor at a place like that, though.”

Allison chortled. “Don’t you want more, though? More than watching someone live your dreams?”

“I’m living my dreams right now, Allison. I have two young boys at home. I have a husband that I don’t hate.”

There was an awkward silence for a moment before Lucy gathered the courage to ask what she wanted to ask. “Are you happy?”

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Allison thought about this deeply. “I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished so far,” she began. “But I’ll never really be happy with where I’m at. Gotta keep moving toward greater things.”

“Kids are kind of those ‘greater things,’ aren’t they?”

“Do you seriously think I’m the type of person to have kids? Ever since we met, I’ve always said that I don’t want kids.”

“Yeah, but you were a teenager! Teenagers change their minds all the time.”

“Not me.” a half-hour drive to the lot. The car grew silent with nervous anticipation for what might be waiting for them. At this hour, on a Sunday, the roads were completely empty, save for Allison’s Prius. In that sense, it was uncannily calming.

They felt unwatched, alone, free to do whatever they had to do. At least for Allison, a small part of her expected that she would have to do it eventually. Come all the way back to Meadowbrook just for this.

“I have no idea. Bones?”

“I hope that’s all that’s left.”

❦

April 24, 1998--one hour later

A labyrinth of dirt and long-dead corn husks wound towards an eloquent two-story manor. According to local legend, it belonged to a Patrick Morrissey, the last in a long line of farmers. He died alone, without any family or friends, and the house was abandoned for years.

It was the site of dares for a generation of kids, Allison and Lucy included. When the two of them got there, they did what they always did at Uncle Pat’s: rubbed a black stone on the large well in the front of the house and slapped the top of the

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frame as they went through the doors that led into the foyer.

Lucy took Allison’s hand, releasing goosebumps all over her body as they laughed and ran up the dusty grand staircase and There was a patio there that reached over the dead crops and faced west. As Lucy swung the doors open, Allison remembered why they braved the haunted walls of Pat’s house all those times. Hand in hand, wrapped up in blankets, sitting on the splintered deck, they watched the sun set over a cotton candy-colored sky. The railing was busted over, so their view was completely unbroken.

“This never gets old,” Allison said.

“Never,” Lucy muttered. “I’m gonna miss it next year.”

A wave of melancholy passed through Allison. Next year.

Lucy in Michigan. And she’d be all the way in New York, completely alone.

“Are you scared? About it all?” Lucy asked, squeezing her hand.

Allison’s heart started racing. “I mean, it’d be stupid if I wasn’t.”

“It’s okay to be afraid. There’s not a lot of time left. We’re just gonna make this summer the best summer of our lives.

And after that, we can write to each other.”

Allison sighed wistfully. “If only you could read.”

“You are so strange,” Lucy said, yanking on Allison’s arm. “I try to be nice to you for once … ” “Why do you hang out with me, then?” Allison replied teasingly.

Lucy thought about this for a moment, a big grin on her face. “Maybe because we’re the only Asian girls in this whole fucking town,” she began. “And somebody’s gotta keep you from going crazy. Might as well be me.”

At that moment, there was something cosmic, something undiluted and pure, pushing Allison towards her. Leaning closer, still holding her hand, she replied, “What makes you the one?”

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For a moment, there was confusion in Lucy’s eyes, confusion that scared Allison. What surprised Allison was how Lucy then leaned in and pressed their lips together. Shaking, unsure, they parted for a moment. Looking into Lucy’s equally confused, puffy eyes, Allison was lost for words. What do you even do after that?

Allison pushed in, kissing her again. Deeply, warmly, softly.

Allison’s left hand gripped Lucy’s tighter and tighter, while her right began to work its way up her leg and onto her stomach.

Lucy’s warm hand slid onto Allison’s neck, holding it gently.

It felt like the culmination of years for Allison, and it felt like she spent years on those lips. Time lost meaning in those long seconds, and when they eventually, slowly pulled away, she wanted more.

Lucy’s lip was trembling. “What was that?”

“I … ” Allison began. “I don’t know.”

“I feel … strange. I mean, I’m not, you know … ” Allison’s heart sank. “You just kissed me.”

That smile snuck its way back onto Lucy’s face. “I did.”

Their hands locked together again. For those brief there is some hope for what lies ahead.

The sound of a car approaching made them jump, the manor, both girls saw the red muscle car and knew exactly who it was. It was close enough; they knew that Blaine saw everything they were doing.

“Fuck,” Lucy mumbled.

“Probably followed us.”

From below, they both heard an angry “LUCY!” reverberating through the halls. Blaine was in the house.

Allison stood and took her hand. “Come on, let’s go.”

Unwavering, Lucy stared back inside the house. In a couple of seconds, Blaine would be up those stairs and in their faces.

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Yet, she didn’t move, and Allison could tell that it wasn’t fear.

“Lucy, let’s go,” she repeated sternly. Lucy stood up but didn’t move anywhere. When Blaine marched up those stairs, Allison let go of her hand, more out of terror than anything else.

“What the fuck is this?” he yelled, raising his hands in disbelief. He was a stocky guy, and in this way of anger, he was absolutely terrifying.

“Walk away, Blaine,” Lucy said calmly.

“I’m not gonna walk away — ” He was on the patio. “ — not now!”

“We’re done. There’s nothing left to say.”

Allison watched the exchange cautiously, putting herself behind Blaine.

“Oh, there’s plenty left. We’ll see what your friends and your parents and everyone thinks of you and your little dyke friend.”

“You wouldn’t — ” as Lucy did. Across Lucy’s face, Blaine swung at full force, knocking her to the ground. Her blood boiling, Allison took hold of a small pot with a dead plant from the ground.

Blaine was hovering over Lucy. “Try me, you stupid, worthless — ” Allison broke the pot over his head as hard as she could, making him holler in pain. Not knowing what to do next, she jumped on his back and wrapped her arms around his neck.

Instinctively, Blaine reached over his head and pulled down on her hair.

“Lucy!” Allison screamed, bloodcurdlingly, desperately.

That brought Lucy to her feet. She grabbed Blaine’s hands, his eyes. He shrieked every profanity as he shoved Lucy to the ground and rammed Allison back into the doorframe.

Allison felt the sharpest pain in her back and let go, coughing, as he released her hair. In what seemed like slow motion,

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Blaine stumbled forwards in a panic, clutching at his eyes and groaning, walking closer and closer to the edge.

In her agonized delusion, Allison saw an opportunity. Lucy saw what was coming.

“Wait!” Lucy screamed, but it was too late.

Allison stood, gathered speed, and rammed into Blaine as hard as she could. Knocked back, he tried to plant his foot, but there was nothing below it. With a guttural howl, he fell off of the porch, down the two stories, and hit the ground with a sickening crack.

Lucy, her face more bruised than before, backed into the house in tears of disbelief. Allison, her breathing shaky, her the destroyed railing. On the ground was Blaine Hughes and a giant mark of blood on the stone well where his head landed.

❦

July 14, 2013--half an hour later

What used to be a dirt turnoff was now a large strip mall containing a Planet Fitness, Lowes, and a Walgreens.

“Are we going to be able to do this?” Allison asked, panic in her voice.

“I mean, nobody ever found him. He’s still gotta be there.”

Driving past the storefronts and deeper into the grasslands, they ended up back at Uncle Pat’s. Even underneath the pale moonlight, they could still see luscious foliage over a single patch of grass on the north side of the house. Allison recalled the agonizing process those decades ago, through uncontrollable sobs and terrible pain, lifting the body to the farthest part of the house, searching through the car and washing up. The silence of the ride back.

Now just as silent, the two women exited the car, went to the trunk, and pulled out a box of surgical gloves, two shovels, and the weighted carry-on suitcase. It was a team effort — they

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both covered it up, so they both got to dig. After three-and-ahalf feet of fertilized dirt, they found him: a skeleton covered in jeans and a varsity jacket.

“We did what we had to do,” Allison said, more to herself than anyone.

“Yeah,” Lucy muttered, kneeling down to pick up the skull.

It was a robotic, silent process — they had to completely been eaten away, or rather, transformed into something more, a healthier patch of greenery than any around it. Something good had come from Blaine Hughes, eventually.

Pulling out the stiffened jacket, Allison thought of her soul.

They were both there, her and Lucy, cleaning up this mess, but Allison was the one who pushed him. Blaine attacked them, and she fought back. He was going to tell everybody, so she Was it worth it, the weight of the act?

She thought of that kiss, all those years ago. Nothing had been better than that. It was the best moment of her life, followed immediately by the worst.

We did what we had to do, Allison thought.

They gathered everything that was left. Decades of decomposition already consumed the detritus. There was plenty of room in the suitcase for everything.

Seven miles west, near the Minnesota-Iowa border, there was a reservoir with a ten-foot cliff, the water going twenty feet deep. Another supposedly haunted place. Blaine Hughes was The drive back was silent. By the time they got back to things to be said, and yet, nobody spoke for a long time.

“How are you feeling?” Allison asked, stepping out of the car.

Lucy sighed, following suit. “It’s weird. I was afraid of this moment for so long, yet … I feel numb. He means so little to me now.”

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“It was a long time ago,” Allison said, her voice breaking.

Lucy walked over and embraced her. It was something so familiar, and yet so distant. A art of Allison wished they could be kids again, but deep down she knew how stupid that was.

“For what it’s worth, Allison, I’m sorry about how things ended up.”

“Me too.”

“I’m never going to see you again, am I?” “After all this, would you really want to?”

“You know I would. You were my best friend.”

A pause. Why not tell her?

“I loved you, Lucy. Back then … I loved you.”

Lucy let go of Allison, unsurprised. “I know. I didn’t then different, I think we would have made a great couple.”

Allison laughed gently. “Certainly not in Meadowbrook, Wisconsin.”

With a smile, Lucy leaned forward and kissed Allison on the cheek. “See you later.”

It was a sweet moment, and Allison understood her place in it. She got back into her car, ready to prepare for the long trip back home, back to New York. “See you, Lucy.”

❦ A week later, Allison was making afternoon tea. She’d just gotten home from work and checked the mail. In the stack of letters, she found a thin envelope from a “Lucy Kwon” in San

be the last, Allison still smiled. One was good enough.

•

P O E T R Y

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The Haunting of Bai Gui Paddy Qiu University of Kansas

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Up North Maya Gelsi Syracuse (Newhouse) University Clouds shout down into the street as the wind swirls together an apparition made of bright rain, sycamores, the smell of

are visible in the windows, so I place you inside them —standing at a sink, or setting the dining room table. I make a crowd or grains of salt, I eat you on toast for breakfast, I can no more escape you than a wave escapes the ocean. I stand on sharply wet streets and weigh the black night in my hand, swaying like a new bough.

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That School in Athens Meredith H. Benjamin Grinnell College --after Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ (1511) fresco in the Vatican.

in the painting the men argue in a phosphorescent room. i have spent all morning staring at Jesus on the cross. the silence was tense and awkward. so i asked him oh my god how’ve you been?? and which was cringey, i know, but in my defense the past few years, God has been a little off the grid.

i bite my tongue, pretending there’s no gaping difference between her and me. it seems most of my time these days is spent negotiating the sexuality of all of womankind but my feet hurt and my back was aching and i simply didn’t feel like getting into it with Christ today. so when he said that for him it’s been awhile, i just said in the painting the men argue

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and compared to all that Jesus stuff, i guess it’s more relatable? by far the most erratic of all erratic things, the hysterical thirst to be recalled as more than carbon and dust. in the painting, the men argue and Plato says to Aristotle, that Alex kid is Great but kick his ego down a notch. cause even in antiquity, no one likes a tool. because there’s Ptolemy with his celestial orb and we all know i would just come out and say it: eclipsing the space of the people around you won’t make you the fucking sun. and yes, i could’ve been more tactful, but it’s not my name on the plaque. forgive me, Jesus, for not believing in the consecrated power of waiting an eon for a man to come around and carve my own words into stone. i like the painting because on some level, it tells me the thing i want most to believe: that everyone interesting who ever lived is gathered together somewhere in a shiny marble room, marveling at the very miracle of having been someone back on earth. that if i can just get the right bearded man to want to paint me, epistemology and shiftings in the stars. that everyone who deserves it is somewhere in that room.

but then again, do you think Aristotle has ever broken down at the arrival gate in an airport?

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because in the painting, he has to argue and arguing makes him cry; because even with all this about those two degrees of global warming it is so much colder in New England than he’d remembered. and believing something hard enough has never made it true. so here’s the thing: i’m sure Aristotle deserved his admission to that famous School of Athens. and perhaps he really did get there on his own. but probe at a possibility in which luck has been stitched into his very DNA. in which a person can earn their success without earning their opportunities. in which the painting shows nothing more than the vastness of the Western frontier. i like to think after that, was honestly just the marijuana talking. was the goosebumps he woke up with after that dead boy hugged him in his sleep. was accidental and anonymous, and fuck the American Dream. was him just trying to crawl out of a hole. in the painting, the men argue so maybe Raphael can paint me too?

i swear if i had a buck for every time i lapsed my feminist religion cause i was trying to make a bitter man feel less sad, a note for every night i didn’t sleep as he baptized me with indecision, a penny for the things i thought, and did not say, i wouldn’t even need to buy my way into that painting;

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the sea and all the grief i’ve stored there Makenzie Hallstrom University of Washington That feeling I thought I grew away from comes back to me with the rising tide, and even though I have long since tossed you into the ocean, it seems I cannot stop searching the shoreline for your body.

whisper to me of your survival, tell me you were rescued by pirates, with them crossed the Border, and that now you are drifting away to the North and Neverland—as if it never happened— and that now you are so close to never existing at all.

(Oh— I could spend an eternity waiting for news of your shipwreck, scanning the newspapers for reports of your unfortunate demise, putting my ear to the wet sand in hope of hearing the

they will beckon me from the sea and all the grief I’ve stored there,

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and they can teach me to avoid death and all his companions, or how to escape hornets, or hands, or how to extricate one single burning memory from my corn maze mind and make it disappear forever, and then they can tell me that the best way to identify humanity is that the bite itches after the puncture.

So even as those whispers grow into a cacophony of what-ifs, and I can almost feel your barnacled hands grasping for more, I turn towards the light rising. The sun is soft upon my lips.

I realize I have spent enough time at the shore.

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Altar Boy The New School, Eugene Lang College --“after Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” Set the fork on the left and on top of the napkin; set the spoon on the right and next to the knife; don’t bite your nails at the dinner table, or I’ll polish them with deterrent; melt a Kraft Single in the microwave on your bagel if you really want to taste God; dump your dishes in the dishyourself a nice pile, be sure to stand clear of the hydrangeas, because that way you’ll preserve their bluish tint; rest on the cushion and not on the edge of the couch; is it true that you still write in your mother’s diary?; always say thank you when the nuns remark how much you’ve grown; sit with your legs uncrossed and not like the faggot you are so bent on becoming; stop writing and get a real job; you mustn’t eyes, you’ll look stoned or worse the devil; but I’ve worked prayer; this is how to say a prayer before the evening meal; this is how you stay silent when your father is drunk because he’s afraid of the faggot you are so bent on becoming;

this is how you pick raspberries, far from the house, because pesticides coat the bushes; when you are printing papers, do

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it at the library, or else we’ll have to sell the car; this is how to be an only child; this is how to be a middle child; this is how you move to a new home; this is how you share a room in a new home; this is how you tie a tie; this is how you tie a tie for your uniform; this is how you bury your grandfather; this is how you bury your grandfather who isn’t really your grandfather; this is how you wash your grandmother; this is how you wash your grandmother who isn’t really your grandmother; this is how you wash your soul; this is how you dress in the presence of the Lord, so as not to tempt the priests who are seduced by the faggot you are so bent on becoming; be sure to close the closet door, even if the lock smith, you know; don’t use both feet while driving—you will die; don’t reject any stones, because it might be the cornerstone; this is why you vote pro-life; this is why you save your money; this is why your friends are scum; this is why I am the parent; this is why you are the child; this is why I am the stepparent and you are the stepchild; this is why you take cold showers, not because it’s green, because I’m the one who has to pay the oil bill; this is how you tell a lie; this is how you tell a lie to me; this is how you tell a lie to yourself; and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about telling the truth; this is why you stay sober, so you don’t end up like your mother who you are so bent on becoming; this is how to stay alive; always carry the cross above your chin; but what if the pastor won’t let me carry the cross?; you mean to say that after all you’re really going to be the kind of altar boy who the pastor won’t let near the cross?

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Out of the Water Kira Santana

Born from the grey rocks at the edge of the fjord, my blood runs // as clear blue saltwater, my bones grafted from the sand // at the bottom of the sea, out of the long, curving Oslofjord I came, and back to its shores // I return, the anatomy of a small seaside town sticking // like wind in sails to my palm lines.

Born is the embroidery stretching across // my skin, resembling the tiny red house in Hvitsten, named after the banks of the fjord where seafoam colors // the stones milky white, and long summer nights, when the sun dips down and kisses // the water like time is not on their side // before rising up into the Born is this hometown, where my grandfather’s great-greatgrandmother came to rest // after walking for hundreds of days from the north, with Kvam in rearview, she traded her path // through farmlands and snow // to the wide open world of sailing ships, determined // to secure a better future for her children. the seas, steamboats pushing hot air in our faces, the yellow night’s magical color, marching // forward: the men she gave life to // who would have been nothing without a strong woman // behind them, a woman who lead them behind closed doors because she was told her hands were too soft // and thin

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ancestors on its back like a fragile trapeze act, struggling // to make everyone content, holding on to the ghosts of Hvitsten // who whisper in my ears great stories // of their travels on the seas, the tides of the ocean; the waves; the sun hitting the back of your neck; the end of the horizon; the freedom to be.

Born was this arctic sorrow, of being told I cannot go // where the boys go, that I am not enough, coming home from school body // too tired to care, an innocence that will never // return.

Born to journey across // the same water I was born from, before me, returning to the waters of Hvitsten each summer, a single grey stone carried in my pocket, engraved into the skin of my ankles are these words // I am of the sea // there is nothing stronger I could be.

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Serenade: A Childhood Dream Eleanor Ambler Arizona State University

• N O N F I C T I O N

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The Scars We Leave Behind Andrea Rodríguez Bowdoin College

I

t was a cooler December night than most. Out over the water, the stars shone intently, and an orange glow illuminated the mostly deserted street. In a normal year, the sations over the sound of a speaker blasting reggaetón and an

each night, a lone pedestrian could probably make out the rhythmic sounds of ocean water crashing against the coralline rocks below.

The ghostly feeling of the empty city subsided on the steps of the National Aquarium. Here, the air had grown thick with nerves and tension. When the clock struck one and water began to drain out of the display tank, aquarium workers, biolomurmured their plans to each other, making their surgical masks shift on their face. This was the Dominican Republic’s Sea. Juana, Pepe, and Lupita must have realized that this was no ordinary medical evaluation. Once their home consisted of no more than a mere puddle, they probably noticed the vehicles and dozens of humans surrounding them and their tank. These manatees likely had no idea that their human counterparts meant no harm, and that in fact, they were the key to freedom.

At least that was what people hoped to do: liberate them. It could take months or even years for the three Antillean mana-

tees to be completely free from the supervision of their current caretakers. And as for after, we can only dream these manatees will never fall victim to a human’s ill intent again.

• [These mermaids] are not half as beautiful as they are painted.

W

ith saltwater lapping the sides of the ship, the crew aboard the Santa Maria spotted what were likely manatees drifting slowly through turquoise Caribbean waters.

Before landing on the shores of Quisqueya and unleashing a storm of violence, disease, and war on Taínos, Columbus scribbled down the believed mermaid sighting in the journal he carried with him.

Even the sadist explorer could not help but think that giant, gray sea creatures could be real-life mermaids.

West Indian manatees, likely the type that Columbus encountered, are gentle marine animals. The occasional moveThey are so slow-moving that algae often grow on their backs. Manatees’ round bodies narrow to a paddle-shaped tail that moves up and down to propel them forwards. Most of their hairs concentrate on their snout and above it, their almost human-like eyes shine with colors ranging from blue to brown.

While whales and sharks prefer deep ocean waters, the West Indian manatee is content with the shallower parts of the sea.

Undisturbed, Florida and Antillean manatees–both subspecies of the West Indian manatee–explore the coasts and rivers of the American continent. The former subspecies resides near the United States’ coastline while the latter spends it time visiting different Caribbean and Central and South American countries.

Despite their lack of marine predators, the International Quisqueya is the believed original name of the island of Hispaniola, chosen by the Taínos who inhabited the island before Columbus’s arrival.

2 Manatees can reach a speed of about 15 miles per hour, but only for a short amount of time.

1

make up for their constant loss of life, causing massive decline in population numbers. Today, the population of West Indian Antillean manatees. change–the list of threats to the West Indian manatee is extensive but not without a common cause: humans. In Florida, accidental collisions with watercrafts have surpassed hunting as the biggest reason for manatee loss. About a third of Florida manatee deaths are the result of these collisions. And yet, in Indian manatee’s status under the Endangered Species Act to “threatened” to protect human economic rights.

If the work of environmentalists in government were pieces of string, interwoven together as they connected the wellbeing of the planet to legal protection, the net was now twisting and fraying and thinning. The string that represented the West Indian manatees would not be able to hold onto anything much longer.

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uana, Pepe and Lupita all laid patiently in a puddle of

the tank. More than a dozen pairs of hands bounded her to a litter made of wide, bright red and orange straps. She seemed to remain calm as a crane hoisted her up and out of the tank, and later lowered her down onto the bed of an awaiting truck.

Her human traveling companions awaited her eagerly, a team consisting of some of her caregivers and veterinarians.

Lupita had arrived at the aquarium only two years before, after her rescuers found her dehydrated and trapped within the roots of a mangrove tree. She was not like Pepe and Juana, for she had spent more time than they had outside the aquar-

ium. Pepe, on the other hand, had grown the most amiable towards humans, something that caused his caregivers great concern. For they could try to ask humans to stay away from manatees, but it became more complicated when the manatee was eager to interact back.

• Each scar on a manatee tells a story.

-Katherine Taylor, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Open Spaces

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ing town turned tourist attraction off the southeast coast of the island. Awaiting them was Remi, a manatee that had gained popularity under the umbrella of the pandemic. She behaved unnaturally, being drawn to humans and their company.

Six scars on her back make it easy for divers to identify her. Thanks to the vibrations of speeding watercrafts in the area, divers can quickly guess how she got the parallel gashes on algae-spotted skin. And yet, Remi shows no fear towards humans. She brushes up against them to play with the bubbles their breaths form and probably follows the little air pockets all the way towards the water’s surface.

Remi does not realize that she often swims alongside the a frantic panic.

For now, conscious Dominicans have held back eager crowds of tourists and locals alike from seeking out Remi.

Her behavior attracts attention and attention attracts a danger unlike that of speeding boats. After all, it seems to be in our nature to exploit and destroy what nature gifts us.

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leave. When the men around him started bounding him to the litter, he thrashed and splashed water onto them with

his massive body weight. Even though he had grown fond of humans, something appeared to change then. Fair, perhaps, not to trust the hands that will force you out of the only home you’ve ever known.

As if this was the last time that they would see each other, Juana shifted and moved toward Pepe in perhaps an attempt at a romantic goodbye. Their snouts met and Juana rested there until the crane hoisted Pepe upwards.

Right as the crane dangled Pepe over the edge of the tank, he started to jerk and squirm against its bounds. Someone in the background screamed. “Put him down! Put him down!” yelled a chorus of desperate voices. The crane sped up. And the moment passed as quickly as it came. Pepe laid calm again and everybody breathed a sigh of relief.

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s the biggest of the three manatees, Juana was the last to leave the tank.

Juana and Pepe arrived at the aquarium eight years prior to that night. As a three-month-old calf, Juana endured more decade later.

Eight years ago, the National Aquarium in the Dominican Republic lacked the appropriate infrastructure and likely also

loud crowds and music blaring, Juana went twenty-two days without eating. Without many other options, the veterinarians of the aquarium had to drain her tank and with a hose deliver her food straight to her stomach. Humans were killing her, slowly draining her will to live. Humans kept her alive.

Now, humans would liberate her.

With added precautions and attention on everybody’s behalf, Juana’s transition to a third truck went as smoothly as Lupita’s. At almost four in the morning, the vehicles holding

the manatees rolled out onto the highway to make it to Bayahibe before sunrise.

But is it true liberation if out in the wild, they are still at the mercy of us?

• What makes for healthy manatees makes for healthy oceans.

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ike any other species, manatees contribute to their

herbivores, they prevent ocean vegetation from being intrusive by eating at least ten percent of their body weight in seagrass each day. Manatees also pass on what they ingest as a form of the algae that grow on their bodies and simultaneously ridding the manatee of it, along with parasites and dead skin. But the wellbeing of manatees measures much more than the simple Manatees are in danger of extinction because of humans.

Anthropogenic climate change, as it affects everything in our modern world, also harms manatees. Because they are susceptible to cold waters, cold snaps due to unusual water and coastal development have also limited manatees’ access to appropriate habitats, food, and freshwater. Then there’s the added danger of watercrafts and probable collisions.

Humans killing them. We are killing them.

And using their trauma to establish our superiority over the natural world.

• Sus cicatrices son huellas feas del humano.3 -Lise Menard, author of “Remi, the Lost Manatee” 3

Collected from an interview conducted by a reporter from Diario Libre. Translation: Their scars are ugly remains of humans.

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he United States was still shaking from the events that unfolded at the steps of the Capitol only a week into the new year. On the verge of a change of administration, political tensions were at a peak. And then came the case of the Florida manatee.

With giant letters etched onto its back, this manatee bore and U–revealed the manatee’s skin underneath the muddy, orange-colored algae. Down its back, the letters’ turned a sickly white. The mutilator had run out of algae to carve out, and so they made the P The manatee swam as if it was unharmed, but the message scarred on its back spoke loud and clear to those who found it.

Almost immediately, people took to the refuge of their political party’s views. Some on the left accused the president’s supporters of the incident and used the chance to advocate for better practices in conservation. Some on the right chose to downplay the severity of it or incite confusion as to whether the report was even real.

Instead of clouding the incident with the nuances of the political debate happening in the U.S., we need to recognize the bigger implications that a single incident like this, and its aftermath, has on our planet’s future. Whatever the reactions to this incident are, they show how we all view the human-caused environmental crisis at our doorstep. Will we defend our actions because we believe ourselves to be superior to other species?

Will we denounce individual harmful acts but do nothing about the systematic issues that threaten our natural environments? Or will we take this as a chance to save our world by tackling the root causes of its destruction?

Despite federal and state laws prohibiting the harassment

this person. Did they see this as an opportunity to expand their leader’s reach beyond the country’s borders? Were they caught up in the moment they encountered a manatee and thought

they should leave their own mark on it? Were they just excited about the upheaval they would cause? Did it, deep down, sufThe circumstances of how this manatee acquired its scars remain unknown. So does whether the word ‘Trump’ will remain on its back, or if it will be covered back up with algae in a couple of months.

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he sky now a light shade of blue and orange, the trucks holding the manatees reached a dirt road that guided them to a closed-off part of the bay. The bay would be home to Juana, Pepe, and Lupita for the next few months before they were ready to venture out into the open.

Those who made the trip from the capital with the manaAlmost as soon as she touched the surface of the water, she tried to break free from the bounds of the litter. As soon as she did, she swam away with a rare burst of speed until she calmed down enough to resume the leisurely pace manatees prefer.

As stubborn as ever, Pepe refused to let his caretakers put him inside the litter. So instead, someone drove his vehicle backwards into the water. Without much need for help, Pepe rolled off the side of it and splashed into the sea. In the background, people cheered and clapped.

Small and calm Lupita was the last to make it into the water.

She seemed hesitant to leave her caregivers behind. Maybe she still had bad memories of the world beyond her tank in the aquarium. Maybe she didn’t want to go back to it. But with enough time, Lupita swam free of the straps from the litter and joined Juana and Pepe.

In the background, applause and cheers morphed into sounds of joyful crying.

• Ponerlos en libertad no es un cuento de hadas... puede

-Rita Sellares, marine biologist and director of FUNDEMAR. In an interview with Rita Sellares, director of the ocean conservationist organization in charge of the liberation of Juana, Pepe, and Lupita, said: “Their liberation is not a fairytale story… it can have a happy ending or a not so happy in the National Aquarium.”

Juana, Pepe, and Lupita will never be truly free, even when they are able to explore the vast expanse of the ocean. Like many other sea creatures, they are affected by the decisions we make every day. There isn’t a place they can go where they are truly out of reach of humans. Or of the consequences of our existence. As long this is true, their eventual extinction is assured.

For that is what we do with our Earth. In our intricate and and cause harm to it, even if we do not desire to. We are even in disagreement with each other on how this relationship should look. And even when we agree that it needs repairing, we disagree in our methods. So what hope is there?

Juana, Pepe, and Lupita’s reintegration into the ocean makes it possible to believe that there is a chance to remedy a part of the harm that we have caused. Maybe they will enjoy intervention. But there is still a chance they go back to where they started, dying on a beach or on the shores of a river.

A part of me dreams of an unrealistic world where we all learn to coexist with nature without damaging it. Where it benit is. A dream.

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bother Juana like the sounds of the city did. I imagine that she swims near the underwater fence often, curious about what lays on the other side of it. She does not know it yet, but in a couple of months she’ll be able to swim beyond it and discover new waters to live out the rest of her–hopefully long–life in.

Somewhere off the coast of another country, a boat lurches

• Works Cited

tees”

.

Scraped into Its Back Was Itself Disturbing. But It Re https://the conversation.com/a-manatee-with-trump-scraped-into.

Juana y Lupita puede que recuperen su libertad.” http://www.acuarionacional.gob.do/index.php/noticias/ que-recuperen-su-libertad.

“First Report of a Florida Manatee (Trichechus Manatus

. www.diariolibre.com. https://www.diariolibre.com/ actualidad/medioambiente/la-odisea-de-juana-pepe-y. la libertad.” www.diariolibre.com. https://www.diarioli bre.com/actualidad/medioambiente/preparando-a-jua .

Mermaids - HISTORY.” https://www.history.com/thisday-in-history/columbus-mistakes-manatees-for-me maids.

Para La Protección de Los Manatíes En El Destino La Romana-Bayahíbe” https://listindiario.com/vi ra-la-proteccion-de-los-manaties-en-el-destino-la-ro mana-bayahibe.

Manatee Harassment.” Chronicle Online. https://www. cials-seek-information-on-manatee-harassment/arti .

Hispaniola?” Oryx—The International Journal of Con servation. https://www.oryxthejournal.org/blog/is-it-toolate-for-manatees-in-hispaniola/. en el proceso de adaptación.” www.diariolibre.com https://www.diariolibre.com/actualidad/medioambiente/ juanita-pepe-y-lupita-cumplen-tres-meses-en-el-proce . on the harassment of manatees | Opinion.” Miami Herald. https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/

. .

Larsen’s Outdoor Publishing. diarioLibre.com https://www.diariolibre.com/actuali dad/medioambiente/remi-la-manati-de-bayahibe-C .

Su Libro.” www.diariolibre.com. https://www.diarioli bre.com/actualidad/medioambiente/remi-la-manati-de. atee” The New York Times https://www.nytimes .

US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmo spheric Administration. n.d. “Endangered Ocean: Man https://oceantoday.noaa. gov/endoceanmanatees/.

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Baba, Mama, & Me Natsumi Meyer Bowdoin College

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t’s early morning and delicately cut shards of sunlight

hazy yellow, and the window shades made of thick, hardened paper stretched across a wooden scaffold seem to glow towels instead of sheets, but the blankets covering my body are exceedingly soft. My hair is still damp.

Out of the quiet, there is a sudden rush of feathers, and a his wings and steps in a circle. He raises his beak towards the sun and shrieks.

CAW! I understand I am no longer asleep. Sounds from the kitchen on the other side of the paper and wood sliding door slowly amplify like I’m turning up the radio. My grandpa is, in fact, It’s Tuesday morning, June 20th, 2017, Heisei era. The weather in Tokyo today is fair. The sky will be clear for most of the day here and in the surrounding areas. The temperature will reach a high of 32 degrees. Those in Chiba prefecture can expect a little rain tonight. Here, I am presenting you with a map of the national temperatures along the coast. You’re watching NHK. Next up is the latest news on Kim Jong-un.

The light in the room softens and rearranges as I open my eyes. I slither out of the covers and slide open the wooden door that enters the kitchen and dining room. My grandpa, Jiji, is standing over the stove on the left, pushing vegetables into a

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steaming pot. My grandma, Baba, is hunched over at the dining room table, her frail arms sticking to the table like posts that keep her upright. Jiji stands where Baba stood. Baba sits next to where Jiji sat.

Baba wasn’t always hunched at a ninety-degree angle, but she has been for most of the time I can remember. Baba’s feet don’t move when her mind tells them to, and she spends hours When I stay with Baba and Jiji for a few weeks each summer, it’s my job to facilitate her movement, to wake at the faintest call.

Natchan…

Natchan…

When I walk with Baba I bend like her, my back curved to mirror hers. She grasps me by my elbows, and I grasp her by hers, and I lift my knees so that maybe her body will realize how to lift knees, and I step forward so that her body must step forward. When Baba panics, her body rejects her, and she can do nothing but shake. In my arms, she feels as brittle as the rusted mechanics of a little metal bird but her grip is as strong as ever.

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efore Baba became a cooking teacher, she bought a luxurious couch without consulting Jiji. Jiji, who was usually an even-tempered and judicious businessman, exploded at Baba. How could you spend our money so rashly? Why do you need And with that, Baba decided she would have her own money.

In just a few years Baba had a full roster of cooking students, all devoted to learning how to execute her delicately complex recipes. Baba developed recipes on Mondays, shopped on Tuesdays, tested them on Wednesdays, and taught them Thursday through Sunday. She would teach a full course meal one month at a time, then change it all again the next month.

Baba stood for hours a day, she wasn’t bent yet, and she moved

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too much.

One New Year, Baba was furiously cooking dinner in prepafor happiness, lotus root for good luck, gold chestnuts for fortune. In her rush from the kitchen to the nearest bathroom, Baba suddenly crumpled in the narrow hallway. No one noticed until my Mama wandered into the kitchen and saw her to Baba. When Baba slowly opened her eyes and moved her mouth again, she said, I was next to a river…My mother was on the other side…I was going to cross the river…but my mom was shoo-

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y Mama once told me a story about her great uncle.

Her great uncle was a bit of an odd man—quiet, kind, and unassuming. His sisters secretly worried he would never years. Yet, strange as they were together, they never had a child.

Instead, Uncle worked in construction while his wife watered plants at home. They read together, walked together, and occasionally appeared at family reunions, only to share a few pleasant smiles, stab at sweet treats, then return to wherever they came from. They grew old together and they sat together, until one day, the wife grew sick and withered.

When his wife died, Uncle packed up all the things in their small, one-bedroom apartment. He nurtured her plants then put them in the ground by the river. He gathered up all their books and gave them away. He collected all their clothing and threw those away too, ‘till all that was left of his and hers were a backpack, a map, a pack of cigarettes, two shirts, and good shoes. Uncle had nothing left to leave behind, and nothing left to take care of. So, he started walking. He visited the giant Buddha in Nara prefecture, the golden castle in Kyoto, and he stopped to toss a coin and pray at every Shinto temple along

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the way. Uncle walked and looked for six months. Stopping, looking, praying, watching, touching, holding, thinking, remembering, walking, then stopping again.

Once along his path, Uncle came upon a particularly old Shinto temple. The red paint had splintered off the iconic red gate, and the ritualistic ropes hanging from the temple’s ceiling were nearly threadbare. Uncle approached the offering box other ancient coins in the box. Uncle grabbed the rope, rang the temple bells, clapped twice, and prayed, just as he did at every temple he came across.

The next morning, the monk who lived in the temple and whose job it was to care for it, came outside to sweep seeds off the path. As he approached the largest tree in the yard, he noticed an old man slumped against the tree, backpack placed intentionally at his side, looking as though he were sleeping peacefully in the morning light.

The monk called to the old man. Are you As the monk approached, he felt no warmth radiating off the old man. A pit formed in his stomach. The old man looked so peaceful.

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ne summer morning when Baba and I were sharing vegetable soup and buttered bread for breakfast, she told me, “My niece Kaori-san is coming today. Let’s make the house I nodded.

“You know,” she continued, “Before Kaori-san was born, my sister-in-law could barely afford another child. She had a boy and a girl already, and her husband was a journalist.”

She signed, then chuckled, “A journalist! They don’t make any money, so all four of them lived in a tiny apartment and they couldn’t afford another child.”

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Baba raised the trembling bowl of soup to her lips and slurped. When she put it down, she continued, “So, when my sister-in-law came to me and asked me what she should do about her unexpected pregnancy, I told her the wisest option would be to terminate the pregnancy. Take care of the kids she had. Save for a better place. But some overly enthusiastic doctor convinced her otherwise, and she kept the baby. Obvithem shared beds and shared clothes and read on top of each other. All three kids worked hard in school, though, and they got good jobs too.”

“And Kaori?” I asked.

“Ah, Kaori,” Baba grinned. “Kaori’s the best one. Her brother and sister moved away but she’s still here. Kaori takes care of everybody—her mother, her father-the-journalist, Jiji, and I.” I thought of the Tupperware containers in the fridge, always loaded with an extra meal cooked in someone else’s kitchen.

“He-he-he” Baba chuckles. “Maybe I wouldn’t be alive without Kaori. Maybe Kaori wouldn’t be alive because of me.”

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owadays, Baba is quiet on the phone. She tries her best to speak loudly when I’m on the line, but after a few exchanges she is out of breath, and after I ask her what she’s eating today, I listen to the crackle on the line.

Recently, Mama told me that she’d told Baba that I started taking birth control, just to get a reaction out of Baba. Mama did it knowing that it would intrigue Baba just as it had infuriated her. Apparently, it worked. I was hurt.

Natchan’s doing that? Baba had apparently asked. I guess she would have to…

As angry as Mama was when she found the pill herself, she described Baba’s engagement in their little gossip session with glee. I wanted to smile.

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When Mama was in college, at music school, it was common to live at home. Mama broke no rules, but Mama thought she was grown, and she did what she pleased in secret. Mama started smoking cigarettes like all the other students who wanted a moment of relief or to share the congregation outdoors. Mama hid her secret well, never keeping cigarettes at home, never letting her clothes smell, never coming home ‘till she had to. It worked until it didn’t. When Baba was searching through one of Mama’s purses for extra change to give the delivery man, her little white lighter. Baba immediately knew Mama’s secret, but because she couldn’t prove it with just the lighter, she tore the clothes out of Mama’s closet with rage. Baba dragged boxes out from under her bed, emptied her drawers, and piled all her clothes on top of the bed in search of a damning cigarette. AnMama’s disobedience, Baba drew out Mama’s favorite skirt last, tore a vicious gash up its length, and left it on top of the pile of uprooted clothing.

Baba’s body is Mama’s body is my body.

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hen Mama arrived in Wyoming for graduate school in the United States, she thought she landed on the moon. There were no subways, no crush of people crossing the road, no apartments stacked on apartments stacked on apartments.

I imagine Mama in her twenties looked quite like me today. ness of this moon so, so far from home. She was so, so far from Baba, Jiji, her-uncle-the-businessman, the train station, and sticky-sweet air.

On this foreign planet, all my mom really had of Japan was her own thick, black hair, smooth, pale, luminescent skin, and her violin, slung across her back. Few things were the same, but there was wind rustling sheets of music, steam rising from

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soups, and the occasional call of a crow that almost sounded like home.

masterful hands.

Mama’s hands are a witch’s hands. Hands of a witch can do anything.

Mama sings things this rhyme to me when I fall and scrape my knee. She puts pressure on the hurt and it escapes through her hand like magic. I wonder how she brought all this magic with her from Japan.

When I’m eleven years old and I skillfully crack an egg into a sizzling pan, Mama looks at me, a little shocked by the departure from my usual clumsiness.

“Natchan is Baba’s child, aren’t ya?”

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apan, for me, is soft like the earliest recollections of my mother and concrete–hard like the weight of generations

and rice bowls before me, before Mama, and before Baba.

Today, it’s phone lines that tie us all shore to shore. Today, it’s Baba in a wheelchair, eating the food she’s fed, still critically like a teacher. Today, it’s Mama in the kitchen, and Mama in the orchestra, leaving home after dark. Today, it’s me, huddled at the dining room table with the steam from miso soup warming my chin, my grandmother’s precious bowl hovering before my lips. Today, it’s the three of us—three generations, three women, three lives, three stories. There’s three of us, and two kitchens, countless tables, and the same bowls.

Today, yesterday, and tomorrow, there’ve been hopes and devastations. Growth and transplantation. Births and deaths that happened or didn’t. Morning lights, softly sung songs, gentle steam rising up from bowls of soup, and the occasional call of a crow to remind us of who and what and where we are.

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Swimming in Circles Tabitha Chilton Bucknell University

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ate July in the Catskill mountains was still cool, sometimes it would stay in the sixties all day and be too cold to swim. On too cool days we would catch salamanders in the shallow edges of the lake. When we were particularly committed, my cousins and I wore rainboots and carried rusty nets over our shoulders, wading through rocks and mud. Certain spots were particularly squishy, and if you didn’t step very cautiously, you’d wander into one of those soft spots and sink splashed between your toes. As this happened, my cousins would scream and run back to the edge of the water, scared an unsuspecting salamander had gotten caught up in the current and was then anxiously swimming around, trapped, in a little pink rain boot. But I knew that never happened. At age nine, I was three years older than the oldest of my cousins, a girl named Katherine Margaret, who had short blonde hair with choppy bangs and scabs all over her legs that would turn scars after she repeatedly picked them. Compared to the amateurs, I We’d name the salamanders we caught Tiney or Greeney or Skinny or Spottie and place them in buckets where they’d swim in circles for a few hours. Some days I could catch almost thirty, and when it felt like I’d captured all the salamanders in the lake, I’d sit on the edge of the water in my green thrift store boots with pruning toes and hold them. Lizards freaked

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me out. The way they would run with their necks strained and their legs rolling across sandy Florida sidewalks like car tires.

Salamanders were different, the way they seemed so at peace, just swimming in circles. They had a faith in us that I couldn’t understand. How did they know we’d let them go home? I remember reaching into the bucket, either with eyes closed to avoid any favoritism or with eyes bright and squinted with precision, searching for one that was especially hard to catch and had earned special attention. Once I had one in my clutches, I’d look all over their speckled green skin and their yellow underbellies for little leeches.

If we ever did come across a leech, we’d use our bitten boring rock. After giving the salamander a quick physical, I’d bring it close to my face and try to make eye contact. Their little heads were slimy like they were always sweating just a little bit out of every pore. Sometimes the younger kids wouldn’t be salamander bodies and give a squeeze. I’d scold them to be softer, but when you give kids advice, they only listen for a few minutes until your words drift away and they’re again left only with their own ignorant instincts.

My grandmother never let us take them back to cabin.

“There are too many germs and bacteria that those little critters carry.” She scolded us to wash our hands, too, the second we walked through the front door. I hated washing my hands.

To scrub and cleanse and clean. To wash away.

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mmediately after I lost my virginity, I took a shower. He left my house at two in the afternoon on a school day in June during my senior year of high school. In the shower,

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on my stomach. The tub was white and shiny, unlike the one in the old house that had brownish green stains that wouldn’t come out no matter how hard my father scrubbed. In the new tub, I stared up at the ceiling and looked at the water droplets forming. I’d forgotten to turn the vent on. The droplets would grow in size and drop intermittently, and I tried to guess which the shower hit it, some spots growing red from the hot water.

I ran my hands across my legs and felt the short prickles of freshly shaven hair starting to grow back already. Using my toes, I pushed on one edge of the little metal stopper until it The water got less and less warm until it was cool. I splashed it in between my legs. Was it weird that I hadn’t taken my bra off during sex? I closed my eyes and thought about who would melt me down the drain, all blood and bones.

I opened my eyes and sat up. No sleeping. I turned my head to the array of bottles lined up on the brim of the tub. Half empty Suave, Pantene, a rubber duck wearing a Santa hat, a men’s razor. Looking dead on, I could make out the skewed

barely see it, so I squinted, trying to avoid the light spray of the shower still coming down in between me and faucet me. I looked hard. What was different? Wasn’t everything supposed to feel different? New and improved, sexually free, dangerous, ravenous, desirable, tempting, provocative, slutty, deranged, disgusting, disturbing, tainted. Faucet me looked the same. Just a swirl of my skin glancing back at me between the rapid and roaring blink of water pouring down on us. The boy had waded picked me up, looked at me, inspected for leeches, and then put me back all the same. Like nothing. Put me back like it

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didn’t even happen. But what if he didn’t? In this new pond I’d swum into, I didn’t know the rules. What if he took me home in his bucket? Brought me somewhere else, somewhere far.

What if he squeezed me too tight, forgot how to be gentle? I wanted to swim over to my friends — where are they in this pond? — and ask them to teach me the rules, teach me the nets to avoid, teach me which of the humans squeeze. I knew I’d never ask these questions. I closed my eyes again, this time hoping I’d fall asleep without trying to and swim down the drain, through the pipes and sewage and plumbing and tubing, swim far away into some lake that no one knew existed, and leave faucet me in the tub, just swimming in circles.

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

A Storm Passes Over Caitlin Woodford University of Virginia

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hen the thunder comes over the mountains, we hear it before we smell it and see it and run from it.

But before we hear it, the rumble starts in the pit of our stomachs—the gut feels the far-away shaking of clouds and water. For my mother, the feeling starts long before that.

Her bones are built to rattle with the mountain thunder. She can smell lightning from miles away. When we go to the hills and leave the cabin in the morning before the sun pierces the sky my mother says There’s a storm coming today and sure as anything when we walk on the trail our guts start to rumble and my older brother says Is that the stuff in our bags? and my mother says No that’s the storm I told you was coming today and it is. My mother who has seen lightning rip through houses and carve dirty scars on the street, my mother knows about thunder.

The rumble comes and goes from the gut and then there is the crackle, which is the thunder coming to the ear. When the thunder comes to the ear and the crackle splits the stale air we know that the storm is close, close enough to whisper to us, and that we had better start walking quickly. When the crackle comes to my mother’s ear she gets a look on her face like she has been wiped clean, and we know that she is thinking of the

from the house. My mother hears the crackle and she says Go. Go. We have to go, and we go. And my mother tries not to say anything about the boy who died with burn marks splintering down his face and we try not to say anything to my mother about the thunder.

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the easiest because we don’t know it’s coming but when the aftershocks surge in waves, after a few hours or a few days, fear is laced into the shifting dirt, and it rolls over and under our feet.

My younger brother, still a child, clamps his mouth together when the aftershocks hit. He won’t say anything, but he grips the chair with white knuckles when the earth begins to stir and we huddle under the table—I notice then how small his and how they shake even when the earth stops. our mother and father aren’t home and we improvise. We raid cabinets and cupboards for candles, pawing at blurry shapes in the dark, and cover the kitchen table with our spoils. My older

closely through the dark. The candlelight spreads as the lighter clicks once, twice, twenty times—we slowly drown the night in soaking in the thin wafts of warmth and watching the light When our mother comes in and sees the table under its candle-blanket she says Are you kidding me and we say There wasn’t any light and she says Did you think about what would

happen if there was another aftershock and the candles fell over? and we don’t answer because of course we haven’t thought about it. But my younger brother starts to laugh, just a little, and the snickers spread to all of our guilty faces.

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eye of the storm now.

father grins and elbows my scowling mother. We are packed in a metal dinghy in the middle of a lake, our knees touching across the tight pair of benches, and my father is wearing a Nationals baseball cap backwards with all the swagkeeps falling in thick droves, rocking the underside of the boat and weighing down our skin and hair and bones. My father can barely see, his glasses fogged over with water droplets and the haze of spring rain, but he pulls the oars back with a heave and grins at the cracked-open sky. he had said What harm can a little rain do? and so we go on the trip anyway and the water rushes up to meet us just as we reach the middle of the lake. My mother grips each of our hands in turn, tries to brush the pouring rain from our cheeks, and our father lets us take turns rowing the boat until I almost lose the oar in the thick current and he grabs it from my hand and says Better to just enjoy the ride anyway. The rain keeps coming down and blurring the surface of the water until there is no line between air and lake, just churning and steam and hissing. My father watches the downpour and laughs and laughs, even when my mother smacks him on the arm and says Get us back to the car already!, even then he smiles at her and a chuckle slips from his lips, rising up into the sky with the evaporating water.

When we sit in the boat with our laughing father the rain enters our bodies through our eyes and opened mouths and

spreads into our chests, dripping down into our lungs where it moistens the not-yet-breath—it is then that we feel a bit like we are drowning. But our father keeps smiling and poking our a bit herself and then we can breathe again, and as we inch toward the shore the car stays just beyond the reach of the the trunk, and we squeeze into too-small jackets for the drive home, our hair still dripping on the faux leather seats.

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we haven’t gotten the worst of it yet.

mable. When my older brother is thirteen the heat makes the grass crunch and the trees brittle, just a little too brittle, and when a single spark leaps from a tossed cigarette the grass

up to the smoke and sirens drifting down the street. Not yet knowing exactly what has happened, my older brother and I walk toward the noise, drawn by a curiosity we can’t name.

from the inside. A corpse erect, the pieces of the burning house shift and tumble into dust and ash, the horrible cracking like the fracturing of giant bones as the house turns into a shell of itself. The shadows of trees leer from above through older brother puts a hand on my shoulder, takes a breath, coughs.

my brother and I witness is the worst of it—the house is gone, and all of the family’s things, but they don’t get hurt. My broth-

er knows the son, he checks in with him later that week. He seems to be doing okay, my brother says. A month later, when the second house burns, the second family isn’t home either, suggest that perhaps it escaped when the house frame started to crumble. The family moves into the rental house next door to us and my older brother asks me to help him bring our old books and toys to the children, to take their mind off of the cat.

When the third house burns at the end of August, the family is home. A boy in the same class as my brother gets trapped become as hollow as the three charred house-shells that haunt the corners of our neighborhood.

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n the eve of my tenth birthday a blizzard stumbles over the mountains. It is well into spring, late for snow of any kind, and yet it comes—the frigid air whipping against the house as the sky disappears behind thick gray clouds that sink all the way to the earth. It seems as if the house has risen up from the ground, suspended in a cold haze. We have to postpone the birthday party, but my mother bakes a cake just for us as we curl into blankets on the couch, listening to the icy wind scream outside. The kitchen smells like vanilla and sugar. We the glass to watch as drifts of snow lift from the ground and swirl and twist, coiling and uncoiling, shimmering in the warm light from the house.

The blizzard shrieks all night, but the morning brings quiet.

The sun, emerging once again, reveals frost and snow covering each tree branch and blade of grass, each rock and leaf and curve of the earth coated in a smooth stroke of white. I watch and wonder at the stillness of the outside, which wavers faint-

ly as the sun grows stronger and shakes the glittering landscape.

A shapeless and blank world lies beyond the window, but watching as the snow slowly melts, splitting open to reveal the hidden colors of spring. My father elbows my mother and points to the rays of sunlight splintered across the distant mountains, and my mother has my younger brother in her lap and my older brother and I are each tucked under one arm, and she strokes my hair as I watch the snow and the steady breathing of my family, and she says It really is quite pretty, isn’t it? and it is.

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To My Mother Anna Kalabukhova

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ou always told me to dream big. I never really understood what that meant until I’d seen how far you had come.

You told me you were raised in Moscow, but that was not exactly accurate, was it? It is at least a two hours’ drive from the city center to your childhood home. I watch the glittering skyscrapers of the modernized city center fall away into the ash-colored Stalinist architecture that gets sootier the farther you get from the capital's epicenter like tree rings aging around the core. Soon the concrete thins to woods, and all that is left is a rugged road fenced on either side with towering evergreens for miles. A faded green sign eventually resolves from the thicket on the side of the road. The peeling white letters translate from Cyrillic into Chernogolovka with an arrow to the left, Noginsk with an arrow pointed straight.

Only the latter seems familiar, an echo of something dropped passively in a conversation once or twice. We head straight, and I realize the familiarity. You were raised in Noginsk, not Moscow. It does not do you justice to call them one and the same.

The woods begin to dwindle. They become interspersed by squat little buildings and apartments all the same varying shades of monochrome, the ash of World War II still staining their stone walls. One school, one grocery store, one

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dark tones of both nature and the town outside. The few vases are spaced far apart to give the impression of volume: some end with their stems peeking out from behind the lid of the the bouquets especially garish, held crisp by the dustless air behind the glass.

Dad takes one look at the withering majority of the general selection and asks about the ones behind the glass. The shopkeeper names a price — in rubles they all sound high to me — but this one must be unreasonably so since Dad does an when you’re here as a visitor rather than an inhabitant, it is nice to feel like the price tag should not matter to you.

Your old apartment building is practically around the corner, and I keep thinking that it shouldn’t be, that it can’t be, that we’ll keep driving, and the town will bloom from crumbling concrete to the elegant architecture that just as suddenly appears towards the center of Moscow. We turn into four stories of hazy windows weeping black soot among the grey weathered stone faces. The bare playground in the middle of the driveway looks caught in perpetual winter. The paint has go-round, the grass below is more a shade reminiscent of grey than green despite it being the height of summer. Children mill about on their bicycles and scooters, their skin as pallid as the sky above.

Walking up to the doorway on the apartment building on the left just lays bare how derelict the place really is — judging by the crumbling threshold and weathered face of the door, you’d think the place was abandoned. But then there is a buzz, and an old man slips out with a golden-toothed smile, and he is gathering me into his frail arms, his moist lips dotting all over my cheek, my face, my ear.

“My happiness!” He names me, ushering me inside into

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the poorly-lit hall. My throat constricts a little at his words; I swallow the tightness along with the slight burn in my eyes. He begins to babble like he always does on the phone in his airy but sweet voice, about this and that and the weather and ohthe cold echoing staircase, the frigid rail biting into my palm, the decades of dust and melted winters clogging my nostrils, I wonder how either of your parents can navigate through this gloom, where I have to focus on each step so that my foot doesn’t miss it in the shadows. Is this why you told me that they hardly leave the house?

We come out onto a narrow corridor from the third landing. There are some traces of life here: faded mats and doors painted some other color than monochrome. Grandpa opens a burgundy door, and we step into the cluttered entrance hall of a faded, yellow-lit apartment. She’s already there, hobbling over with her bad hip, having forgotten her cane in her excitement, throwing her arms around my neck before I can even open my mouth to say hello. I have to stoop a little since I’ve only grown taller, and she’s gotten shorter.

There are tears in her eyes since it’s been so, so long since she’s seen me. Is this the same woman who shouts her lungs raw at you over the phone? Who makes you cry bitter tears rather than the sweet ones I feel now stinging my own eyes?

The place of it is a museum, part of it a shrine to you.

She sits me down in a musty armchair and just begins talking since, for once, we don’t have the static of a long-distance line separating us. She dotes on me, but all of it is rivulets that eventually spill back into the river of you. I’m smart, like you.

I’m pretty, like you. One day I’ll become a doctor, like you. Your monochrome pictures pasted all over the room seem to listen in, your face closer to mine than it is to yours now.

Then there is a pause after the cascade of sweets. She draws in a breath and says, “She could have had so much here, you know. But instead, she took everything along with you and decided it was better to be living on an isolated dot in the

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middle of some ocean.”

Now I understood why the energy between you two always crackled, even across radio waves. She’s bitter because she

continents and two whole oceans for me. from you, and when I do, I wonder if your words will still hold true.

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"She Menaced Him With Reality": Aversion to Women in The City and The Pillar Kate Tapscott Bowdoin College Although The City and the Pillar’s protagonist Jim Willard vacillates on a number of issues throughout the text, one inclination of his remains markedly constant and unambiguous: his aversion to women. Jim’s sexual encounters with women range from terrifying ordeals in which he considers the idea of sex “obscene” to surface-level affairs devoid of physical contact, and even outside a sexual context he can barely muster up anything

actualization of Jim’s idealized union with his masculine “twin,” Bob; in fact, Jim’s devaluation of women seems central to his sexual identity. He further extends his disgust for femininity to a condemnation of effeminacy in men, emphatically establishing psychic distance between himself and the “strange womanSeveral critics have commented on the problematic potential of Jim’s hyperbolic idealization of masculinity, noting that the text detaching it from effeminacy. However, I would add that Jim’s masculinist approach should not be viewed as the extension of a desire to reify heteropatriarchal structures, but rather as part of an attempt to escape the oppressive heteropatriarchal structures that threaten to entrap him. While its problematic potential remains, I venture to complicate an understanding of the text’s idealization of masculinity beyond misogyny and as part of a larger project to challenge and reject constrictive frameworks of masculinity and sexuality.

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Jim’s uncomfortable entanglement with Anne, forced upon him by his overly eager companion Collins, makes abundantly clear his disgust towards women in a sexual context. Jim describes feeling “repelled,” “frightened,” and “ill at ease” at the

with the heterosexual order she represents rather than simply with her femininity. While Jim invests little in the obligatory small talk with Anne, he does seem to discern her theatrical, movie actress,” Jim comments upon meeting his female commative quality that triggers Jim’s hatred for Anne as well as his quick departure. “Come on in, Jimmy,” a naked Anne says to Jim while posing for him expectantly. “Her voice was high-pitched then. He hated her pasWhile his brief attraction to her is forced and shaky at best, Jim does not understand an affair with Anne as untenable until this moment in which he is confronted with her performativity.

Jim perceives Anne’s hypersexual invitation as play-acting, an unnatural performance of heterosexual romance. It is not, then, As Jim spirals to a hasty exit, for which Collins terms him a “queer,” he importantly invokes the image of Bob as precluding

At the moment when what should have happened was about to happen, the image of Bob had come between him and the girl, rendering the act obscene and impossible. What to do? He would not exorcise

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the ghost of Bob even if he could. Yet he realized that it would be a ipating in their ancient and necessary duet. (53)

Jim clearly articulates his understanding of heterosexual sex and sex with Bob as opposing and mutually exclusive poles.

Even as he experiments with the “normal,” the specter of Bob as an ideal sexual partner not only obstructs Jim’s normative sexual behavior but renders it “obscene”. Jim’s visualization proposes the inversion of a heteronormative framework of sexuality casting male-male intercourse as natural and heterosexuality as perverse and offensive. For Jim, women come to signify this repugnant and unnatural sexuality as well as the broader pressure to conform to it in order to adhere to the conventional mode of masculinity. When he describes sex with Anne as “what should have happened,” he alludes to this obligation to conform to a set of behaviors that constrict his gender and sexuality. As critic Talel Jemia puts it, women “represent a set of expectation[s] to perform something that actually seems unnatural to Jim” (Jemia ritating individual trait but because it marks her as part of the “ancient and necessary duet” that appears to Jim not only performative but also deeply oppressive.

Additionally, Jim’s insistence on viewing Bob fraternally sire to interpret Bob as his other half early on in the text while admiring him at the pond: “When Jim looked at Bob’s body he felt as if he were looking at an ideal brother, a twin, and he was myth of soulmates, thus elevating Jim and Bob’s relationship to a mythical ideal, it also exhibits Jim’s fetishization of the homosocial. The idea of Bob as his mirror image allows Jim to hood while obviating the necessity for a female partner. Jim’s

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feeling of contentment upon looking at Bob as an ideal brother derstanding of their union as a fraternal one. Jim notes that he “admired [Bob] without envy,” further suggesting that he views

his homosocial idyll and therefore must be excluded in order to sustain Jim’s sexual and gender identities as natural. Only though reuniting with Bob can Jim “complete the circle of his life”; his quest for self-actualization depends on this union with mere intrusions into a homosocial utopia, he nonetheless seeks to destabilize rather than reinforce the heteropatriarchal structures that oppress them both.

Jim’s fear of the potential of women to intrude upon Jim’s masculine idyll is most explicitly realized through Sally, Bob’s counter at the slave cabin, Bob’s frustration with Sally acts as a catalyst for their homosexual encounter. Ranting against Sally’s unwillingness to oblige sexually, Bob condemns her as a women sets the stage for a much more satisfying union with Jim, in which “each became the other, as their bodies collided with a primal violence, like to like, metal to magnet, half to half and ality as supremely natural, a representation that Bob plays into him sexually. At the end of the novel, then, it is all too easy for Jim to perceive Bob’s marriage to Sally as a “kindly noose being dropped over Bob’s unwilling shoulders”, shuttling him into a disparages Sally in her capacity as a manifestation of the social

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expression of sexuality and towards something depressingly unnatural. When Jim describes Sally as “his rival,” he evokes these competing worlds, making it clear that he cannot view women While Jim’s emphatic rejection of women and of femininity inevitably raises alarm bells for the critical reader, I would caution against overstating his masculinist quest as a purely misogynistic one. Jim’s treatment of men and women does not simply mimic a conventional patriarchal denigration of the feminine; rather, he construes women as part of that heteropatriartreatment of women enables the reader to pinpoint his aversion as directed towards constrictive sexual and gender frameworks, endowing it with complexity and nuance that should not be reduced to mere chauvinism. Critic Harry Thomas convincingly points out the damaging consequences of the text’s disparaging

concur that the text’s limited understanding of masculinity and and constrictive presence towards men. However, I would insist that the value of Jim’s larger quest should not be discounted, nor should it be construed as a mere extension of patriarchal that deems his gender and sexual identities unnatural, seeking to turn this system on its head by eschewing the civilizing fethe novel neatly encapsulates his understanding of the gender

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• Works Cited

Jemia, Talel B. “”Not Like the Rest of Us” - Masculine Idyll and the Pillar.” Gender Forum Thomas, Harry. “‘Immaculate Manhood’: The City and the Pillar, Giovanni’s Room, and the Straight–Acting Gay Man.” Twentieth Century Literature JSTOR The City and the Pillar: a Novel

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the Other, and the Environment Between Olive Amdur Amherst College The subway is slow when it rains in New York City: the underground air in every station humid and heavy, the uneven during warm months, the weeds and trees rooted beneath the concrete sidewalks above those subways grow faster, greener, and thicker, towards the air. Even in New York, with its steeled and solid built environment, our lives are intertwined with and fundamentally shaped by weather, nature, and Earth. Why, then, have we long distanced the city — our cities — from this Weather and Teju Cole’s Open City, both set and grounded in New York, are two novels keenly aware not only of this perpetuated separation of human and natural environments but of the interrelated separations of self and other — individual and collective form — Open City a standard prose piece and Weather built of small fragments and sentences — in both we follow a narrator them as they weave themselves back into their surroundings.

In an essay on Alexander Hartwiger reshapes the

on urban streets and observes, almost passively, the immeis the active walker, listener, and seer capable of uncovering the buried histories of a space: the voices of the marginalized, the silenced, the deconstructed, the hidden. Building on Hartwiger’s work with Cole’s postcolonial Open City, I will turn

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in this essay to Weather Lizzie, our narrator, moves through the city with unique attunement to the shared political, social, and emotional climates she encounters. Exploring these observations, and the stories Lizzie uncovers in these climates, I borrow from the position reading new meaning into environments to demonstrate that environment and the environment into the self. I argue that to this positionality the power to make visible the collective atmosphere of affect in a city space, the long term effects of slow violence on individuals and communities, and the necessary apprehension of the impact of climate change — and crisis —o ing about, with, and for nature: one that answers questions of genre in the Anthropocene, reckons with our responsibilities as individuals to this collective, and seeks balance and care. block holds layers of history, life, and meaning. Following the walks, wanderings, and observations of Julius, the narrator of Open City and non-dominant viewpoints, capable of reading suppressed histories back into the city through this perspective (Hartwiger of history, a keen observer of the present, and an augur of the future,” and later, more importantly, “The contrapuntal reading leads to a polyvocal representation of a city and the voices that nial lens, yet in his language and the model of dual thinking he provides we can uncover the function of another sort of

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is the era in which “humans now wield a geological force,” that is, in which the collective impact of human behavior is inextricable from the geological systems of the Earth. (Chakrabarty capable of holding, understanding, and working with an awaresciously and unconsciously — the relationships we hold with nature and our surroundings. This occurs, however, through processes of thinking and observation more slow and subtle vides a way to read the legacies of colonialism, oppression, and exploitation back into…the frameworks that shape the global this case, Cole’s narrator Julius — encounters are stories that stories of those who experience the marginalization, disenfranThough the city is constructed on lands that once were natural and holds stories of environmental colonialism, suppression, ten, or encounter them directly. her city, as in most, libraries are places not only for reading, writing, and books but for shelter and conversation, WiFi and computer access, food and bathrooms, story-telling and sharing. Libraries are places dedicated to community resources didn’t mean to wind up a librarian, she tells us, it is happened school dissertation — she writes, “Feral librarians, they call us, as in just wandered out of the woods” — but it is because of this accident that she begins to inhabit the position of the because it enables the simultaneity of insider/outsider status, at once being part of the crowd and being apart from it”

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from the passers-through and tied to the library’s institution, but deeply intertwined with all the people moving through the building around her. She becomes, here, a listening, noticing interlocutor. who is mostly enlightened comes in. There are stages and she doomed adjunct. He has been working on his dissertation for constant state of observation, of the people moving through and into her world. What makes Lizzie’s poly-vocal experience of the city distinct from the traditional and postcolonial to hear all voices with an awareness of shared environments of encounter. Dropping Eli off at his building in the morning, Lizzie says, “The problem with Eli’s school is it’s not on a then later, in a moment of integration of human and environmental voice, “The window is open. It is nice out. The pigeons attentive to people, place, and people in place, and she is in a constant state of engagement with the people and stories around her: with the “woman who sells whirling things” whose cart she stops by to buy a toy for her son Eli, with Mohan at the bodega, with Mr. Jimmy who runs her favorite — and only — car service, with Kasper’s mother Nicola who brings organic food and talks about the “strivers.” We hear the voices of these people, just as we hear the more intimate, closely held voices of Lizzie’s husband Ben, brother Henry, and Eli at home, so that the experience of reading in all its bursts and fragments — is one of keen and constant chronicling. through the city are unbound by destination and period of time; in Hartwiger’s descriptions it is the very disorder of this wandering that allows for the necessary “disjunctive shifts” that result in the surfacing of formerly lost histories with “the-

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Weaththough at times disjunctive, moves forward in its fragmented way through time on paths constructed by the routines of daily life. She writes that, “A last spring across the playground and we make it just in time. I’m out of breath, sweaty, sad. I kiss Eli’s head, trying to undo the rush,” and “I wait until bedtime.

Eli and I have this routine that is always the same. Just before with people who depend on her for the routine structure of life: her son, her brother, her husband, Sylvia, all the people who move through the library each day. Unlike Hartwiger’s

buried, and spectral narratives of the oppressed, the specters of Lizzie’s observation are personal and worldly at once. They are not entirely her own and not entirely the world’s, but a collective story of humans and the Earth: the story of the Anthrobased in the experiences of routine city life, she grounds it in ments.

• Hartwiger argues the palimpsestic story emerges, that the cenreading of self and surrounding. This contrapuntal reading, which Hartwiger draws from Edward Said, is a method of reading and “way to expose ‘intertwined and overlapping hisidea of counterpoint, it shifts between privileged themes to allow for a simultaneous reading of dominant and nondomidominant narrative is that of the forces of marginalization in the city, the dominant narrative, I argue, in a reading of the

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Anthropocene is one that privileges the individual — one that gives narrative dominance to one human voice and one experience of the environment. Thinking only the individual requires a setting aside of Chakrabarty’s contention of our geological agency, and allows for an absolution of responsibility. In positioning of Lizzie’s self and the collective of the family, community, city, and earth she is a part of. It is a reading that moves between the single voice and the multiplicity of voices, one that models, in this form, the thinking required of us in the Anthropocene: thinking that understands our collecuniquely capable of experiencing a multiplicity of voices — in the library and the subway and on every street of Brooklyn and New York — and modeling a way of holding the internal with the external: the self with its surrounding.

The surrounding is often unavoidable in New York. Before and after work, during rush hours when the city is on and elbows against elbows, everywhere a sea of limbs, books, cellphones, and bags. Bodies lean left and right, forward as the stop or platform nears, and back, suddenly, when the engine jolts to a stop. There are feelings in the air: shared frustration when everything is delayed, excitement when everyone seems to be moving towards the same concert, protest, sports game, or celebration. New York transportation is intimate, and immediately collective. It is in these moments when Lizzie loses herself to the crowd, packed closely with the bodies of strangers in small spaces and unable to hold herself, on any level, separate. “It’s raining. The bus is full. It’s reached that density where being seated feels like a form of guilt. I look around…I forgot my phone, or I too would have blotted out all these Weather cape from the density of humanity, the experience of closeness and intimacy with unknown others from across the city allows for an uncovering of the power of the collective. “I miss the express bus and have to take the local home instead. Just the

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other day I heard one woman tell another that slowness is a form of goodness. This bus is full of old Russian people holdcloseness is a form of goodness too.

Flâneuring in the Anthropocene is a project of thinking — moving between — the self and surrounding in counterpoint form. The larger importance of this practice for questions of climate change, devastation, and dread — the extending power tal readings Lizzie accesses in Weather. Here, we turn to the counterpoint functions of intimacy, grief, anxiety, and routine. tween Lizzie and the closest people in her life. After trying to undo the rush of a morning school drop off, Lizzie asks, “Why another moment, lying in bed with her husband Ben, she says, “We make up a proverb (Married sex is like taking off your own emerge in the narrative alongside the wider-spread, collective intimacies of life in the world. These are the moments where a closeness — good, bad, or ominous — is shared. These are on the subway, sometimes, or outside of the school building, where all the mothers, mostly, line up in anticipation, shared love, for the children. Other times, the family dog barks through the window while “the news blares in from the living room,” and the intimate mood changes. “He wants to build

this shift. This is compared, later, to the way the city felt after in the air. Everyone everywhere talking about the same thing. intimacy; a closeness felt by all.

In Jennifer Ladino and Kyle Bladow’s piece, they write of these environmental hums as shared forces of affect. “Affect,” they argue, “is ecological ‘by nature,’ since it operates at the

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in Lizzie’s narrative movement between the individual and collective intimacies that an awareness of shared, ecological affect is constructed. The ecocritical turn in their piece asks us to reconceive what we mean when we talk about an “atmosphere” as something that takes into account the combination of environment, affect, politics, and other material forces (Bladow notion that we must hold the earth in all that we do, becomes visible in the contrapuntal interplay of Lizzie’s narrative of feeling and the feeling she encounters. When, a few pages after a soft feathery gray, streaked here and there with clouds,” we see her come into a knowledge of the integration of her and One of the Anthropocene affects we are introduced to in Affective Ecocriticism is climate grief: a mourning for the planet.

Weather, and, like in the case of feeling, these are at once individual and held by the collective. Some are small, everyday sorrows: Lizzie hurts her knee and worries for a while that she has gout or arthritis or one of the other diseases that eats away at the bones. Some of the personal griefs are larger, like Lizzie’s overwhelming grief for her brother’s addiction: all his attempted recoveries, his relapse. In the beginning of Weather Henry is on a healthy path; Lizzie meets him for coffee or dinner his eyes look clear, his work is stable, and he’s met somebody. Progressively, however, this shifts, and by the middle of the novel my brother says as we walk around the park, his sleeping baby about hurting his daughter, about losing her in an overheated parked car or hurting her, high, during a relapse. His loss of home, for Lizzie — who has both been and provided him with one — is a violent tragedy she must hold.

The larger griefs of the book are of and for the climate, and they are more abstract: the weather is warming and the waters

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elected, the world is veering towards apocalypse. We see Lizzie begin to hold this grief, anxiety, and fear over the course of the novel, and the awareness and urgency begin to seep into each however, that this growing awareness of climate — and the associated push towards action and shift in behavior — is guided

by Lizzie’s deep awareness of her own narrative sorrow. In the intertwining of her grief and anxiety with the collective affected atmosphere of the city, Lizzie is able to uncover the roots of those more subtle, pressing sorrows. This is also, in slightly different terms, a growing awareness of Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence: “A violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal ing and often outside of our immediate sight; they creep, they wait, and they “dispense their devastation” as the routine surrounding that underscores the power of collective affect, and it is in this counterpoint motion that the violent sorrows or griefs of individual and collective life emerge. The slow violence that is necessary in our understanding of and action surrounding the climate crisis is felt — deeply and fully — by our contrapuntal reader because it exists in the self and the surrounding. This is where it begins to draw our attention, so we can see the atmosphere, the environment, and the temporal violence of climate change.

Nixon’s word apprehension may be used here, too, to describe the awareness of the contrapuntal Anthropocene reader.

Because a counterpoint reading of the self in its surroundings allows for a harmony of individual tragedies, sorrows, and threats and those of the collective, affected atmosphere, it allows for a recognition of slow violence as it exists in the abstract and manifests in the particular. This brings us to the last function of environmental contrapuntal reading: the disruption of the everyday. Where slow violence manifests in the particular is in routine. We have already seen in Weather a life

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articulated in routine temporality. Lizzie’s life revolves around her work schedule and her son’s school schedule, around the times her brother wants to go for walks or dinner and when collective routines in the subway patterns — rush hours and those strangers you now from daily commutes — and common spaces; these routines exist and shape the shared affective atmosphere. Lizzie tells us about this in the beginning of the novel, “Sometimes I like to ask my boss about little patterns I notice at the library … So how come three different people

and accumulate each year in the largest scale, seasonal routine of our earth. The library routine is noticeable, tangible, and dependent on everyone, yet this is the very thing slow violence — the creeping devastation of the climate crisis and potential apocalypse — disrupts.

To this, Stephanie LeMenager writes, “Habit, the subjective practice of reality, frays in this unique moment of global Weather moves forward, we do see an encroachment of the climate on the everyday, and a sense of rising dread. Where in the beginning there was separation between life and climate fear, by the end Lizzie’s passages read, “Eli is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben brings him a bowl of water … According to the current trajectory, New York City will begin to experience dramatic, life-altering temperatures encroachment, just as she feels in herself and her surroundings the presence of growing tragedy, grief, and slow violence. ing at once the individual and collective environmental affects, and uncovers through this dual reading the presence of slow their disruptions. This is a particularly vital way of living and working in an era where the external must be held. It is in this rounding, the awareness of environmental crisis as it begins to

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interfere with the patterns of routine life, that we turn towards as a path forward: action.

There is a long history of writing that addresses human relationships with nature: writing that theorizes our role on earth, writing that works to capture environmental beauty, writing that explores life seemingly outside of society. The Romantics took walks in England’s countryside and wrote poetry about the sublime and Emerson and the transcendentalists founded philosophies of nature from the New England mountains. Figures like John Muir and Aldo Leopold documented the patterns of the trees and plants through the season, charting courses and travels through the woods. The positions and attitudes of these writers are varied, but these narratives hold central a reading of nature as an elsewhere: a place with mountains and trees, greenery and thick forest to be visited, traveled in, and experienced, places without other people. These are journals, travel writings, almanacs, charts, and narratives of the David Thoreau, whose journals of a secluded life in nature is one of the most well-known of all, LeMenager notes that his, “Extensive recording of seasonal variations in his journals registers the apparently small differences within cycles … to show profound respect for those nonhuman agents … that are irreis careful and attentive to the everyday, yet the Earth remains an object of observation, and the nonhuman, though venerated, is separate. This separation — of the self-moving through tional nature writing, as does the immersion in the green and the single, often male, voice. frame. Weather is a city book — a book of concrete, crowds, and close subways — and of all the scenes and voices we encounter there are only a few with explicit mentions of nature. Once, on the way home from a trip out of the city, Lizzie watches the movements of the Hudson River and the changing trees on its banks in fall. Just a few scenes before, in a moment of reverence, Lizzie says, “Driving home alone, radio on, every-

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thing was so green — you wouldn’t believe how green it was Lizzie’s nature reads like this: “This block smells like garbage. isn’t only un-green, however, but un-single and un-lone. We have already explored the multiplicity of voices with which Lizzie interacts, the presence of the countless other people who contribute to what she understands as the atmospheric collective, yet this is also made physical in the text. There are questions and jokes written on scraps of paper collected in placed between Wikipedia entries, Google search results, and snippets of documented overheard conversation.

Though it is not a nature journal like Thoreau’s, and argue that it remains a sort of journal narrative. It is still of Lizzie’s voice, even when we are left without the full picture.

She says to us in one moment, from the bathroom of her the neat suburban house her brother shares with his new wife, “There’s some antibacterial soap Ben bought last week at the dollar store. It’s a bright pink. Don’t use antibacterial soap!

Catherine told me, because lalalalalalalalalala,” and then writes later at one of Sylvia’s donor dinners, “He tells me…that soon everything in our lives will be hooked up to the internet of us that we are close to Lizzie’s mind, and that it is next to this mind, voice, and life that we read the world, and read back into the world all that her positioning. It seems, then, that this its related integration with collective affect, slow violence, and climate disruptions of the everyday — is a model of a new form of environmental writing. Rather than hold nature as separate and observable, this form of writing, informed by the basic contrapuntal reading of self and surrounding, establishes a way of environmental thinking: with and as nature, weather, and to reject traditional nature narratives and narrators in favor of an a new, radical one: centered in the dirty, polluted, deeply un-green city and imbued with the layered feeling and aware-

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ness of the counterpoint reader of self and surrounding, self in surrounding, and self of surrounding. also a rejection of the ways the climate crisis is held and reserved for an elsewhere. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, he asks us to consider why this crisis of climate change is ers, people, and societies appear resolved to pretend it does not exist until the moment it does, everywhere and all at once.

In the few instances where nature is made visible in Weather, it is attached to a particular form of suburban, wealthy, usually white separation, which is really a full disengagement from communal spaces and community care. When Sylvia pulls up an image of people in nature during one of her presentations, people out of the city and surrounded by fresh air, it is, “a slide of people having a picnic by a lake. Blue skies, green trees, Lizzie says, “I decide to ignore my twinging knee. We walk except the gardeners. Legions of them on the lawns, working quietly. There is one house where a famously liberal rich perapprehends this. In divided spaces, it is impossible to hold the reminders of the collective so fundamental in holding the environment, and ourselves in it. The return of the pain in her knee — that individual slow violence — is another reminder of the danger in this divide. “‘Become rich, very, very rich,’” Sylvia says in a tired voice,” when Lizzie wonders how to protect her child, Eli, and his middle of the country — the dry lands far from the coasts and rich in soil — to tend her own garden in a Candide-esque turn into herself. But there are real sorts of protection here. On in the community garden. He is growing eggplants and waiting: for the weather to change, for more sun and more rain, for more compost from the neighbors’ soil. When Lizzie’s anxiety becomes too much to bear, it is because she is thinking too

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much of the griefs of her individual life, or the griefs of the world — to much of herself or her surroundings. These are the moments when her brother’s addiction is all she can think of, feel imminent, immediate. In the act of contrapuntal reading, self and surrounding that is, at once, a reminder of the atmospheric affect — the collective experience of the Anthropocene separation for a movement between the self, the other, and the in-between.

Capturing this, Lizzie says, “Sometimes I slip up and allow myself for a moment to think of what is wrong with Henry …

Then there is the press of strangers against me and I’m up -

munity garden one day, watching Eli play. “Sunday morning.

The dog has found a baby bunny in the grass. She closed her mouth around it once, then released it. Now we are trying to save it,” they say, “Someone at the community garden has given

garden, saving is a delicate, collective effort. To protect her son, Lizzie must lean into this collective; just as to protect the collective means leaning on every individual. Just as on a crowded subway at rush hour, as the train curves through a tunnel and everyone pressing into one another for balance.

Ghosh, reckoning with the absence of climate awareness in ing of the individual psyche, at the expensive of the aggregate nonhuman in the modern novel?” he asks, when we know the Jenny the self is tempered, balanced, and held with the surroundings — human and nonhuman. It is a nature writing that challenges the privileging of visible nature in climate writing, asking us

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and consider the environment in all the spaces we occupy. It trapuntally into a balance of the self and the other, provides us with a mode for life and thinking in the Anthropocene. By the end of the novel, we are capable of thinking contrapuntally shift into geological agency, asks how we can think of ourselves in this way — as a species collective — without avoiding the different positions of power and varying responsibilities of individuals. “‘What is the core delusion?’” Lizzie’s meditation teacher asks their class one day, everyone silent and spread across Chakrabarty’s questions, she also answers Margot’s. It is the alongside the narratives of individual feeling and emotion, the affective ecosystem of the collective, and in this process apprehend the presence of slow violence in a climate change world.

Through this process, as slow violence is made visible and this apprehension begins to disrupt the patterns of routine life, counterpoint work.

By the end of the novel, observing the balanced oscillation of Lizzie’s narrative of self and surrounding, we see what it looks like to think in this way: holding in conversation our anxieties, griefs, joys, and pains with those of our intimate worlds and the largest world we are a part of. We are called to into the Earth and learning, more radically, to care. Hartwiger writes of Open City in the end of his piece that it is Cole’s use of counterpoint that asks readers “to negotiate seemingly inus to negotiate our individual relationships with the collective: to make commensurable our lives with a perilous Earth.

The epigraph of the book is a psalm, read out at a town meeting in an era before we became geological agents — before the beginning of the Anthropocene. It declares that the

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Earth is the Lord’s and that we are the saints. Now, in the Anthropocene, we return to this, differently. Now, we share responsibility for the care of this Earth, and we learn to hold offers. As the last line of Weather reads, Lizzie and Ben inside in bed feeling the rustle of their dog’s movement at their feet and listening, outside, to the tap of walnuts on the roof, “The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.”

• Works Cited

Bladow, Kyle and Jennifer Ladino. “Toward an Affective Ecocriticism: Placing Feeling in the Anthropocene,” in Af Uni Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.”

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.

Hartwiger, Alexander. “The Postcolonial Flaneur: Open City and the Urban Palimpsest.” Postcolonial Text LeMenager, Stephanie. “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre,” in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geolog ic Times.

Nixon, Rob. “Introduction,” in Slow Violence and the Environ mentalism of the Poor.

Weather.

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To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931) Nicole Fan University College of London

INTRODUCTION writing lay close together,” and her commitment to this creative ethos is indeed evident in her visually evocative texts To the Lighthouse The Waves to the fore as she incorporates the techniques of two modern art movements. In the style of the Impressionists, Woolf is committed to naturalism and evokes the mutability of life; yet, at the same time, she mirrors the Post-Impressionists in seeking a structure to encompass the volatility and discerning an underlying essence to human experience. By blending these methods together, Woolf conveys the paradoxical nature of From the late nineteenth-century onwards, the modernist preoccupation with visual perception grew due to the advent of “new technologies of vision” that illuminated both “visible and ‘invisible’ photographic technology could “capture images which escape natural vision” and “bring things ‘closer’ spatially and development of optical equipment such as stereoscopes and X-ray machines allowed for the exploration of “physiological domains otherwise inaccessible to the human eye” (Danius a heightened awareness about the subjectivity of perception, psychoanalysis and its attention to psychological interiority, as

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well as the solipsistic individuality of urban living.

In response to these different ways of thinking and seeing in the modern world, artists were compelled to develop new aesthetic styles, and experimental art movements such as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism began to arise. Impressionism originated from a group of Paris-based painters that broke away from the conventions of elite academic painting in part by the nascent medium of photography and its way of foregrounding the ordinary moments of everyday life, the Impressionists chose to paint the quotidian world instead. Moreover, they desired to move beyond photographic stasis and to capture the ephemeral sensations of temporal moments, which they innovatively achieved through rapid and fragmented brushwork. Impressionism’s rejection of tradition appalled the twentieth-century art world, but it was the dawn of Post-Impressionism that would completely revolutionise it. Coined in pressionism was a term used to describe a style of French art that diverged from the Impressionists. It was not a cohesive movement in itself, but the painters it referred to all shared the aim of extending the naturalistic representation of Impressionism by adding the rigour of aesthetic form. Thus, while the Post-Impressionists continued to paint scenes from daily life, they imbued their perceived reality with greater intensity through the use of geometric forms and vivid colours.

Woolf herself had artistic inclinations, as seen in letters where she expressed, “How I wish I were a painter!” and the impressionistic sketches that she reportedly drew in her diaand interior designer whom Woolf praised as “a great artist” a renowned photographer who earned Woolf’s admiration for al eye: she subsequently entered a vibrant coterie of creatives known as the Bloomsbury Group, wherein she developed her passion for writing and was encouraged to incorporate paint-

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ing techniques by Roger Fry, who “taught her to ‘see’ and to in a cultural milieu that was preoccupied with the changing nature of visual perception and surrounded by an eclectic mix of intellectuals that encouraged this fascination, it is no wonder that art infused Woolf’s writing. With a pen for a brush and a page for a canvas, Woolf skillfully painted visual landscapes with the texture of words, and it is by turning to her novels that we will be able to appreciate the virtuosity of her craft.

• The Temporal Reality: Woolf ’s Literary Impressionism “people never dare to express frankly what they experience” and set his heart on creating genuine expressions of the world promising painter was Claude Monet, and he would subsequently make his mark on art history as the driving force behind Impressionism, a movement devoted to representing the “perception of Nature through the eyes, as it were, of the Unlike the idealized and heroic tableaus of the academic art .

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The Impressionists’ aim of naturalistic representation was shared by Woolf, who grounded her stories in the normal world in order to “examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” and to detail the impact that “each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” (“Modern Fiction” ed in To the Lighthouse, where characters perceive the physical world with the “fugitive quality” of Impressionist paintings

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she conveys the impermanence of the scene by observing the

Briscoe looks at the seascape, she notices the irrevocable minute shifts of how “the sky changed slightly and the sea changed slightly and the boats altered their positions,” all of which have

method is “to see everything pale, elegant, semitransparent,” the characters’ perceptions are translucent and constantly in Woolf’s preoccupation with the subjectivity of visual perception would further develop in The Waves, a novel interspersed with scenic interludes of a seascape that draw on the

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to evoke the transience of immediate perceptions. The opening interlude, for instance, depicts the sun’s ascent over the water ’ that become ‘fused into one haze, of this illuminated brilliance and transform solid objects into lay rippling and sparkling,” and the canopy of the trees starts to shimmer as the light begins “making one leaf transparent When these interludes are read together, moreover, they form a continuous chronicle of the passage of time as they

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detail every slight gradation in the scenery throughout the day.

From the sheer luminosity of waves “steeped deep-blue” with “a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs” in the mid-day heat, to the haunting gloom of a vision so clouded by the darkness of twilight that “Sky and sea were indistinguishable,” these scenes accurately account for the circadian transHere, Woolf’s literary method is similar to the Impressionist practice of painting a landscape multiple times in different conditions, with the aim of capturing the variations of time and climate on objects. A notable example of one such landscape series is Claude Monet’ depicts the same scene in the different seasons of summer, autumn, and winter. Mirroring the “instants of intense aesthetic pleasure” portrayed in such Impressionist artworks (Lacourarie The Waves are much like Monet’s paintings, conveying the evanescence of immediate perceptions through ekphrastic descriptions of the landscape.

Furthermore, Woolf expands the possibilities of pictorial Impressionism by revealing the psychological process that this, she plunges into each character’s stream of consciousness

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and emerges with the thoughts and sensations that constitute their perceptions of the world. For instance, when Mr. Carmichael walks past Mrs. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, Woolf elucidates the web of transitory cogitations in Mrs. Ramsay’s mind at that instantaneous moment, yoking the disparate thoughts together with commas and semicolons: the very moment when it was painful to be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships, that the most perfect was husband, with her instinct for truth, she turned upon it; when it was painful to feel herself convicted of unworthiness, and impeded in her proper function by these lies, these exaggera-

This rapid chain of thought associations mirrors the proliferation of brush strokes in Impressionist paintings that create a sense of movement and dynamism but takes it further by showing the psychological faculties that contribute to such mutable perceptions.

Such immediate impressions are articulated in an even more ephemeral way within The Waves, as thoughts and sensathe brief and discontinuous brush strokes of Impressionist paintings. For instance, when Bernard is bathing, he perceives a myriad of “rich and heavy sensations” that “form on the roof of my mind” and renders them in short, quick phrases punctuated by full stops: “Water pours down the runnel of my spine.

Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either side. I am covered further heightened by how he abruptly connects the physical feeling of water on his skin to arbitrary memories of “the woods; and Elvedon; Susan and the pigeon,” thoughts that are themselves reminiscent of liquid droplets in “pouring down ing the psychological aspects of immediate perception, Woolf

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encapsulates how Woolf expands on Impressionist techniques consciousness as realistically as possible in words.

• A Revelation of Order: Woolf ’s Literary Post-Impressionism

Impressionism aligned with Woolf’s belief in naturalistic representation, but it could not satisfy her desire to penetrate the surface of sensory perception and uncover the rich layers of meaning within consciousness itself. As Rhoda in The Waves asks, “Like and like and like — but what is the thing that lies that being preoccupied with “the trivial and the transitory” left “materialist” writers “centred in a self which [...] never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond” (“Modern pressionist artists who, despite producing an accurate mimesis of the world, were arguably unable to unearth the substance beneath the sensation. After all, with Impressionism’s “contours erased” and “volumes merely suggested by strokes of illuminated. This concern is intimated by Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse when she compares a life “made up of little separate incidents” to a wave that ruthlessly “bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach” — What Woolf discerned instead was a greater depth to visual perception and an overarching design to creative expression.

This increasingly aligned her with Post-Impressionism, a movement that aimed to reinstate a “purposeful order” to art, “without which our sensations will be troubled and perplexed” of academic art, Post-Impressionism was an innovative style to Woolf because it enabled her to defy the “older forms of vehicle […] for the poetry in her” (“A Room of One’

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Convinced that the most prominent Post-Impressionist artists at the time were ushering in a new kind of creative expression, Woolf wrote that “Cézanne and Picasso had shown the way; techniques, suffusing sensation with emotion and crystallizing One of the Post-Impressionist techniques that Woolf applied to her writing was their “entirely new use of colour,” which was able to express “certain spiritual experiences” (Fry, property of visible objects, “colour is maintained irrespective of light effects” in Post-Impressionism and is determined by the subject’ while an Impressionist might faithfully render a night sky as an inky blanket of darkness dotted with imperceptible spots landscape according to their internal visions — be it a vigorous tempest of blue clouds that roll into dazzling orbs of glowing

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These contrasting artistic convictions are represented by the two artists in To the Lighthouse: Mr. Paunceforte aligns with the Impressionists by making “the colour [...] thinned and fadPost-Impressionists’ preservation of colour by retaining “the a wall in her painting on account of artistic integrity, as she “would not have considered it honest to tamper” with the vivid colour is thus a quality of both visual fact and personal feeling.

Woolf embraces this notion by incorporating colour into her literary works and using it to saturate the visible world with the emotional depth of experience. In To the Lighthouse, for instance, colour is often used to describe the appearance of characters but goes far beyond being a physical descriptor.

Instead, it becomes a manifestation of their underlying temperament, as Woolf compounds the various applications of a single colour into a distinctive emotional essence. For instance, the pretentious Charles Tansley is likened to “red, energetic

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associated with profundity and wisdom: the philosophical Mr. Carmichael appears to be immersed in “a grey-green somic colours are thus imbued with meaning through their application to particular characters, becoming not just a characteris’s interior world.

Similarly, in The Waves voice throughout their growth from youth to maturity, signifying a distinctive, enduring essence at the heart of each character. For instance, warm colours are associated with Jinny: in her younger years, her “red dress” and her conviction that “My

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and her cosmetic application of “red to the lips” convey her with achromatic colours that emphasize her emptiness and despair. In her youth, she is often connected to the colour of white to convey her detachment from the material world, with melancholy grows, darker colours cloud her descriptions: she descends into “the black plumes of sleep” and spirals down also symbolize death and poignantly foreshadow her suicide.

Beyond being a visible property, colour thus points towards a deeper internal reality that endures despite the vacillations of the sensory world.

Apart from the use of colour, Woolf also adopts the Post-Impressionist technique of organizing surface sensations with a carefully balanced structure to invoke the overall unity at the heart of human experience. Unlike the blur of pigments that streaks across an Impressionist’s canvas, Post-Impressionist works resist the obliteration of form, prioritizing ideas over ethos was encapsulated by Cézanne when he expressed that “To read nature is to see her, underneath the veil of interpretation, as coloured taches following one another according to Briscoe echoes in her conviction that, beneath the “feathery and evanescent” surface of her painting, “the fabric must be of capturing the structure beneath the sensation, Post-Imequivalents, a method that is evident in the cuboid shapes that comprise the jagged mountain and rows of houses in Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire

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This technique was what led Fry to call Post-Impressionist works “a new kind of literary painting” in which “ideas, symbolised by forms, could be juxtaposed, contrasted and combined almost as they can be by words on a page” (“Modern thus not just an artistic innovation but a visual language for ’s portraits essence that, in these instances, seems to comprise emotional fatigue and melancholy.

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Lily Briscoe adopts this Post-Impressionist technique in To the Lighthouse, as she perceives that “one way of knowing peothe way that “shapes etherealised” in Mr. Paunceforte’s paintcaptivating aura embodied in the scene of Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, and completes her artwork by painting “a line there, desire to balance “the relations of masses, of lights and shadtral to Mrs. Ramsay’s character but also implies an underlying order to existence.

Lily’s creative process can indeed be read as an analogy for Woolf’s own approach to literary composition because Woolf seems to translate this visual approach when constructing her novels. Demarcated segments of the text are the equivalents of geometric shapes, and they are assembled into balanced narrative structures that reinstate order to the inherent mutability of life. In To the Lighthouse, for instance, the multivalent perspectives of the characters are organized into three separate sections to produce the “enactive elegy” that Woolf intended day in “The Window”; the confusion and shock of losing loved ones is conveyed through the compression of time and parenthetical asides about death in “Time Passes”; while the process tives in “The Lighthouse.” Arranged according to this tripartite structure, the chronological evolution of the family is thus ordered into periods of thematic resonance.

Likewise, the picturesque interludes in The Waves distinguish each succession of interior monologues and separate the text into nine parts that correspond to different stages in the characters’ lives. By differentiating each series of soliloquies, Woolf draws out the essence of the characters that persist throughout the passage of time, such as Louis’s lasting insecurity about his outsider status as he repeatedly agonizes over how “my father is a banker in Brisbane, and I speak with an ’s obsession with weav-

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ing life into a narrative as he constantly works at “solacing The Waves thus invites a consideration of the consistencies that persist throughout the characters’ evolutions and ultimately points to the order that undergirds the inevitable changes of an individual’s life. Much like the Post-Impressionists and their attention to form, then, Woolf divides her texts into structures that help

• Woolf ’s Hybrid Aesthetic: Integrating Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

The transient chaos of Impressionism and the meaningful form of Post-Impressionism seem to be fundamentally antithetical; yet, they coalesce in Woolf’s unique aesthetic as she acknowledges that “all is tumultuous and transitional” while simultaneously ensuring that “a whole has been made from all presents a multiplicity of fragmented perspectives, all of which revolve simultaneously around a focal point to achieve her aim of bringing all “lives together; thinking them into one story” ’s novels and is what Chantal Lacourarie insightfully discerns as “the radial structure,” whereby “everything tends towards or reverberates allowing for harmony and balance to emerge from connecting — rather than containing — the chaos.

In To the Lighthouse, this radial structure manifests in the

by Mrs. Ramsay. To begin with, Woolf represents the initial friction between the characters using a technique that is reminiscent of Impressionism’s “dappling,” rapidly oscillating between their temporal perspectives to produce instances of simultaneous discordance throughout the novel. For instance, when Mrs. Ramsay attempts to make idle conversation during the dinner party, a burst of concurrent reactions takes place: Lily Briscoe contemplates Mrs. Ramsay’s fatigue and thinks of “how worn

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among these disorderly fragments of thought, as Mrs. Ramsay is the common thread that runs through the consciousness of every character –—from Mr. Ramsay, who “wanted her to tell Mrs. McNab, the housekeeper whose memories are inextricably linked with recollections of the “poor lady” who had “died very Functioning like an artist in the domestic sphere, Mrs. Ramsay is the craftswoman that subtly weaves the social fabric into a harmonious tapestry, eliciting the characters’ recognition of the innate connection between them as her magnetic presence makes “life stand still here” and imbues each moment is further emphasized by how “disintegration set in” upon departure from the world, as the house is gradually deserted after her death. Yet, even from beyond the grave, the deceased Mrs. Ramsay still kindles solidarity, as she is the reason why the various characters return to the house decades later in monious beauty in life, Mrs. Ramsay had sensed that “the effort enduring spirit in death, she continues to provide the family with a direction amidst the uncertainty. In this way, she can be ’s painting: a Post-Impressionist structure that draws a myriad of elements together and a centripetal force unifying all of their disparate experiences in both life and death.

In The Waves, the radial structure is evident in how a monPercival, whose name alludes to the purest knight of Arthurian

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myth that quested for the Holy Grail and represents the “endeavour at something mystic, spiritual” that Woolf aimed for between the characters is established from the outset of the novel, which opens with them describing their individual perceptions of the same scene in unison. Bernard’s “I see a ring,” Susan’s “I see a slab of pale yellow,” Rhoda’s “I hear a sound,” Neville’s “I see a globe,” Jinny’s “I see a crimson tassel,” and Louis’s “I hear something stamping” all coalesce to place the reader at the heart of the simultaneous Impressionist sensations arising from their experience of the school garden, and their self-containment is sustained throughout the novel as Woolf seamlessly blends the different streams of conscioussent presence that is never given a voice but always embodied through their perspectives. Just like Mrs. Ramsay, he reinstates order to the confusion of sensations, enabling the characters to go “beyond and outside our own predicament; to that which is symbolic, and thus perhaps permanent, if there is any perma’s arrival, Post-Impressionist form is introduced, enabling the characters to derive greater meaning from a world that had initially been oppressively solipsistic.

Thus, Louis declares that they can now “issue from the darkness of solitude,” Neville celebrates that “Our isolation, our preparation, is over,” and Bernard synthesises all of their reactions with his conviction that “we are drawn into this commuHowever, it is Percival’ dent ideal that leaves the characters utterly destroyed after his death — as Neville articulates, “without Percival there is no solidity. We are silhouettes, hollow phantoms moving mistily desire for meaning, without which their lives are devoid of

ters lose their sense of self: for instance, Louis withdraws into Jinny’

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and, most tragically, Rhoda takes her own life in the despair cival, the six voices fall apart, and the novel is driven to a lonely and discordant end, where the single voice of Bernard tries and fails to accept the absolute isolation that torments them all, proclaiming on the one hand that “Heaven be praised for solitude!”, and yet despairing on the other that he is “beat and thus binds the characters together and maintains the structural integrity of the text as a whole, without which the narrative inevitably ceases. ’s novels, as she brilliantly integrates the techniques of Impressionism and her own unique, hybrid style of writing in which form never eradicates chaos, but neither does chaos ever obscure form, melding vision and design together into aesthetic wholeness.

• Works Cited

Primary Works

Collected Novels of Virginia Woolf, ed. Stella

“Julia Margaret Cameron.” Victorian Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women, Julia Margaret Cameron. New York: Har A Letter to a Young Poet Roger Fry: A Biography “Modern Fiction.”

. London: The Hog

, eds. Nigel Nichol son and Joanne Trautmann. New York and London: Har

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, eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. New York and London: Har Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations, ed.

Fry, Roger. “Modern French Art at the Mansard Gallery.” The Athenaeum Vision and Design Secondary Works Dackombe, Amanda Marie. Making Thought Visible: Colour in the Beckett and T.S. Eliot. PhD Thesis. Queen Mary College, Technology, Modernism, and Death in The Magic Moun tain.”

The Waves: Some Services of the Style.” University of Toronto Quarterly The Cam bridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Sellers.

Kalitina, Nina. Claude Monet. New York: Parkstone Internation Kostkowska, Justyna. “Studland Beach and Jacob’s Room: Partial Answers Lacourarie, Chantal. “Painting and Writing: A Symbiotic Re ’s Works.” Interdisciplinary Liter ary Studies Le Brun, Xavier. “The Early Experimental Short Stories Of To Post-Impressionist Forms?.” Image & Narrative

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’s To the Lighthouse.” Bulletin of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Petrie, Brian. Claude Monet: The First of the Impressionists. Ox Stevenson, Randall and Jane Goldman. “‘But what? Elegy?’”: Modernist Reading and the Death of Mrs. Ramsay.” The Yearbook of English Studies Stewart, Jack F. “Spatial Form and Color in The Waves.” Twentieth Century Literature Illustrations

in Argenteuil

The Holy Family on the Steps

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Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist’s Garden Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer)

The Starry Night

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Night Fishing at Antibes Mont Sainte-Victoire Virginia Woolf Monk’

Oil on canvas.

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T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Making New Out of the Old: The Manifold Purpose of Gothic Elements in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland Nina Merkofer Universität Basel

INTRODUCTION Ancient castles and ivy-covered ruins with spiral staircases, eerie dungeons, and hidden trap doors set the scenery maidens, valorous heroes, and supernatural on-goings. These dark, uncanny, and suspenseful stories draw the readers into the mysterious and fantastic world of the Gothic. Surrounded by the ideas of enlightenment, Gothic literature presented a backlash against the predictability and regularity of the literature of the Age of Reason. The core ideas of this literary trend were retrieved from the stories of traditional folksay and from gripping mysteries of the gloomy past. Especially the Middle Ages proved to be a fertile ground for the derivation of imaginative narrative: a period featuring great controversies and contrasts. The curiosity for this ancient past of vast cultural exchange, intriguing wilderness, and remarkable architecture gave way for medievalism, which lent its color and decor to the emerging Gothic literature. After making its formal debut in

The term “Gothic” exhibits multiple meanings and touches historical, artistical, and architectural sense. Examining “Gothic” in a literary context, the term is often used to describe the

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tious body. Characterizing this “traditional Gothic literature,” al of the terrifying, the archaic setting of scenes, the striking appearance of supernatural elements, the stereotypical behavior of characters, and the endeavor to apply and perfect instruments of literary suspense. However, there is a mutability inherent to the Gothic, and as the “original Gothic” has gone through many adaptations and transformations during past deAt the heart of origin of the Gothic novel is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto revolving around a chivalric age with a haunted castle, an archaic tyranny, and humanized inanimate objects through the contribution to the Gothic canon is Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or The Transformation pean Gothic conventions into a new direction. He immerses himself in the American consciousness and focusses on the

— yet their kindred traits are applied differently in order to give the reader a particular conception of the respective novel.

According to Andrew Smith’s Gothic Literature address. Images of political turmoil and periods of war are The Castle of Otranto is grounded in the conservativity of its socio-political surroundings, Wieland draws its

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text. This mutative, transatlantic adaptation of Gothic literature American Gothic Literature the Gothic are the result of the changing conditions regarding how a different usage of traditional Gothic elements can innovatively change the perception of a Gothic novel, this paper atGothic novel. The paper argues that while both novels exhibit both different and similar Gothic characteristics — especially diverging conceptions — Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto can be considered “conservative,” whereas Brown’s Wieland can be construed as “modern.”

• Two “Firsts”: The English and the American Gothic Novel The tradition of the Gothic novel has its beginnings in -

in the liking of classicism and developed a pronounced fascination for medieval tastes. Walpole was an aristocrat: his father which permitted Walpole to lead the life of a scholar and genis, best known for is the highly disputed The Castle of Otranto second edition included the subtitle “A Gothic Story.” The introduction of the term “Gothic” into the context of literature leads to Otranto being acknowledged as the progenitor of the Gothic Romance. The emerging genre appealed to a wide audi-

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ence and, according to Walpole himself, constituted a blend of ancient and modern Romance. Thus, Otranto aided the estabof characters which were incorporated into the works of later The story of Otranto is set in medieval Sicily and revolves around themes of parental duties and around making amends for the wrongs of the past plaguing the family history. Manfred, the tyrannical prince of Otranto, holds a usurped title inherited from his ancestors: a fateful secret that is accompanied by an ancient prophecy of predicted doom for the usurper’s family. When Manfred’s only male heir Conrad loses his life in a freak accident on the day of his wedding and an innocent peasant is falsely imprisoned, Manfred pursues the newly groom-less Isabella in an attempt to circumvent the dire ominous supernatural elements predicting the return of the true heir and with the continuous self-abandonment of Theodore, the young peasant. After a series of events unfold, includof a doomed love between Theodore and Manfred’s daughter, Matilda; a reunion of both Theodore and Isabella with their fathers; and a tragic mistake causing Manfred to kill his daughter, Theodore is revealed to be the real heir of Otranto. The castle falls to ruins, and Isabella and Theodore marry in agony Walpole’s cautionary tale originated the basic set of Gothic convention: the purposely scary story uses creaking trap doors, subterranean passage ways, shadowy stairs, cryptic sounds, the pathetic fallacy, and fateful omens to create the Gothic novel’s standard atmosphere. This gloomy atmosphere thrives on ominous mood and tone, a vague geographical setting within Gothic architecture (such as ruins, castles, cloisters, caves, re-

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manifestations and forebodings. Formulaic elements imply duplicity and prospective danger coming towards naive or innocent characters and heighten the story’s suspense (Snodgrass Otranto exhibits all of these embodiments: located in a foreign place sometime in the Middle Ages, the story takes place in a haunted castle, a dark vault, a cloister, a cave, and eventually ends in the fallen ruins of the castle. Comprised in a visions, the reader worries about the looming threat to poor Isabella’s innocence and about the fate of Otranto. The story culminates in the terrible death of the pure Matilda and the deliverance of Otranto through the legitimate heir.

On the other side of the globe, it all started with Charles Brockden Brown’s seminal novel Wieland; or The Transformation delphian Quakers. From a young age, Brown possessed a vivid he pursued his literary ambitions as editor of the periodical Monthly Magazine and American Review, founded by the Friendly Club. As club member and editor, Brown frequently contribther of the American Romance novel” and is foremost known Wieland, carries the subtitle “An American Tale.”

The novel’s story revolves around dilemmas of a psychological, moral, sociopolitical, and philosophical nature, which were central American issues at the time (taking into consideration that the word “American” was still very new at the time and did not carry the cultural and geo-political weight it does nowaWieland constitutes a combination and transformation of different literary elements, making its “Gothic” status debatable for some scholars — yet there is a broad consensus on the acknowledgement of the importance of the novel’s Gothic

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Within the story of Wieland, “Brown, inverting standard Gothic expectations, articulates a drama of universal depravity and self-discovery with political, historical, and cultural implitionary Pennsylvania and centers on the demise of the Wieland family. The German religious fanatic Theodore Wieland Sr. follows his call for Christianization to the New World, where he dies mysteriously, quite possibly because of spontaneous human combustion. His two children, Theodore and Clara, set up an enlightened household on the family estate, where they live a protected and gleeful life with Catherine, the sibling’s oldest friend, wife to Theodore, and mother to their four children. Joined by Catherine’s brother Henry Pleyel, the completed group’s bliss is only disrupted with the appearance of the mysterious outsider Carwin and the simultaneous emersion of disembodied voices. The unexplained voices — whose source, later revealed, is Carwin’s biloquism — interrupt the budding romance between Clara and Pleyel and confound the young Wieland, together with the haunting memory of his father’s demise, to slaughter wife and children as an act of religious deference. After his apprehension and imprisonment, Wieland escapes multiple times to complete what he believes to be a divine command by butchering his sister. Saved by Carwin, Clara watches her brother commit suicide, experiences a nervous breakdown, nearly burns to death during her recovery when she and Pleyel restart.

Brown’s novel evidently draws upon elements and conventions of the initial English Gothic: like Walpole’s Otranto, Wieland revolves around a trio of main protagonists which constitute a villain, a hero, and a female. Though the characters’ personas are more blurred in Brown’s writing, both storylines end with a father killing his child/children, a ruined

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ginning. Both novels have a main protagonist called Theodore, and both use Germanic as well as symbolic character names

role in both novels.

Brown not only embeds parameters of the English Gothic but adapts, transforms, and expands the Gothic elements within an American context. These transatlantic manifestations have been incorporated into the characteristics of an American Gothic tradition: the focus shifts from topics concerning aristocracy, primogeniture, and medievalism to the issues of the New World such as Native Americans, slaves, frontier wilderness, the status of women, revolutionary ideas, and religion.

The setting of the stories is usually recognizably American, placing the danger not afar but right at home. Supernatural and patriarchal dangers move to the background, and the absence of authority — the horror vacui following revolutions and parricide — becomes the new main source of fear. This notion of Wieland’s characters: both the Wieland and Pleyel siblings are orphaned at a young age, and their lack of guidance leads ternalized, illustrated by the haunting of Clara’s psyche, and Brown inverts the notion of the pathetic fallacy as well through the depiction of Clara’s sentiments in the form of inanimate objects. Wieland’s supernatural elements are far less prominent than the over-sized helmets, moving paintings, and blood tears of a statue of Walpole’s Otranto, and they are later revealed as having a human source after all.

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The Castle of Otranto and “Gothic Conservatism” Walpole’s Otranto was prompted by a vivid dream which placed the author on the inside of an ancient castle. Letting the dreamscape develop and grow organically for the duration of the following two months, Walpole indulged himself in reverie and exercised the method of automatic writing. The story of Otranto is preceded by a preface, whereby the preface of the story is the translation of an ancient Italian manuscript and that both the time the story is set in and the time of its writing must have occurred during the period of the crusades, as the work’s “principal incidents are such as were believed in the dissolves this delusion of the reader and reveals that Otranto is a story written in the present by a current member of parliament.

The writing of Walpole inspires to emulate the practice part of this emulation is evident in the way in which the storytelling of Otranto and the behavior of its characters verge on theatrics: upon having been stabbed, Matilda exclaims “Ah me, is additionally composed in archaic diction so as to match its historical perception; both theatrics and language style are apparent in the scene where Theodore would never escape the dungeon at the cost of Matilda’s suffering: “[T]hinkest thou, charming maid, that I will accept of life at the hazard of aught Whilst Walpole’s combination of terror with ancient and modern romance was a novelty and initialized a groundbreaking new genre, Otranto simultaneously constitutes a re-immersion into conservatism.

This re-immersion is especially visible in the story’s heavily medieval basis. The storytelling is full of typical motifs, themes,

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and characteristics of the Middle Ages: ancient castles and abbeys, old wills and documents, grand chivalry and evil villainy, be argued that Walpole’s medievalism goes beyond an imaginative return to the intriguing oppositions of the past and can be construed as a “historical recovery.” Otranto portrays many elements similar to historical sources on the real Castle of entirely do without endeavors of verisimilitude. Walpole’s novel is thus routed in a conservative frame celebrating power in The embedment of the story into actual history is done by Walpole himself as well, as the alleged translator asserts that “the ground-work of the story is founded on truth” and “the scene Otranto’s medievalism is particularly lived out in its characters: there is a very clear trio of villain, hero, and female in the center of the plot. The black-hearted Manfred turns into the stalker of darling Isabella, taken over by a fear for his dynasty, eventually leading to his demise. Theodore, the inexperienced yet chivalric youth pitted against the villain, comes to himself the worthy heir. This “black and white” political landthe tyrannical patriarch who is eagerly holding on to power and the good yet powerless youth who counters the patriarch’s evil with his gentle masculinity. The youth outlasts the tyrant and often ends up with the latter’s possession (which includes Otranto thus contains “truly good” and “truly bad” characters, whereby no in-between exists. Accordingly, there are no impactful character transformations during the course of the novel (perhaps to some extent the exception Shakespeare’s plays as a guide, Walpole’s cardboard charac-

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ters converge with “Shakespearean” grotesque characters. As the grotesque presents “a perverse intertwining of ludicrous, estranged beings or comic events and their tragic outcomes,” disparate absurdity. illustrated as a swooning, frightened, and frail maiden in need of protection. Isabella’s maidenhood is seen as her most valuable asset, and it is not her life but her virginity which needs to be protected at all costs; when Frederic, Isabella’s father, appears to be on the verge of death, he tells his daughter that “this brave knight — I know not who he is — shall protect claustrophobia, yet it is not actual dungeons or prisons that are posing the danger, but patriarchal marriage. Facing the very real threat of being raped and “trapped” at Manfred’s side, Isabella is forced to retreat into the animalistic logic of the only for Theodore, her protector, that she stays safe (Snodgrass

Most of Otranto’s characters are caught up in love triangles — or perhaps better described as a complex “love chaos.”

Hippolita loves Manfred, who wants Isabella, who has feelings for Theodore, who loves Matilda, who loves Theodore in return but is almost married off to Frederic, who fancies her. In traditional Gothic fashion, this almost comic chaos of lovers is accompanied by tragedy. Theodore’s true love Matilda dies by the hand of her own father, making the current rulers of Otranto childless, and two heartbroken souls marry in the knowledge of their eternal melancholy: “[H]e [Theodore] could know no happiness but in the society of one [Isabella] with whom he

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could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possestimes, most particularly through pastor Jerome’s exclamation that “[a] tyrant’s race must be swept from the earth to the third family is also foretold through various supernatural elements connected to a divine will. maniacal prince Manfred of Otranto, Walpole established the havoc-wreaking, dynastic, dark, and patriarchic villain of the Gothic novel. The typically demonic father and husband stops at nothing to implement his dynastic “design.” Manfred’s core concern is his obsessive struggle for the preservation and transference of a property which had been acquired through suspicious means. Both the villain’s dynastic line and his contested property are doomed to failure within the conventional resolution of the story of the Gothic novel. The villain and past misdeeds are overcome through the insertion of a time-honored instrument of aristocracy: a marital union between the two contending families. With the marriage of Theodore — the the novel closes with a union that simultaneously legitimizes and consolidates the secret heir’s position as the rightful suctime about the actual source of legitimacy. As some perceived property as a divinely bestowal which was to be inherited by blood, owners of new money challenged this notion. In Otranto, the dead still claim authority over the living by keeping a grip on their property: the usurper’s family pays the price for the wrongs of its forefathers, and the royal blood lineage is awarded when a vision in the form of Alfonso appears upon the destruction of the castle to speak: “Behold in Theodore, the

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ascends towards heaven, depicting a divine sanction. The rightful heir comes into his own while maintaining the status quo, ending the novel in the restoration of order.

Otranto’s extensive symbolism pursues this conservative note as “[t]he giant helmet that sits in the courtyard at Otranto metaphorically shows that, in Walpole’s realm of fantasy, authority is more than ever vested in a head of state, in a single topics of aristocratic authority, inheritance, and possession and dispossession, Walpole’s novel employs innovative Gothic elements to consolidate notions of conservatism.

• Wieland: Giving the Gothic Novel a “Modern Twist” The story of Wieland was written within a very short period of time, and its landscape of terror portrays a distinctly American setting and combines physical with mental spaces. Using Gothic elements and national allegories, Brown presents an innovative cautionary tale focusing on the exposure of the hu-

Wieland plays some decades before it was written — between the end of the French and the beginning of the American Revolution — not in an indeterminate medieval past and not in archaic diction. Set in Philadelphia, Brown diminishes the feeling of distance within the reader and places the story in a homely setting. Instead of a simple narrative, the story is told in the form of letters written by Clara Wieland to some curious offers much foreshadowing to the reader, as the narrator’s feel-

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ings are biased towards certain characters. There is no preface to the novel, but there is an advertisement written by Brown himself concerning the authors intentions: his aim is a moral painting of man, whereby the subject should exhibit its most to address the heart as well as the mind of its readership and portrays political and social meditations at its core (ChrisThe plot of Wieland is based on a true story: Brown was inspired by newspaper accounts about an actual psychological crime committed by James Yates. The family-killer claims that he had been incited to commit the mass murder by a hallucidid, Brown resides on actual historical sources — yet they do not stem from the dark ages but concern contemporary incidents. Another similarity to Walpole lies in some of Brown’s characters’ showcasing of Shakespearean traits; in Wieland, there is even an additional insinuation with the continuous warning of a disembodied voice crying “hold! hold!”, so as to employ “[t]he mode in which heaven is said by the poet [Shakespeare], to interfere for the prevention of crimes” ments makes it possible to consider Brown’s story as “modern.”

In the context of this paper, “modern” refers to “new” in the the term “modern” was more closely connected to “Enlightenment,” this is not what is meant in the following; here, the term refers to the turning away from conservative perspectives and values and shifting toward something new.

This “modern” twist of Gothic elements is visible in Brown’s embedding of political landscapes. Usually, Italy, Spain, and Germany portray the chaotic and the anarchic (in contrast to England and France, portraying an ordered consti-

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does not appear to include this element — Wieland plays in the New World. However, the elder Wieland was a native from Saxony and moved across the sea because of his “duty to disseminate the truths of the gospel among the unbelieving nations”

chaos and anarchy through religion; whereby this is not truly on. From Walpole’s Manfred, “the typical villainous Gothic patriarch is a swarthy Catholic Italian or Spaniard, the Other can also be observed in hero-villain Carwin, who takes up studies in Europe and converts to Catholicism in Spain, which the story takes a different turn than simple anti-Catholicism, ending in the questioning of what religion (especially religious Wieland’s characters are much different to those of Otranto: while Walpole and Brown use the same name for a very important protagonist, Walpole’s Theodore turns out to be a noble hero and heir to a kingdom, and Brown’s Theodore turns out to be the villain (or perhaps a marionette of the villain, manner, the name of Clara — which stands for purity — may already insinuate the attribute which is endangered during the course of the story; it is not just her actual innocence but the purity of her soul that is incriminated as well. Brown digresses from Walpole’s cardboard characters to layered ones through assigning them traits of aberrant behavior. There is no clearcut triad of villain, hero, and female. Carwin is not inherently villainous but merely a wicked meddler. His intent to manipulate is of a curious nature, and in the end, he even saves Clara

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Wieland, a hero brother trying to rescue his sister from social disgrace, becomes a berserk family-murderer. Clara, the frail

on. Contrary to Otranto, the lines between the pair of male to say who the actual evil is — the puppet, the puppeteer, or a supernatural entity? developed into Clara, a courageous and strong woman: “Reputation and life might be wrested from me by another, but my like Isabella, Clara’s innocence is in danger — yet rape and assault are much less literal in Wieland and take on the form of Following this complexity of plot and characters, all main proand also learns about her darker, animalistic side; Wieland becomes a violent religious fanatic/lunatic; and Carwin, the menace, decides to reveal his mischief and becomes a “semi-hero.”

Still, the novel’s central transformation is Clara’s reaching womanhood, awoken by her simultaneously compulsive repulsion and attraction for Carwin. His distinctly unbeautiful form is starkly contrasted with his entrancingly sublime voice, which reverie — she fancies the voice to be so special: “it seemed as if an heart of stone could not fail of being moved by it. It imparted to me an emotion altogether involuntary and incontroulaobsession with Carwin, as his memorable visage, glimpsed for but a moment, “continued for hours to occupy [her] fancy, to are stirred in Carwin, when through the accounts of Clara’s

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in his eyes. Yet Clara’s feelings towards all three men in her life desire and love to fear and animosity — the latter which arises towards the ending when the victim herself is incriminated.

With Clara’s realization that her “heart was black enough to evil is an aptitude everyone possesses. Everyone, even the pure Comparable to Otranto, Wieland takes up incestuous elePleyel, Clara, and Carwin, and the other between the Wieland disengagement as he confesses his meddling and is hunted by

for the short absence of Wieland’s learning his profession, which only added to the women’s “impatience in the absence only one that survives from the triangle, and it is Wieland’s she is the only one he cannot bring himself to kill: “Any victim is prompted by a disembodied voice he believes to stem from divine origin. The voice is only one of several unexplained voices — among them the imitation of Catherine and of Clara, conspiring voices in Clara’s closet, and voices warning Clara of impending danger. As seemingly supernatural elements, the voices later turn out to have a human agent: Carwin. His ability of biloquism enables him not only “to mimic exactly the voice and distance. Carwin confesses to all the voices but to the one giving Wieland his divine command, leaving the uncertainty of some supernatural force. The tragedy of Wieland is foreboded

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in Clara’s warning dream at the river bank, in which her brother tries to entice her to fall into a pit.

Contrasting Walpole, Brown moves away from the theme of the aristocratic patriarch. When grandfather Wieland, a man of noble origins, married a member of the middle-class bitions,” he rebelled against the constraints of social class and patriarchal authority, which left him “entirely disowned and ther Wieland and his wife, father Wieland was orphaned at a young age and set adrift. Likewise, the Wieland siblings are left without parental guidance early on, and because of their severed ties with the Old World, they completely wrap themselves up in a naïve trust in reason and its power. Together with two other orphans, the foursome created a rational utopia within this missing of a patriarch which ultimately brings the family to its demise. This “masterlessness” leads to mayhem, as the lack of the patriarch’s stabilizing authority leaves the unguided children to their own means in interpreting the voices they hear. In the backdrop of the Enlightenment revolutionary, the question arises if listening to the voices in our own heads will Wieland also takes up notions of property, possession, and inheritance differing to those of Walpole. While the English way of acquiring money centered around marriage, inheritance, and patronage, the New World allowed for an accumulation of wealth through landownership and the practice of slave labor. Because of a vast amount of affordable lands, the topic of birthright loses some of its importance. The Wieland siblings inherit the family estate but do not feel the need or want for more; they do not act on an opportunity to seize possession of large domains in Germany, even as Clara recounts that “by the law of male-primogeniture, my brother’s claims were superior

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novel, it is the Pennsylvania wilderness which becomes “the new American version of the darkly mysterious, dangerous, Brown goes beyond a simple adoption of English Gothic conventions — he transforms them. The novel traverses a continuous unbalance between reason and religion, rationality and the supernatural, and an inherent human aptitude for goodness and an aptitude for evil. The supernatural has a rational explanation, whereby not all of the voices are accounted for, because of masterlessness. The disrupted order is never truly restored, and the awoken animosity of Clara has left its mark.

Every individual is susceptible to evil, and “no human virtue is

• CONCLUSION Gothic novel took on a seminal role in the development of a Gothic canon in their respective nation. Picking up remnants of medieval times and displaying hyperbolic characters, Walpole’s groundbreaking Otranto was a highly controversial novelty. The novel embeds a conservative political perspective within the establishing of a convention of Gothic elements.

Otranto’s family curse, its supernatural ongoing, its triad of stylized characters, and its conventional ending weave a conservative return to an aristocratic order. The legitimacy of the true ruler stems from a divine will, and ancestral sins against noble blood are punished mercilessly. Building upon Walpole’s his story within the dominant questions and issues of the Wieland introduces new topics

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the controversy of religion and reason, the uncertainty of the existence of the supernatural, the perils of masterlessness, and the general ways of the New World. The characters of Wieland are much more manifold, as each character portrays a duplicity of good and bad within them. Adding to this moral dilemma of the self, Brown blurs the internal and the external. He explores the human unconscious by confusing his characters with whose untraceable and incomprehensible origin makes them appear alien, perhaps resonating God or one’s own unconJust as most innovations are impacted by their social, culAmerican Gothic novel exhibit contemporary issues. While Walpole portrays the precedence of monarchy and aristocratic Revolutionary/post-revolutionary tensions are addressed within the story of Wieland, offering a thought-provoking impulse about the future of a new, revolutionary America. Presumably having eluded the atrocious events of the French Revolution, the established America still carries irreparable consequences.

In emphasizing that even a “revolution in sentiments” implies a transformation of some sorts, Brown gives a warning that there are still residual possibilities to be considered. Post-revolutionary America must face its violent national transformation and the arisen issues of power and self-control (Christopherscation of Gothic elements can have manifold effects and elicit diverging thoughts within the audience. Brown uses Walpole’s Gothic characteristics in an entirely different manner, which makes his novel appear in another light. While Walpole’s take is clearly conservative, Brown’s stance is much more complex.

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The masterless regime of the Wielands decays in need of the stabilizing guide of a patriarch, yet not of the Old-World patriarch; the demise of the rational foursome is based on a seemingly supernatural deception of their senses; and the female protagonist comes face to face with human depravity, learning that the human conscious and unconscious are not rooted in an inherent goodness.

Thus, the Gothic is a mutant hybrid constantly making new out of the old. Just like a virus replicates, the Gothic reproduces itself within our different cultures, generating new growths.

It is a virus which resists its realism antidote, and it consistently fuses with the contemporary dark side. The only thing prevailing throughout this reproducing chain is the provoca-

Gothic novel are actually old and new simultaneously: Otranto as a contemporary innovation and yet in some ways “conservative” in nature; Wieland as a combination of an older, pre-established basis with a “modern” twist.

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• Works Cited Bienstock Anolik, R. American Gothic Literature. A Thematic Study from Charles Brockden Brown to Colson Whitehead.

Bloom, C. Bradshaw, C. C. “The New England Illuminati: Conspiracy and Causality in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland.” The New England Quarterly Brown, C. B. Wieland; or The Transformation Christophersen, B. The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic. University of Georgia Press, Davison, C. M. “Charles Brockden Brown: Godfather of the American Gothic.” A Companion to American Gothic,

Galluzzo, A. “Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and the Aesthetics of Terror: Revolution, Reaction, and the Radical Enlightenment in Early American Letters.” Eighteenth-Century Studies canny in Wieland and Prometheus Unbound.” Eighteenth-Century Studies Ed. Mulvey-Roberts, M. The Handbook to Gothic Literature. New Pécastaings, A. “William Marshal and the Origins of The Castle of Otranto.” English Studies Punter, D. The Literature of Terror: Volume 1: The Gothic Tradition.

Terror Across the Disciplines.” Teaching the Transatlan-

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tic Eighteenth Century, edited by Jennifer Frangos and

Smith, A. Gothic Literature Snodgrass, M. E. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. Facts Walpole, H. The Castle of Otranto Watt, J. Weinstock, J. A. “Brown, Charles Brockden.” The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by William Hughes et al., WiWinter, C. “’Some Fatal Secret’: Mortmain in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.” Lumen

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Daniel Lüthi for his helpful comments and thoughts regarding the thesis of this paper and for his benevolent guidance

Hiermit bestätige ich, dass ich vertraut bin mit den von der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel herausgegebenen „Regeln zur Sicherung wissenschaftlicher Redlichkeit“ und

Basel, 22.12.2020 Nina Merkofer

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

The Postmodern Neo-Sensation Novel: Metalepsis as Narrative Strategy in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and its Filmic Adaptation Rachelle Claire Strub Universität Basel

• In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles uses metliterature to create surprise and shock in the readers. These tion. The aim of this paper is to outline how these instances of

genres serve as a foundation for the later analysis of instances The French Lieutenant’s Woman portrays the emerging love story between Charles Smithson, an engaged gentleman, and Sarah Woodruff, a social outcast. It

French Lieutenant’s Woman (TFLW

Victorian The

ern twist to it through the novel’s unique narrative structure.

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and bears several typical plot and narrative characteristics. His Especially through the narrative structure, Fowles is able to i.e., that of causing surprise and shock in the reader.

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between Anne and Mike, the actors who portray the characters roles are played by Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Since the narrative structure is so crucial to the novel, Pinter had to come up with a creative way in which he could adapt it to the nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. In both the novel and strategy.

• Neo-Victorianism Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn emphasize, however, that more than the nineteenth century”. Heilmann and Llewellyn proceed to elucidate their previous statement by writing that “to be part must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of rians always concerned with temporality. A return to the historical period necessitates a re-examination of its characteristics. Jes-

“the importance of the text’s active engagement and dialogue with history, and hence the necessity of an informed and critical an studies is the process of adaptation. According to Linda Hutcheon, adaptations are “openly acknowledged and extended reworkings of particular other texts”. During the process of adaptation, a change from one medium to another may take place, and adaptations are therefore “re-mediations”. The references to the characteristics and conventions of the widely tion novel can thus be perceived as a modern adaptation of the

tion novel along with some new and distinct features.

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• The Neo-Sensation Novel as “neither a parody or critique of the sensation novel of the “‘pastiche,’ or ‘blank parody’” and draws from Fredric Jamesunique style [...] without parody’s ulterior motive”. Pastiche the ridiculous aspects of a particular style. Instead, the style the authors use in neo-sensation novels should imitate and allude to the original sensation novel of the nineteenth century. The aim of the neo-sensation novel is, according to Marsh, that “it presents images that recall the nineteenth century, and it recreates the experience of reading the nineteenth-century novel”. Fowles recreates this experience stylistically, by writing in a manner that resembles that of the nineteenth century.

tiche, she adds that contemporary neo-sensation novels cannot be deemed to be “simplistic or regressive”. The neo-sensation an ideology or values. Marsh points out that “sensation novels, the past, yet they are not historical novels. They are actually that present”. This is an important caveat considering the extensive research that becomes evident by the many historical facts that Fowles provides in TFLW either in the text itself or in the epigraphs. What Fowles does, more precisely, is that he he also questions those of his own time thereby. In terms of formal conventions of the sensation novel to challenge popular philosophical stances in their very different historical periods”.

• TFLW as Neo-sensation Fiction

Certain narrative conventions are present in sensation and

set in the present”. A similarity between the sensation novel and the neo-sensation novel is that the “neo-sensation novel is set in the narrative present”. The narration is “usually by an omniscient speaker [and] is simultaneous with the action”.

In TFLW, the narrator is overtly omniscient, and throughout the novel, the narrator even develops his own personality and upon this generic convention of the sensation and neo-sen-

sation novel: “If I have pretended until now to know my character’s minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in [...] a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God”. This indicates Fowles’, and separately, the narrator’s knowledge of the generic conventions.

There are also conventions and reappearing characteristics The narrator in TFLW is not only deeply aware of the generic conventions, but also of the plot elements which constitute chance have a place in the sensation novel, and romance is accorded primacy”. The narrator in TFLW addresses these instances of coincidence and chance which drive the plot, but he deconstructs them as well. After Charles’ encounter with Sarah asleep on the cliff, he apologizes to her and on his way back he stops to drink milk. Sarah follows him and they meet chance, is revealed by the narrator to be fully constructed: “the idea crossed my mind as I wrote that it might be more clever to have him stop and drink milk… and meet Sarah again”.

Another coincidence occurs when Charles wants to sleep with a prostitute whose name turns out to also be Sarah. Although coincidence and chance certainly play an important role in the novel, the narrator emphasizes his own role in constructing the plot.

Cox provides a concise summary of the main issues of the sensation novel which are also frequently featured in neo-sensation narratives and can include “crime, secrets, identity, transgressive women, the family, and the apparently ‘respectable’ home”. According to Kelly Marsh, the sensation novel usually starts “by portraying a model community of seemingly unrelated and apparently upstanding citizens” and progresses to “uncover the scandalous secrets and illicit connections that exist under that thin veneer of respectability”. This is partially contradicted in Fowles’ novel, since the narrator already provides blatantly honest and negative character descriptions respectability attributed to Charles due to his social stand-

ing is immediately questioned by the narrator due to his past behavior. In the second chapter of TFLW, Charles’ character narrator because Charles was once “in carnal possession of a naked girl,” implying premarital sex. The sensation novel aims at exposing the characters’ secrets and double lives and thererian era. In Fowles’ modern adaptation of the sensation novel, the characters’ secrets are exposed, not by the unfolding of the plot, but through an omniscient and brutally honest narrator.

The possible discovery of these secrets hidden in the past can result in a loss of money, status, or power for the characters, which indicates that some characters necessarily have to originate from a high social class. There is much at stake for them if their secrets are revealed. Fowles uses Charles’ scandalous past as an early instance to construct TFLW as a neo-sensation novel. Marsh elaborates further on this aspect that present enigmas are the result of secrets hidden in the past, and that these secrets are discoverable”. To summarize, a the revelations made in the present. The central illicit connection in the novel is the romantic relationship that develops between Charles and Sarah, who belong to different social classes. Exposing the past affairs that these characters have, could have dire consequences for them. These illicit romantic relationships tie further into the next characteristic of sensation and neo-sensation plots, which is fundamental.

Marsh writes that “sensation-novel plots almost universally have their origins in a crime; often these crimes are transgressions that threaten the family, such as adultery and bigamy”.

Charles’ and Sarah’s relationship is further problematic and thereby typical for the neo-sensation novel, since Charles is engaged to Ernestina and his actions can be seen as adultery. The image of the perfect, stable family, which stands for property, social class, or money, is jeopardized by revealing the characters’ transgressive actions. After Charles and Sarah

have sexual intercourse, Charles realizes he has feelings for Sarah and proposes marriage to her, because it is the correct measure: “I must. I wish to. I could never look myself in the face again if I did not”. Charles thus intends to break off his engagement to Ernestina, and he is rather shocked once he

rian social standards, the loss of virginity due to premarital sex out of wedlock. During a later conversation with Dr. Grogan, after Charles has broken off his engagement, Dr. Grogan says: “[y]ou have committed a crime. Your punishment will be to remember it all your life”. Since crimes generally play an important role in the development of the plot, it is not surprising that legal matters frequently occur in sensation and neo-sensation novels. Fowles includes this aspect when Charles must legally state that he ended his engagement to Ernestina in an admission of guilt.

Further transgressions include madness and the topic of mental illness is embodied in Sarah, whom Ernestina describes as: “[s]he is… a little mad”. Sarah’s mental illness is discussed by Charles and Dr. Grogan who says she is “addicted to melancholia”. This is one of several reasons as to why Sarah is a transgressive woman. Interestingly, Sarah’s father also suffered from mental illness and was sent to an asylum, this could allude to a possible inheritance of mental illnesses. The theme of in TFLW, when Charles’ elderly uncle decides to marry. Due to this, Charles does not receive his intended inheritance, which further jeopardizes his relationship with Ernestina, since he should be the main provider of the family.

For readers at the time, these transgressions were especially thrilling, surprising and shocking, and this element of shock constitutes a further characteristic of the sensation novel and its modern equivalent. This element of shock was included because it was perceived as a fundamental part of the only recently emerging experience of modernity, which came about -

an era, many rapid and exciting changes occurred due to the Industrial Revolution, the colonial expansion, the political citement, which the people experienced then. Fowles uses this element of shock during Charles’ stroll through Ware Commons when he catches sight of Sarah asleep: “[f]or one terrible moment he thought he had stumbled on a corpse. But it was a woman asleep”. The potential discovery of a corpse would have implied a crime, and this short excerpt causes suspense in the reader. Charles continues to observe Sarah as she is sleeping, and he is mesmerized by her and even sexualizes her body. For would be such highly intrusive and ungentlemanly behavior that it would cause surprise and outrage. Charles is eventually discovered by Sarah: “[s]he looked up at once, [...] He was detected, and he was too much a gentleman to deny it”. In this thrilling passage, Charles’ transgressive action is caught, and their encounter further drives the plot.

Since this element of shock is key in evoking the genre necessarily includes it in his novel. The crucial point is that, whereas the previously mentioned characteristics of the plot, cause thrill and excitement in the reader, Fowles now creates shock through the novel’s narrative structure. Fowles adapts reader of his neo-sensation novel. He achieves this through his unique narrator, who forms the decisive narrative instance in the novel. Although the narrator’s importance in the novel is narrative strategy that becomes palpable through the narrator through the narrative strategy called metalepsis that TFLW causes shock in both the readers and the audience.

• Metalepsis as Narrative Strategy intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic emphasizes that there must be “at least two narrative levels”; between the extradiegetic level and the diegetic level — that is to say, between the narrator’s universe and that of his or her story”. It is through exterior metalepsis, that the narrator blurs the temporal dimensions in TFLW. In addition to this, “an exterior metalepsis may take the reader by surprise at any moment” write Cohn and Gleich. This element of surprise that is caused by metalepsis allows for TFLW to be linked back to its Since the narrator is fundamental for creating metalepsis, a closer analysis is necessary. Even though Fowles capably imitates the style of the sensation novel, there are instances with his humorous and modern comments. Marie-Claire Simonetti describes the narrator as a “highly self-conscious, contemporary narrator, who comments on the nineteenth-century narrative from a twentieth-century perspective”. Since much cise to describe the narrator not as contemporary, but rather is always connected to a shift in time. The narrator uses the historical information that is available in this own lifetime in example, provides historical context concerning the topic of

rather humorously that “‘tasting before you buy’ (pre-marinarrator’s use of anachronisms and his personal retrospections which provide critical and frequently humorous re-evaluations of metalepsis in the novel.

When the narrator introduces Mrs. Poulteney, he writes that “there would have been a place in the Gestapo for the decades later during the Second World War. Assorting Mrs. Poulteney to the Gestapo is therefore an anachronism, “the fact of placing something in the wrong period of history” (Anachronism sense for readers after the Second World War. The Gestapo were known for their cruelty and torture and the narrator’s characterization of Mrs. Poulteney is rather radical. In conshocking to the reader but also humorous, because it is so extreme. The anachronisms employed in the novel thus evoke the purpose to induce what Simonetti refers to as “a blurring of temporal dimensions”. Again, Fowles wants to cause shock The most direct strategy that creates metalepsis is through TFLW, Fowles uses -

( expose the metaphor of its own fraudulence, and not to pretend any longer to pass for reality, for truth, or for beauty”. The

staged reality offered by the text. Fowles thereby not only uses yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages”. Even though TFLW provides many historical facts accurately and refers to historical personages such as Charles Darwin, Mary Anning and Karl Marx, it raises the readers’

•

important in relation to the novel’s three endings. He openly comments on the narrative structure and the literary convenmetalepsis takes place again, catapulting the reader into another time period. Fowles provides three endings in his neo-sensation novel, and thereby questions the romance genre, which three endings to what is generally perceived as a love story, is tionally deems as a “thoroughly traditional ending”. Nevertheless, as the narrator proclaims himself a few chapters later, for the open, the inconclusive ending”. This comment not only demonstrates the narrator’s awareness and knowledge of the generic conventions, but by stating this, he himself breaks the boundaries of the genre he is part of. In all three of the novel’s endings, the narrator interferes and recalls the element of surprise and shock by blatantly changing his mind about the present ending.

decides to marry Ernestina after all with “and so ends the story”. The sentence contradicts itself, because the sentence itself claims that it ends the story, although it is not actually there is no closure regarding Sarah and Charles’ relationship, is thoroughly disappointing and receiving an inconclusive ending in a romance novel is unacceptable for the reader. The narrator eventually realizes his unconventional ending and proceeds to give two alternative endings with more closure.

In the other two endings, Charles has a sexual encounter with Sarah in Exeter and then breaks off his engagement to Ernestina, because he wants to marry Sarah. Meanwhile, Sarah vanishes from the hotel, and it takes two years for Sarah and Charles to see each other again. The two endings are introduced by repeating the exact same paragraph with different outcomes: “‘[n]o. It is as I say. You have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have delighted in twisting it.’ She stood now staring at Charles, sentence. He pronounced it. ‘A day will come when you shall be called to account for what you have done to me. And if there is justice in heaven – your punishment shall outlast eternity!’”

In the novel’s second ending, Charles meets his daughter Lalage, and he accepts Sarah’s emancipation, which represents a somewhat happier ending than the last. This ending provides reader with a reunited romantic couple. Charles Scruggs writes endings. He seems to deliberately poking fun at the false sense -

viding an ending that is so traditional in what can be deemed therefore also surprising. Since Fowles continually decon-

structs the sensation novel throughout his text, this ending contradicts what a reader might expect after all the built-up.

Even before the second ending has occurred, the narrator already builds the foundation for the third ending to evenbearded face” appears at Charles’ train window and joins him for his journey. The narrator reveals that he has physically entered Charles’ story when he writes “so I continue to stare at the narrator himself. In this instance, the two narrative levels that were previously separated, are merged by the narrator’s physical appearance in the story. The earlier metalepsis is thereby dismantled by the narrator. For the aforementioned paragraph to be repeated, and the third ending to be introduced, the narrator needs to turn back time. He achieves this by materializing and physically entering the story again by using his watch: “[h]e makes a small adjustment to the time”.

This short passage asserts the narrator’s ability to transcend time yet once more. The above paragraph is repeated with a different outcome; the narrator’s interference results in Sarah and Charles not being happily together. The narrator conwhat you must not think is that this is a less plausible ending to their story”. Although Sarah and Charles do not end up together, the narrator emphasizes that it is not less plausible. The third ending is more modern in that Sarah rejects Charles and wants to live her life independently of becoming married.

Providing three endings to a love story is unconventional for the romance genre. Since the last two endings are introduced by repeating the same paragraph, Fowles raises the reader’s awareness of the narrator’s power over the text. The reader is likely to be unfamiliar with being openly exposed surprising or perhaps even shocking. Fowles succeeds at taking elements that are typically postmodern — metalepsis and the readers of his novel. Through this clever use of postmodern elements, Fowles can emphasize that TFLW belongs to

surprise primarily through his narrative structure, and not only through typical plot characteristics of the neo-sensation novel.

• The Filmic Adaptation

rates the metalepses that occur in the novel. However, the narrator, who causes the metalepses in the novel, is not adapted in occur in different time periods, provide the occurrence of metTFLW. Anna and Mike respectively portray Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson and their love stories become juxtaposed. The element of surprise and shock ence perceives two parallel affairs: the one between Charles and Sarah and the one between Mike and Anna. Essentially, TFLW is being shot portraying an adaptation in an adaptation can be perceived as

In a crucial scene, Anna and Mike read up on historical audience, they provide knowledge that is important later in the between Sarah and Charles takes place: Anna: Mike.

Mike: Yeah?

Anna: Listen to this: “In 1857 it is estimated that there were 80’000 prostitutes in the county of London.”

Mike: Yeah.

Anna: “Out of every 60 houses one was a brothel.”

Mike: Uh uh uh.

Anna: “At a time that the male population of London of all ages was one in a quarter million the prostitutes were receiving clients at a rate of two million per week.”

Mike: Two million?

Anna: You know when I say in the graveyard scene, about going to London? “If I went to London, I know what I should become. I should become what some already call me here in Lyme.”

This scene shows an indirect adaptation of the role of the narrator through the actors who educate themselves and simultaneously also the audience. In this instance, the metalepsis serves as a replacement for the narrator and his self-relikely fate as a disgraced woman in society. The aim of the metalepsis is thus that the audience should empathize with the actors’ surprise of the high number of female sex workers.

The metalepses, the jumps that take place between the two narrative levels, are stressed in a scene where Anna and Mike are rehearsing a scene from the script together. The scene is striking because it provides insight to the audience as to how actors rehearse a scene bit for bit:

Anna: Wait a minute. I lost the place.

Mike: Page 50. I suddenly see you, you’ve got your dress caught in the brambles. I see you, then you see me. We look at each other and then Anna: Alright.

Mike: Right. I see you. Get your coat caught in the brambles. Right.

Anna: I’m looking at you.

Mike: But now, you come towards me to pass me. It’s a narrow path, it’s muddy, you slip in the mud.

The metalepsis that occurs in this scene only makes sense in relation to the scene that follows right after it, in which the audience sees the actual scene from TFLW that Anna and Mike were rehearsing before. For the audience, it is atypical to witness how the actors rehearse a scene and how it develops

function of surprise and shock in its neo-sensational source

cast members to his house for a lunch party. Anna’s husband Davide goes up to Mike and inquires Davide: Have they decided how they’re going to end the movie?

Mike: End it?

Davide: I hear they keep changing the script.

Mike: No, not at all. Where did you hear that?

Davide: Well, there are two endings in the book. A happy ending and an unhappy ending, no?

Davide: Which one is that?

Mike: Hasn’t Anna told you?

This short interaction between Davide and Mike sets the

the parallel love story between Anna and Mike will end. Mike’s confusion regarding which ending they are going for could stem from his knowledge that the novel technically has three endings, not only two. The revelation which ending is concludreunite after three years apart, and the romantic couple recmakes the entanglement and jump between the two narrative occurs when the cast and crew are celebrating at the wrap party. The second ending takes place on the narrative level of Anna and Mike’s love story. Mike wants to talk to Anna and runs up to the room in which Charles and Sarah reconciled in cludes with Mike calling out the window: Mike: Sarah!

manner; It becomes evident that Mike has fallen in love with Sarah, Anna’s character. Simultaneously, the ending shows to portray two parallel love stories cleverly does justice to the novel and its two principal endings.

CONCLUSION

Whereas the merging of the two narrative levels could only be achieved by physically introducing the narrator in the novtechnique to evoke surprise and shock in the reader and the audience, respectively. As has been argued, the elements of

cur in both works are necessarily always connected to a jump TFLW is still of an importance for revisiting Fowles’ particular narrative structure suggests that torian works of postmodern writers. Perhaps more research could result in establishing a new subcategory of neo-sensa-

contribute to the establishment of this new genre by further ies centered approach could advance the understanding of TFLW and its

• Works Cited Anachronism Cohn, Dorrit and Gleich, Lewis S. “Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme.” Narrative Cox, Jessica. Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction. Palgrave Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman Form of an Introduction.”

Tomorrow. Ed. Raymond Fedennan. Chicago: Swallow, Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method.

Translated by Jane Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversiHeilmann, Ann and Llewellyn, Mark. Neo-Victorianism: The . Palgrave Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation, London and New Hutcheon, Linda.

Fiction Marsh, Kelly. “The Neo-Sensation Novel: A Contemporary Philological Quarterly . Oxford Reference. https://www.oxfordreference.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Dir. Karel Reisz. Prod. Leon Clore. Perf. Meryl Streep Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New

Scruggs, Charles. “The Two Endings of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Modern Fiction Studies Simonetti, Marie-Claire. “The Blurring of Time in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, the Novel and the Film.” Literature/Film Quarterly Victorian -

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Mara Facon for proofreading earlier versions of this paper and providing helpful feedback.

The Foundationalist is not operated by Bowdoin College, Yale University, or University of Iowa. The

CONTRIBUTORS ELEANOR AMBLER pursuing degrees in English and Sociology from Arizona State University. As a dancer, she has performed professionally with Ballet Quad Cities, Festival Ballet Providence, and American Repertory Ballet. As a writer, her work has been featured in the Rhode Island Women’s Choreography Project and has won the Arizona State University Homecoming Writing Award for Poetry. Eleanor is fascinated by the connections between movement, music, and language, and enjoys exploring these connections in her creative work.

OLIVE AMDUR English and American Studies. She loves climate writing and Romanticism. Her creative and critical work has appeared in The Common and online at Amherst College Press.

MEREDITH H. BENJAMIN student at Grinnell College. Originally from the east coast, she has found herself more recently in Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, and Iowa. She loves volleyball, curry dishes, and anything Taylor Swift.

Her work has been published in and is forthcoming in Agapanthus Collective and the Grinnell Review. You can connect with her via her Instagram TABITHA CHILTON ( is a senior Creative Writing major and Literary Studies minor at Bucknell University. She is from Alexandria, graduation this year and continue to pursue writing.

NATHAN CHU Kenyon College. A compulsive workaholic that likes writing short scenes more of their work on their website or follow them on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

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SEAN ETTER

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themes and characters. In his free time he enjoys reading, writing, and playing Final Fantasy. Originally from New Jersey, he currently lives in Boston.

NICOLE FAN versity College London, with particular interests in art, philosophy, and the history of science. She loves connecting with people, so feel free to reach out to her at her LinkedIn. MAYA GELSI since childhood. Her piece “Up North” won the Edward T. Whiffen Poetry Prize for best undergraduate poem, selected by Jaswinder Bolina. She is honored to be included in this publication.

MAKENZIE HALLSTROM (she/her) is a third-year Environmental Studies student specializing in marine biology and writing at the University of Washington. When she isn’t thinking, reading, or writing about climate change, she enjoys taking pictures of her friends and wildlife, ANNA KALABUKHOVA

grew up in Hawai’i in a Russian

sails for the university and spends any free time that she has playing around in the ocean doing various wind and water sports or climbing up mountains. She is an English major doing pre-med, and she owes her love of reading and especially writing to her sixth grade English teacher, Mrs. Robinson.

JOSHUA LEE ( Washington studying journalism and public interest communication.

newspaper, The Daily of the University of Washington. You can contact him through his LinkedIn.

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NINA MERKOFER Merkofer enjoyed a turbulent and imaginative childhood. Moving around a lot, her family and her love of books have been a constant companion in an ever-changing environment. Her great passion for reading and writing have occupied many a waking hour, leading her to study English and Political Science at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Surrounded by many loved ones, Merkofer aspires to keep creating and sharing her writing with the world.

NATSUMI MEYER Psychology and English. She has always had an interest in family histories, storytelling, and multiracial/ Asian-American identity experiences.

When she’s not writing she enjoys singing in an acapella group, playing the violin with her family, and dancing anywhere and everywhere.

PADDY QIU (they/he) is an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, studying behavioral neuroscience with a minor in creative writing. Their work primarily focuses upon the navigation of spaces, emphasizing the conduits of knowledge found in ancestral trauma and the nurture of interpersonal relationships.

ANDREA RODRÍGUEZ can, Caribbean, LatinX Studies double major at Bowdoin College. She is passionate about the outdoors and enjoys exploring the natural world around her homes in Maine and the Dominican Republic. During her breaks from the college, she travels home to Santo Domingo to work as an early childhood educator and to spend quality time with her family.

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she was honored for her work in Creative Writing at the University of Hawai’i’s undergraduate showcase “English Represents!”

GRETA SCHMITZER ty of Florida studying psychology and telecommunications. Dedicated to LinkedIn.

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BASIA SIWEK and topics exploring concepts of feminine identity, change, growing up, and fascination with the natural world. She is based in Boston, MA and Austin, TX and you can contact her through LinkedIn. RACHELLE CLAIRE STRUB born and raised in the surrounding villages of Basel, Switzerland. She is paper and she could not be more thrilled to be included in this current issue of the Foundationalist.

KATE TAPSCOTT where she is double-majoring in English and Hispanic Studies and minoring in German. She loves writing about gender in literature, and she aspires to be able to write for a living, either as a journalist or an academic. When she is not reading or writing, Kate enjoys long-distance running, rowing for Bowdoin’s crew team, and critiquing reality dating shows.

A.J. VITIELLO graduate from The New School. He is currently Assistant to the Publisher of Street Noise Books. Fresh off a solo trek across the Trans-Siberian railway, his hobbies include wandering, Dostoevsky, queer B-movies on CAITLIN WOODFORD tion in literary prose, and minoring in Russian Language & Literature.

Based in the Blue Ridge, she uses her writing to explore the boundaries between humanity and nature, and the stories that connect them. When excessively, and wreaking havoc on Charlottesville’s local coffee supply.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to acknowledge our Faculty Advisor Belinda Kong, The Bowdoin Department of English, especially Laurie Holland for always passing along our messages, and the 60+ universities this issue who participated or encouraged students to submit to our journal.

We are deeply grateful for the undergraduate writers who weren’t afraid to be vulnerable, out-spoken, and experimental; sharing their critical words in such an especially critical time.

This semester was unimaginable, losses leaving imprints and uncertainty. To our committed and enthusiastic board members who carved out space and time in their heart for meetings at all hours (and timezones) of the day and their steadfast presence in our community.

Thank you.

We are so grateful to our readers. With your interest, perspectives, and engagement we are better able to the globe.