Here you have it, a curious amalgam of things I was at once obligated and inspired to write. It's a strange paper, though I think it does what it was intended.
Hopefully I'm not too far from the truth on that bit.
The original may be found here;
Still Life with Woodpecker, The Final Draft
What lies below is the text as a whole complete with my inner dialogue inserted as I saw fit.
Enjoy,
M
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Introduction to paper/first topic
While many symbols, signs, and patterns both connote and denote any number of things that may link this text to structurally similar bodies of work, those that will be most deeply discussed in this criticism are those that appear in reference to four elements; the style of writing with which Tom Robbins delivers the story, the Camel Pack, the relationship of Leigh-Cheri and Wrangle, and Bernard Mickey Wrangle as an outlaw (1). Literal definition, the mythoi of Northrop Frye, and the original foundations of structuralism laid by Peirce and Saussure for analyzing the sign system will be employed to establish Still Life with Woodpecker as a many faceted work which relates to a few specific writing styles and plot genres, among other things. These elements are meant to characterize the work as fitting into the “modern fiction” genre of the authors to be discussed, the age-old structure of fairy tale romance, and the archetypal (2) nature of characters and objects which are present in said bodies of work. As well, the presence of food and its symbolism will be discussed to further demonstrate the ways in which Still Life might be called similar to other bodies of work. It should be noted that this work was intended to hold very little, if any symbolism, and rather to detail objects for the sake of the object. In light of this, any interpretations I draw are from my own feelings as to what that object or occurrence symbolizes, and from those critics who have drawn parallels which are relevant to this criticism, which I will interpret as I see fit (3).
To begin, the delivery of this work will be our focus. Tom Robbins displays writing style in Still Life characterized by an ever-present optimism for the future of his characters voiced by the storyteller, character professions of near faultless optimism about their own futures, and a somewhat magical reality which, frankly, has every power to give all but the least involved characters near faultless optimism (4). This style could be called “new,” as such, but if more deeply considered is found to be a curious amalgam of patterns, some of which mimic bodies of work to which we might call this one similar, including the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, and Roald Dahl (5).
1 I didn't think it would end well, but I was aiming for viable points
2 Yes, Diana, it's a real word :) Though I have no idea how it gained that title
3 Translation? No amount of symoblism I'm about to cover was intended, me and those other guys are literally making all of it up. We ask your forgiveness. Maybe they don't, they're published and theoretically respected after all. I'm just a college student aiming for a pleasant grade.
4 Because they have nothing better to believe in
5 Three of the craziest people I could think of, and completely fitting
To begin, the delivery of this work will be our focus. Tom Robbins displays writing style in Still Life characterized by an ever-present optimism for the future of his characters voiced by the storyteller, character professions of near faultless optimism about their own futures, and a somewhat magical reality which, frankly, has every power to give all but the least involved characters near faultless optimism (4). This style could be called “new,” as such, but if more deeply considered is found to be a curious amalgam of patterns, some of which mimic bodies of work to which we might call this one similar, including the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, and Roald Dahl (5).
1 I didn't think it would end well, but I was aiming for viable points
2 Yes, Diana, it's a real word :) Though I have no idea how it gained that title
3 Translation? No amount of symoblism I'm about to cover was intended, me and those other guys are literally making all of it up. We ask your forgiveness. Maybe they don't, they're published and theoretically respected after all. I'm just a college student aiming for a pleasant grade.
4 Because they have nothing better to believe in
5 Three of the craziest people I could think of, and completely fitting
Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, though of more tragic beginnings, wrote black comedies, of which Still Life clearly is not one; in Cat's Cradle, in which Vonnegut exhibits one of many references to his fear of technology (1), we find ice-nine, a material which allows water to freeze at room temperature and eventually freezes the world into oblivion. Taken as it is, ice-nine can be said to portray Vonnegut's fear of technology and the propensity of even simple advances to perpetrate horrors upon the world, much in the same way we find Robbins courting the idea of simple advances in human pattern. As the omnipotent narrator, and not the intermittent typist, we often find Robbins going far in depth about the Outlaw College; Outlaw C. holds a strong belief that even the most seemingly insignificant “advances” in human pattern can escalate into global disintegration of love, prosperity, and, of course, human pattern (2). The advances he speaks of are things such as the movement toward peaceful and honestly democratic governing. This movement, much like ice-nine, is something there is a strong belief should be birthed, and also, a thing which the reality of human pattern dictates will likely never exist. More literally like ice-nine, we find Robbins discussing the Hawaiian mongoose syndrome again and again, an advanced-human method the Hawaiian island people used to rid the island of so many rats, but, as advances in human pattern are wont to do, this advance over natural ecology ended poorly; the mongooses did get rid of the rats, along with “chickens, pigs, birds, cats, dogs, and small children,” (Robbins, Still Life, 29) (3). Some would argue that human pattern is, and has ever-been, to take control of its surroundings, and they would be right. However, ice-nine and the mongooses share another similarity here, the immediate surroundings of neither human group warranted the solution of either ice-nine or mongooses.
1 I say "fear," I mean "phobia"
2 The last of which, unfortunately, seems to hold the greatest measure
3 You read that right, mongooses eat kids, too
1 I say "fear," I mean "phobia"
2 The last of which, unfortunately, seems to hold the greatest measure
3 You read that right, mongooses eat kids, too
Thompson/Cake (1)
To continue, we find similarities with Robbins in the writing of Hunter S. Thompson, who often portrayed his characters as literally or figuratively intoxicated, and only in this state do they seem to truly find their clearest ideas and feelings. It is the method of both writers to take the typical sanity away from their characters as a means of granting them complete rationality (2); in Fear, Thompson creates a world of intoxication and narcotic influence which, while sometimes a bit terrifying, gives the go-ahead to Raoul Duke to live as he feels he should, and must. The narcotics Raoul consumes are illegal, taboo substances which the greater part of humans believe to be harmful, destructive, vicious things (3). His actions and rationalizations are nearly entirely brought about by these drugs streaming through his system, and yet these intoxicants, unlike socially-imprinted human reason, grant him the freedom to make decisions which are not greatly influenced by other human beings and their beliefs or actions, but rather, strongly by his reactions to those human beings and his surroundings. It is in much this way that we find Robbins granting both Princess Leigh-Cheri and Wrangle the ability to rationalize all that they do and the myriad ways in which they do it (4). In many scenes, we find the princess and Wrangle consuming alcohol and reaching decisions which they might never have made sober, and yet once they sober up, they are not only quite happy with their decisions, but also feel quite fulfilled by the things such intoxicated decisions have introduced to them. Wrangle, as he stands, rarely makes a decision while literally intoxicated, but is rather in a constant state of intoxication by way of his own “outlaw” ways, he has essentially doped himself into his beliefs, much in the way a heroin addict never really beats the need, and instead might accomplish the lesser addiction of methadone, but rarely ever reached total bodily normalcy. As well, we find Leigh-Cheri reaching her great plan for the monarchy of Mu whilst in Hawaii, sitting on the beach, intoxicated with thoughts of eco-friendly legislation and a small, globally governing body, not narcotics to be sure, but certainly things which for the most part, the whole of the human race was not taking quite seriously during the time in which the book was taking place (5). By using alcohol to intoxicate his characters, I posit that Robbins was creating a link between the things we literally and figuratively choose to intoxicate ourselves with. Beginning with a dunk in drunkenness, and continuing by stirring them in a pool of their own personal passions, Robbins graduated his characters from their necessary baptism in alcohol to the self-fulfilling intoxication of one's own passion and motivations. I feel it should be noted that the majority of these alcoholic libations are not had straight, but rather blended with a number of fruits, and it is these that first stir the passions of our princess Leigh-Cheri (6). It stands to reason that we find Leigh-Cheri erupting from her shell upon swilling these fruits mingled with alcohol, the gifts of fertile land, to find herself mad about Wrangle. As well, it becomes more evident that she has given herself to the life of an outlaw when we find her practically chugging tequila, the favored drink of outlaws the world round, among them her Wrangle. To put it as Shakespeare did, it was “as if increase in appetite had grown by what it fed on,” but the focus of what these two feed on is love and passion for life and being outlaws, not on their love for one another, as Gertrude's (7).
Alcohol and passion are the primary foods of this novel, Wrangle and Leigh-Cheri feed on them always as if constantly starved for both (8). Their presence is enough reason to have them, and this reckless desire is evident throughout the text. But, do not misunderstand fervent desire for alcohol as alcoholism in Still Life, as that would be awfully close to calling the expression of passion in the text the equivalent of stalking. These two feed on alcohol, passion, and wedding cake throughout the work; it cannot be said that their infinite buffet is gluttonous as they do not overindulge, it cannot be said that it is unhealthy as they have neither gin blossoms or restraining orders, and it cannot be said that it causes harm to others (9) because their feast is meant to serve others as well, their actions are invitations to dine on passion for life and join the festivities. In the end, this buffet is meant to be the greatest party in human history, the one that will finally entice love to stay (10).
1 The food, not the rock band :(
2 Read that over once or twice, it starts to sink in shortly after the Riesling does
3 I can't believe I typed that in reference to drugs... it looks exactly like what I'd said about Miley Cyrus
4 Through tequila, like every other good idea
5 Sorry guys, flower power will not save the world. Not unless you find flowers that generate electricity, or a flower than can grow in an industrial turbine and run an entire power grid
6 One of them had avocado in it. Find me a tasty drink saturated with avocado and tequila and I'll find you several million dollars worth of thanks
7 Considering how much I love that particular soliloquy, I have a hard time rationalizing why I used it to reference this book. Especially anything in this book having to do with Wrangle.
8 Sex is all well and good, Robbins, but the way you put it makes me never, ever, ever want to contemplate it. I spent a god lot of hours after reading passages in this text having been reverted back to my grade-school "everyone has cooties!" mentality.
9 That's mostly true, besides that one guy Wrangle mangled, thus ruining his life.
10 Unless it gets a sober eye on Wrangle, at which point you'd have to drug and restrain it in order to harness it so that it couldn't not stay
Alcohol and passion are the primary foods of this novel, Wrangle and Leigh-Cheri feed on them always as if constantly starved for both (8). Their presence is enough reason to have them, and this reckless desire is evident throughout the text. But, do not misunderstand fervent desire for alcohol as alcoholism in Still Life, as that would be awfully close to calling the expression of passion in the text the equivalent of stalking. These two feed on alcohol, passion, and wedding cake throughout the work; it cannot be said that their infinite buffet is gluttonous as they do not overindulge, it cannot be said that it is unhealthy as they have neither gin blossoms or restraining orders, and it cannot be said that it causes harm to others (9) because their feast is meant to serve others as well, their actions are invitations to dine on passion for life and join the festivities. In the end, this buffet is meant to be the greatest party in human history, the one that will finally entice love to stay (10).
1 The food, not the rock band :(
2 Read that over once or twice, it starts to sink in shortly after the Riesling does
3 I can't believe I typed that in reference to drugs... it looks exactly like what I'd said about Miley Cyrus
4 Through tequila, like every other good idea
5 Sorry guys, flower power will not save the world. Not unless you find flowers that generate electricity, or a flower than can grow in an industrial turbine and run an entire power grid
6 One of them had avocado in it. Find me a tasty drink saturated with avocado and tequila and I'll find you several million dollars worth of thanks
7 Considering how much I love that particular soliloquy, I have a hard time rationalizing why I used it to reference this book. Especially anything in this book having to do with Wrangle.
8 Sex is all well and good, Robbins, but the way you put it makes me never, ever, ever want to contemplate it. I spent a god lot of hours after reading passages in this text having been reverted back to my grade-school "everyone has cooties!" mentality.
9 That's mostly true, besides that one guy Wrangle mangled, thus ruining his life.
10 Unless it gets a sober eye on Wrangle, at which point you'd have to drug and restrain it in order to harness it so that it couldn't not stay
Dahl
Looking at the surface of Still Life, we do not immediately see what link might exist between the writings of Roald Dahl and Tom Robbins (1); but take into account the presence of such pairs as the mother of Matilda and Nina Jablonski, both totally unaware of what their young, starry-eyed charges truly needed or wanted in life. We find both deposed from their roles, and perfectly fine with it, neither woman is offended or heartbroken because her heart was never truly in the mix. Both Dahl and Robbins have taken great measures to create worlds in which non-heroic heros are the saviors of some wonderful ideal world (2), and in fact, are often the creators of said world as opposed to having read of it somewhere and imagining it into existence by way of delusion. In much the same way Dahl's characters wade through tribulations and ignore the paths of least resistance (3), we find Leigh-Cheri and Wrangle ignoring the simpler ways to live that life might offer them, and instead move on to live in a world where life is certainly not perfect, but meets every want and desire they might have with a strange, yet deeply satisfying answer. Where Charlie Bucket meets his future as the owner of a chocolate factory, which certainly is a job that asks much of its applicant, Leigh-Cheri and Wrangle meet a world where Gulietta the housemaid is queen and they are mostly deaf, but can still “hear the chipmunk at the center of the earth” (Robbins, Still Life, 270) running smoothly on its wheel; in both of these worlds, the inhabitants are happy and satisfied, yet no one lives a life typically perfect.
1 and despite my very next words, I still mostly don't
2 I guess my point here was to explain how great the world would be if smothered in blackberry brambles? Albeit in an awfully clipped way...
3 Be wise, listen to the little orange men
1 and despite my very next words, I still mostly don't
2 I guess my point here was to explain how great the world would be if smothered in blackberry brambles? Albeit in an awfully clipped way...
3 Be wise, listen to the little orange men
The Whole Kit and Caboodle, as Pertaining to the Authors
Not only for its similarities to other works of the same years from 1950-1980 and that spans' heroic redefining of the only somewhat defined word, “literature (1),” I argue that this text should be looked at as a product of its time. It should be considered an indicator, as it were, of the period from whence it came. While the book's contents come from a somewhat predictable time, the text not only takes place in a different time than the late seventies, but the time period within the contents happened... and didn't (2).
Let's look at our similar authors again, shall we? Robbins, Vonnegut, Thompson, and Dahl all wrote a great bulk of their combined works from 1950-1980, a time when literature was having yet another one of its seizing rebirths. Take into account though the seizing culture of that time, and we have an obvious link from the world each of those authors lived in to the world their stories took place in. Each of the authors listed either participated in war or saw it from the sidelines with incredibly pronounced opinions, these men were not only the children of the first World War and its lasting effects, but also found themselves participating in World War II, one of the many other wars of that period, or, as the insubordinate Thompson chose, commenting on war at every available opportunity in the face of being smothered with it.
Beyond war, though we find these authors including from time to time in their writing, the world that they lived in was tumultuous and constantly changing. The United States experienced many profound changes during this thirty year period (3), and I assert that the changing nature of the beast is awfully responsible for the boundaries these men felt they could bend to their will, or simply break. This time of change and redefining of their world and many of its broad words allowed for personal interpretation on a level which no generation before had ever quite experienced, sure there had been times before them during which new schools of thought had been born and new genres accepted, but this time, this was the time of radios and airwaves, of television (4). The blossoming ideas that American culture now formed around were war and peace, and all the muck-luck in between (5). This nonsensical, no holds barred, every man for himself but don't forget your neighbor mentality yielded such notions as world peace and harmony with nature, superior races and saviors purely genetic.
I maintain that coming from such a time may not only have made these authors feel they had been granted the right to go forth and publish their works, but also it created in them a need to create worlds uplifting, and allegorical, too. Vonnegut chose to show the world through morbid yet strangely comedic fables that it was basically digging itself deeper into a hole, and this one would not pleasantly end with a surprise trip to the Forbidden Gardens or that rather large wall (6). Instead, it would be tragically consumed with ice or partially destroyed by those who tried to save it, fortunately or unfortunately, because it was necessary to save the world.
Thompson chose to introduce to the world the concept that reality was much too much to bear, so it may just be best to take reality off its hinges and perhaps drag it down a terribly sandy road, inhabited by violent bats, to a place which only mimicked reality by exaggerating its least awful features (7). These stories, often largely non-fictitious, weren't the fables Vonnegut speared popular culture with, they were more the informative stories of someone who, in the face of great horror, chose to look reality in the eye and not sugar-coat it with propaganda and shiny new kitchen appliances (8). Having looked into the eye of the beast, he promptly chose to heavily medicate himself and go full hog, no rousing posters or gleaming toasters for Raoul Duke, for the horse that would save him did not run as fast as quicksilver, but instead it shown with the same liquid gleam.
Dahl took a slightly less offensive approach, though not truly a far cry from Vonnegut or Thompson (9). In writing the many children's books he published, Dahl created slightly magical realities, much as Robbins would, to land the characters in positions that didn't quite spare them from their own reality so much as take a miserable life and make it kind of average, but in a kind of fantastical way. Matilda, for instance, loses her magical powers but is somehow legally left in the care of the lovely Miss Honey who stands for everything the child yearns for in life, while Charlie Bucket gains the adult task of maintaining a chocolate factory as no child should be left to do, gains freedom from poverty, and mystically is allowed to own and operate his own monumental candy shop (10).
I reason that the culture in which these authors were raised sparked in them more than a desire to see what else their fellows, swarmed with new ideas, could tolerate, and their like-minded publishers would dole out to the world, but also that it brought out in them prophets and story-tellers who honestly sought to bring the world back to its senses (11). As I said before, the time that the most of these stories take place in happened, and didn't. Yes, Vonnegut was held in slaughterhouse number five, but there was no Pilgrim who traveled through time introduced to us in his memoirs. Sure, Thompson based Raoul Duke largely on himself. Of course, Dahl wrote of occurrences that might very well have happened in his time. All of these stories still share an element of fiction while coming from people who, in some sense, were trying to deliver some sort of message instead of just a tale of characters exiting one plot point to enter another. I would argue that this book, Still Life, fits firmly into the odd structure that was the culture it came from; it is indicative of this culture for its unorthodox reason for being, its internal need to share feelings about the present times, and the strange necessity it feels to graduate its characters from coddled notions of reality to the full brunt of truth through intoxication and passionate manipulations of their own state of being (12).
1 Really, look it up sometime. It's so vague they'd be better off defining what it isn't
2 Mysterious and insightful, no? Okay, no. Not really, but I tried
3 Not the least of which being the introduction of Astronaut Ice Cream. Which, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, only went up in space once in 1968 and will never be put into orbit again.
4 Or, "devil box" as many came to call it
5 Wonderboy, won't you take me far away from the mucky muck?
6 I'm sure that was during a moment when I thought, "this will later become an annotation," and then I liked it so much it stayed
7 Viva Las Vegas!
8 Instead, it got powdered with coke and iced with meth. Drug references make baking references so much easier. Thanks thugs!
9 In one book, "snozberry" is a male genital reference, in another, it's a candy. WTF Dahl?
10 Not only would these things never happen in real life, they'd be somewhat illegal if they ever did
11 By explaining things like the Hawaiian mongoose problem, of course
12 Read; lots of drugs and alcohol. Oh, and passion
Let's look at our similar authors again, shall we? Robbins, Vonnegut, Thompson, and Dahl all wrote a great bulk of their combined works from 1950-1980, a time when literature was having yet another one of its seizing rebirths. Take into account though the seizing culture of that time, and we have an obvious link from the world each of those authors lived in to the world their stories took place in. Each of the authors listed either participated in war or saw it from the sidelines with incredibly pronounced opinions, these men were not only the children of the first World War and its lasting effects, but also found themselves participating in World War II, one of the many other wars of that period, or, as the insubordinate Thompson chose, commenting on war at every available opportunity in the face of being smothered with it.
Beyond war, though we find these authors including from time to time in their writing, the world that they lived in was tumultuous and constantly changing. The United States experienced many profound changes during this thirty year period (3), and I assert that the changing nature of the beast is awfully responsible for the boundaries these men felt they could bend to their will, or simply break. This time of change and redefining of their world and many of its broad words allowed for personal interpretation on a level which no generation before had ever quite experienced, sure there had been times before them during which new schools of thought had been born and new genres accepted, but this time, this was the time of radios and airwaves, of television (4). The blossoming ideas that American culture now formed around were war and peace, and all the muck-luck in between (5). This nonsensical, no holds barred, every man for himself but don't forget your neighbor mentality yielded such notions as world peace and harmony with nature, superior races and saviors purely genetic.
I maintain that coming from such a time may not only have made these authors feel they had been granted the right to go forth and publish their works, but also it created in them a need to create worlds uplifting, and allegorical, too. Vonnegut chose to show the world through morbid yet strangely comedic fables that it was basically digging itself deeper into a hole, and this one would not pleasantly end with a surprise trip to the Forbidden Gardens or that rather large wall (6). Instead, it would be tragically consumed with ice or partially destroyed by those who tried to save it, fortunately or unfortunately, because it was necessary to save the world.
Thompson chose to introduce to the world the concept that reality was much too much to bear, so it may just be best to take reality off its hinges and perhaps drag it down a terribly sandy road, inhabited by violent bats, to a place which only mimicked reality by exaggerating its least awful features (7). These stories, often largely non-fictitious, weren't the fables Vonnegut speared popular culture with, they were more the informative stories of someone who, in the face of great horror, chose to look reality in the eye and not sugar-coat it with propaganda and shiny new kitchen appliances (8). Having looked into the eye of the beast, he promptly chose to heavily medicate himself and go full hog, no rousing posters or gleaming toasters for Raoul Duke, for the horse that would save him did not run as fast as quicksilver, but instead it shown with the same liquid gleam.
Dahl took a slightly less offensive approach, though not truly a far cry from Vonnegut or Thompson (9). In writing the many children's books he published, Dahl created slightly magical realities, much as Robbins would, to land the characters in positions that didn't quite spare them from their own reality so much as take a miserable life and make it kind of average, but in a kind of fantastical way. Matilda, for instance, loses her magical powers but is somehow legally left in the care of the lovely Miss Honey who stands for everything the child yearns for in life, while Charlie Bucket gains the adult task of maintaining a chocolate factory as no child should be left to do, gains freedom from poverty, and mystically is allowed to own and operate his own monumental candy shop (10).
I reason that the culture in which these authors were raised sparked in them more than a desire to see what else their fellows, swarmed with new ideas, could tolerate, and their like-minded publishers would dole out to the world, but also that it brought out in them prophets and story-tellers who honestly sought to bring the world back to its senses (11). As I said before, the time that the most of these stories take place in happened, and didn't. Yes, Vonnegut was held in slaughterhouse number five, but there was no Pilgrim who traveled through time introduced to us in his memoirs. Sure, Thompson based Raoul Duke largely on himself. Of course, Dahl wrote of occurrences that might very well have happened in his time. All of these stories still share an element of fiction while coming from people who, in some sense, were trying to deliver some sort of message instead of just a tale of characters exiting one plot point to enter another. I would argue that this book, Still Life, fits firmly into the odd structure that was the culture it came from; it is indicative of this culture for its unorthodox reason for being, its internal need to share feelings about the present times, and the strange necessity it feels to graduate its characters from coddled notions of reality to the full brunt of truth through intoxication and passionate manipulations of their own state of being (12).
1 Really, look it up sometime. It's so vague they'd be better off defining what it isn't
2 Mysterious and insightful, no? Okay, no. Not really, but I tried
3 Not the least of which being the introduction of Astronaut Ice Cream. Which, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, only went up in space once in 1968 and will never be put into orbit again.
4 Or, "devil box" as many came to call it
5 Wonderboy, won't you take me far away from the mucky muck?
6 I'm sure that was during a moment when I thought, "this will later become an annotation," and then I liked it so much it stayed
7 Viva Las Vegas!
8 Instead, it got powdered with coke and iced with meth. Drug references make baking references so much easier. Thanks thugs!
9 In one book, "snozberry" is a male genital reference, in another, it's a candy. WTF Dahl?
10 Not only would these things never happen in real life, they'd be somewhat illegal if they ever did
11 By explaining things like the Hawaiian mongoose problem, of course
12 Read; lots of drugs and alcohol. Oh, and passion
The Camel Pack (1)
To take the strange reason for being and expound upon it, I will focus on the pack of Camel cigarettes as it surely holds the position of the most glorified object of the novel (2). It should be noted again that this text was intended to display each object for the sake of the object, so the importance of the Camels must certainly be dissected (3). With this novel, Robbins set out to write a story about objects in a profound new way. He wanted to tell the story of the objects themselves, the story of something with its own proper function and meaning to society. This story, of the cigarette pack, is the only story involved in the book which isn't characterized as a love story (4). Unless, of course, you consider that Leigh-Cheri used said Camel pack to foster her connection with Wrangle, used it as the seed to her recreation of Wrangle's room in prison, used it to meditate on and find a meaning in it that might “make love stay,” as the star-crossed pair longs to do. In that case, it's no surprise that we find another love story (5). However, the point of this dissection is not to establish life with the Camel pack as= another love story, although that does certainly fit it neatly into the structure of the novel as a whole, the point here is to establish it as part of the very structure of our princess, Leigh-Cheri.
The Camel pack initially stands alone as its own object, described as it is, a small box wrapped in cellophane which contains cancerous agents. It is introduced to the princess as the sort of box which Wrangle carries with him to keep him company in prison, and more importantly, to explain his constant stash of matches. Once Leigh-Cheri begins to contemplate its face though, the pack face becomes a part of her, a world in and of itself which fits into her universe. As stated, she uses the box to meditate upon to become closer to her imprisoned love by sharing his surroundings, but in meditating, Leigh-Cheri finds a world in the Camel pack face comprised of the elements presented to her, and those she finds there through metaphysical travels (6). Having been found and colonized by her, this land fits into her universe and thus the structure of her very being, and because of their mutual isolation, Leigh-Cheri and this Camel pack, she visits its face often not to escape her room, but to become even more acquainted with herself.
The Camel pack face yields a very interesting move on the part of Leigh-Cheri, a dive into the index system as laid down by Charles Sanders Peirce; where there's smoke, there's fire (7). Our princess took quite the plummet into indexes, though, when she decided the very image of the pyramids indicated the presence of a world she could visit. So she did, and this world was not Egypt, as such, but rather a logical world of indexes which much resembles that Saharan land (8). After hypothesizing at great length about the true nature and origin of the pyramids, for she decided they must all share one common nature and origin, our princess took indexes to their furthest point and entered a world based on the elements present on a pack of Camel cigarettes. From the pyramids, sand, dromedary, and palms, our princess decided that because there was no end to the horizon, there must be no end to the land. She “found” that land. From the pyramids, on land which must be there, for there was no end to the horizon, Leigh-Cheri decides there must be some population here, for otherwise, where would the pyramids have come from? Then, upon meeting these people, they and their animals, friends, slaves, she had conversations with them. How could she have decided they could be communicated with? Because the fact that these people travel together indicated they must have some kind of communicative method or else how and why would they have banded together? One might even go so far as to say the herders would surely be the most apt communicators, for they share not only a kind of language with one another, but they can also communicate, on a certain level, with animals. To me, it seems quite obvious that in a work where the face of a pack of Camel cigarettes indicates the existence of a world one might step into from their own abode, the existence of herders indicates a presence of some sort of communication, but also that inter-species communication is certainly an indicator of communicative prowess (9).
Where Leigh-Cheri is presented to us as royalty, a princess, the Camel pack is presented to us as something somewhat regal in its global presence, its grand face, its very traceable heritage like the lineage of a knight. The both of them, though, are very, well, usual. They are extraordinary in the honest breakdown of the word, they are extra, that is to say, particularly, ordinary. Leigh-Cheri, deposed by a royal mishap along with the rest of her family, doesn't function in society in a way much different than most other twenty-somethings. She is passionate, but about nothing specific until it catches her interest, has her little obsessions, views love in a strange and constantly changing way. Much like the princess, Camel was deposed by what could be called a royal mishap. Surely it wouldn't be a stretch to call the turn of the mighty, fashionable, cool and smooth cigarette dynasty into the lord tyrants of the cigarettes and cancer throne. Though, after, Camel still functions in society much like any other cigarette company. It is prolific, but only so much as we allow ourselves to let it be, has its little quirks that make people choose it over others, and continues to sell its products, lethal as they are. In their characteristics, we find surface similarities between Leigh-Cheri and the pack face world, but internally, they are not just similar, they are the same (10).
In the face of the Camel pack, Leigh-Cheri finds a Saharan land. She wanders this land by way of her mind, discovering the weathered faces of the pyramids and the hidden oasises where she meets the people of the pack face, the sort of people you might expect to find wandering the desert. She becomes quite protective of the pack of Camels, which she carries with her in this land, telling those travelers that, no, she cannot give them a smoke because “a successful external reality depends on an internal vision that is left intact,” (Robbins, Still Life, 167). As Leigh-Cheri develops this well-rounded and quite realistic understanding of the pack face, she becomes all the more aware of herself, of her mind, and what she believes. This pack face world is an analogous mirror world of our princess' inner self, where she becomes comfortable and sure; this pack face world becomes not simply a being structurally similar to Leigh-Cheri, but a structural element necessary to her self, and her personal development (11).
The “external reality” that Leigh-Cheri must maintain here can arguably be herself or the room, which she seeks to live in by her penitentiary rules, without losing her mind. The young woman as a human, seen and heard by other humans, who we find asking for her suitor after a letter breaks her heart, this woman is not a frail individual. I would argue that, while she crushes the Camel pack in her bitter reaction, it is only because of the world within the face that Leigh-Cheri now possesses the sense of self to be capable of crushing it. As it is smashed, the world is crumpled with it, she “[topples] the pyramids and [busts] the dromedary's hump,” yet she does not lose her mind because she is in totally control of that pack face world, and has made herself as real and as hearty as that world (12). That being said, as it is literally her, the chamber pot, cot, and pack of cigarettes within that room, losing the wholeness of that cigarette pack would effectively rip into the fabric of her mind, and likely destroy her sense of self and all that she had developed that self into. She does not open the pack when she crushes is, she is destroying the outward appearance of the pack and its innards, yes, but she is not crumpling that world as she had found it. Leigh-Cheri creates on the surface of the pack a visible infliction of the internal pain she feels, further bridging her self and the pack face world; when she recovers, the pack, as well as her self, will surely bear the hallmarks of agony, but they both continue to flourish in spite of their scars.
The pack face world ceases to be the carefully preserved mirror of Leigh-Cheri after the incident, to be the very core of her world. But, the world still holds a significance to her, in that the pyramids it houses have proven to her the phenomenal power (13) which the human race has prescribed to them for millennia, among few other things that have proven to have such a monumental bearing on our species. Like, for example, love.
1 Were it not for Gulietta, you would be the star of the show
2 If you ignore how many time Leigh-Cheri's breasts were glorified, of course. Don't even get me started on the "peachf..." I give, Robbins, you make my stomach turn.
3 Because what else am I going to talk about? Robbins' penis envy?
4 Before you tell me I'm wrong, the book says the love story takes place inside the pack of Camels, I'm talking about the story of the world the crazy girl makes up
5 I'd like to say "unfortunately..." here, but it was awfully pertinent to my paper, so I guess I should be thankful.
6 Keep in mind, she's presented as the "normal" one in the couple
7 Where there's crazy, there's meds. Oh Leigh-Cheri, please do take some.
8 The girl should have picked up a book with merit at the library, like a book about structuralism instead of one on advertising
9 I'm not sure what scares me more about everything written after annotation 8, that I wrote it in a hazy stupor of sleeplessness and starvation, or that it's actually entirely valid based on Peirce's outline of indexes.
10 Hey world, meet the first person to get better after finding cigarettes.
11 Which is why I contend somebody needs to put her on meds, I don't typically condone that, but here, anything to get her away from Wrangle seems like a marvelous plan
12 Which I've just noticed I inadvertently likened to a can of Campbell's Chunky
13 PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWA!!! Like the genie. In the lamp, in Aladdin? Get it? Well, I did. Because I'm 21 and still love Disney.
The Camel pack initially stands alone as its own object, described as it is, a small box wrapped in cellophane which contains cancerous agents. It is introduced to the princess as the sort of box which Wrangle carries with him to keep him company in prison, and more importantly, to explain his constant stash of matches. Once Leigh-Cheri begins to contemplate its face though, the pack face becomes a part of her, a world in and of itself which fits into her universe. As stated, she uses the box to meditate upon to become closer to her imprisoned love by sharing his surroundings, but in meditating, Leigh-Cheri finds a world in the Camel pack face comprised of the elements presented to her, and those she finds there through metaphysical travels (6). Having been found and colonized by her, this land fits into her universe and thus the structure of her very being, and because of their mutual isolation, Leigh-Cheri and this Camel pack, she visits its face often not to escape her room, but to become even more acquainted with herself.
The Camel pack face yields a very interesting move on the part of Leigh-Cheri, a dive into the index system as laid down by Charles Sanders Peirce; where there's smoke, there's fire (7). Our princess took quite the plummet into indexes, though, when she decided the very image of the pyramids indicated the presence of a world she could visit. So she did, and this world was not Egypt, as such, but rather a logical world of indexes which much resembles that Saharan land (8). After hypothesizing at great length about the true nature and origin of the pyramids, for she decided they must all share one common nature and origin, our princess took indexes to their furthest point and entered a world based on the elements present on a pack of Camel cigarettes. From the pyramids, sand, dromedary, and palms, our princess decided that because there was no end to the horizon, there must be no end to the land. She “found” that land. From the pyramids, on land which must be there, for there was no end to the horizon, Leigh-Cheri decides there must be some population here, for otherwise, where would the pyramids have come from? Then, upon meeting these people, they and their animals, friends, slaves, she had conversations with them. How could she have decided they could be communicated with? Because the fact that these people travel together indicated they must have some kind of communicative method or else how and why would they have banded together? One might even go so far as to say the herders would surely be the most apt communicators, for they share not only a kind of language with one another, but they can also communicate, on a certain level, with animals. To me, it seems quite obvious that in a work where the face of a pack of Camel cigarettes indicates the existence of a world one might step into from their own abode, the existence of herders indicates a presence of some sort of communication, but also that inter-species communication is certainly an indicator of communicative prowess (9).
Where Leigh-Cheri is presented to us as royalty, a princess, the Camel pack is presented to us as something somewhat regal in its global presence, its grand face, its very traceable heritage like the lineage of a knight. The both of them, though, are very, well, usual. They are extraordinary in the honest breakdown of the word, they are extra, that is to say, particularly, ordinary. Leigh-Cheri, deposed by a royal mishap along with the rest of her family, doesn't function in society in a way much different than most other twenty-somethings. She is passionate, but about nothing specific until it catches her interest, has her little obsessions, views love in a strange and constantly changing way. Much like the princess, Camel was deposed by what could be called a royal mishap. Surely it wouldn't be a stretch to call the turn of the mighty, fashionable, cool and smooth cigarette dynasty into the lord tyrants of the cigarettes and cancer throne. Though, after, Camel still functions in society much like any other cigarette company. It is prolific, but only so much as we allow ourselves to let it be, has its little quirks that make people choose it over others, and continues to sell its products, lethal as they are. In their characteristics, we find surface similarities between Leigh-Cheri and the pack face world, but internally, they are not just similar, they are the same (10).
In the face of the Camel pack, Leigh-Cheri finds a Saharan land. She wanders this land by way of her mind, discovering the weathered faces of the pyramids and the hidden oasises where she meets the people of the pack face, the sort of people you might expect to find wandering the desert. She becomes quite protective of the pack of Camels, which she carries with her in this land, telling those travelers that, no, she cannot give them a smoke because “a successful external reality depends on an internal vision that is left intact,” (Robbins, Still Life, 167). As Leigh-Cheri develops this well-rounded and quite realistic understanding of the pack face, she becomes all the more aware of herself, of her mind, and what she believes. This pack face world is an analogous mirror world of our princess' inner self, where she becomes comfortable and sure; this pack face world becomes not simply a being structurally similar to Leigh-Cheri, but a structural element necessary to her self, and her personal development (11).
The “external reality” that Leigh-Cheri must maintain here can arguably be herself or the room, which she seeks to live in by her penitentiary rules, without losing her mind. The young woman as a human, seen and heard by other humans, who we find asking for her suitor after a letter breaks her heart, this woman is not a frail individual. I would argue that, while she crushes the Camel pack in her bitter reaction, it is only because of the world within the face that Leigh-Cheri now possesses the sense of self to be capable of crushing it. As it is smashed, the world is crumpled with it, she “[topples] the pyramids and [busts] the dromedary's hump,” yet she does not lose her mind because she is in totally control of that pack face world, and has made herself as real and as hearty as that world (12). That being said, as it is literally her, the chamber pot, cot, and pack of cigarettes within that room, losing the wholeness of that cigarette pack would effectively rip into the fabric of her mind, and likely destroy her sense of self and all that she had developed that self into. She does not open the pack when she crushes is, she is destroying the outward appearance of the pack and its innards, yes, but she is not crumpling that world as she had found it. Leigh-Cheri creates on the surface of the pack a visible infliction of the internal pain she feels, further bridging her self and the pack face world; when she recovers, the pack, as well as her self, will surely bear the hallmarks of agony, but they both continue to flourish in spite of their scars.
The pack face world ceases to be the carefully preserved mirror of Leigh-Cheri after the incident, to be the very core of her world. But, the world still holds a significance to her, in that the pyramids it houses have proven to her the phenomenal power (13) which the human race has prescribed to them for millennia, among few other things that have proven to have such a monumental bearing on our species. Like, for example, love.
1 Were it not for Gulietta, you would be the star of the show
2 If you ignore how many time Leigh-Cheri's breasts were glorified, of course. Don't even get me started on the "peachf..." I give, Robbins, you make my stomach turn.
3 Because what else am I going to talk about? Robbins' penis envy?
4 Before you tell me I'm wrong, the book says the love story takes place inside the pack of Camels, I'm talking about the story of the world the crazy girl makes up
5 I'd like to say "unfortunately..." here, but it was awfully pertinent to my paper, so I guess I should be thankful.
6 Keep in mind, she's presented as the "normal" one in the couple
7 Where there's crazy, there's meds. Oh Leigh-Cheri, please do take some.
8 The girl should have picked up a book with merit at the library, like a book about structuralism instead of one on advertising
9 I'm not sure what scares me more about everything written after annotation 8, that I wrote it in a hazy stupor of sleeplessness and starvation, or that it's actually entirely valid based on Peirce's outline of indexes.
10 Hey world, meet the first person to get better after finding cigarettes.
11 Which is why I contend somebody needs to put her on meds, I don't typically condone that, but here, anything to get her away from Wrangle seems like a marvelous plan
12 Which I've just noticed I inadvertently likened to a can of Campbell's Chunky
13 PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWA!!! Like the genie. In the lamp, in Aladdin? Get it? Well, I did. Because I'm 21 and still love Disney.
The Relationship of Bernard Mickey Wrangle and Leigh-Cheri (21)
(1) The relationship of Bernard Mickey Wrangle and Princess Leigh-Cheri is, in essence, the “tale as old as time” that Mrs. Pots declares the love of Beauty and The Beast to be, as such, it is the relationship in nearly every Disney movie with a love story, and every story that each of those movies is based on. In this sense, we might call the entire structure of this novel to be like all fairy tale romances or love stories. The two are seemingly interchangeable, but I will postulate here that no one will debate that a fairy tale romance is a kind of love story, although not all love stories are fairy tale romances (2). In Still Life, quite a bit of magical realism exists, so I'll be detailing it as a fairy tale romance for the most part, because I, personally, view love stories as those that happen under the conditions of the natural world and reality, and with little “magical” occurrence. For the sake of not detailing every love story or fairy tale romance in history, I will be focus on three, as brought to you by Disney (not the strikingly more morbid original counterparts (3)) and William Shakespeare; Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Romeo and Juliet. The work as whole will thus be characterized as fitting into the Northrop Frye theory of myths, because it it romantic, comedic, a bit tragic, and often sarcastic in nature. In demonstrating its structural similarity to fairy tale romances, this aim here is to establish it not as a “new” fairy tale, but as a “modern” fairy tale. The story and structure of this novel are not new, the elements are merely updated to fit the reality of the “last quarter of the twentieth century” (Robbins, Still Life, 4) (4).
Initially, I'd like to bring up the fact that, unlike the tales in the storied vault to which this book will never be permitted (5), the wedding cake shared by these two lovers is not their own. They feed off of the wedding cake meant for Leigh-Cheri and her fiance, A'ben, to live through their imprisonment in the princess' wedding gift, a great pyramid. Arguing that this is symbolic, that the cake somehow represents the traditional union neither the princess or Wrangle are destined to have, much less between themselves, goes against the track that Robbins set out on with this novel, to write the story of an object for its own sake (6). However, I insist that to argue this is quite in the vein of Robbins' point (7). The function of a wedding cake, the story of it, reaches its finale when the cake is shared by the newlyweds and given by them to their attending loved ones. This is not the story of this wedding cake, and so I contend that Robbins must have had some hidden agenda when he changed the traditional relationship to this world that a wedding cake has. This change in the story should not go unnoticed because it hearkens their survival and the continuance of their relationship; they have ingested something that suggests forever (8), that is only fed upon in in union, and something that is not for them (9). In eating this cake, they crush any preconceptions of traditional marriage or romantic relationship in favor of something a bit more flecked with incongruities between tradition and reality. This cake, though, comes towards the end of their story, so let's begin at the beginning.
Upon her first interaction with Bernard, we find the princess in a Beauty and The Beast situation; Bernard is not your typical good-looking, hunky prince, and in fact is described to behold quite unattractive features, including the sweet smile of “a retarded jack-o-lantern” (Robbins, Still Life, 46) (10). The romances begin in much the same way, though Robbins' moves much more quickly into the realm of attraction, as Disney is yet to employ alcohol as a means by which two characters discover their attraction to one another (11). As Belle is forced into close quarters with The Beast, so Leigh-Cheri is forced into close confines with Bernard; their first meeting is on a plane, and the man is immediately to her distaste. Upon the princess getting drunk and in a state of uncertainty, as Belle overturns her carriage and faces a pack of hungry wolves, Bernard rescues her from her many silly thoughts of rationality and reasonable thinking much like the Beast saves Belle from wolves and the cold (12). From here, of course, the responsibility of Leigh-Cheri to hold up Bernard as he wavers in a tequila-induced haze falls much as the equally guilty/nurturing duty falls on Belle to revive the wounded Beast. These initial character interactions are, admittedly, humorous, but also carry a great slew of non-sequiturs, which commonly fit into the same genre of work that blatantly sarcastic and ironic interactions do (13).
From here, the story moves into more into an Aladdin-like plot, still in the realm of a bastard Disney/Terry Gilliam movie (14); the princess is quite like Jasmine in that she as been pressured by parental figure(s) to find a suitable husband, but refuses the advances of all those who might express interest, she is considered very beautiful, she presents with an absent mother figure (though here, it is because her mother is awfully dull, mentally absent, and not because she is absent altogether (15)), and she keeps the company of, primarily, only one other character. That other character, in Still Life the housemaid Gulietta, strangely enough, is in both stories one who hardly communicates with a language the audience can understand, and who wanders around naked for a great bit of the story (16). Princess Leigh-Cheri is now faced with a commoner, Bernard, who makes himself out to be an awful lot more than he is, which is to say, he's only human but makes himself out to be the savior of humankind in the most roundabout way possible. This relationship is forced to develop under some strange pretenses, much like Jasmine and Aladdin's; Bernard is living as an outlaw who tries to lightly corrupt a princess whom he finds mesmerizing because of the color of her hair, all while trying to convince her not to arrest him for being a serial bomber, and attempting to convince her that the bombings are totally necessary to his way of life and, truly, to everyone else's. Sure, it's not the heavily layered commoner/prince act that Aladdin must keep up, but the fact still stands that while the many facets of Bernard's history are true while Aladdin's are false, both men are trying to convince the woman they do/will love of the rationale of their lifestyle and how it blends perfectly with hers despite conflicts between the two that both woman and audience recognize immediately. I personally give the benefit of the doubt to those male characters in these stories and theorize that they, too, somehow must have recognized the immediate conflicts of their lifestyles and those of their lady-loves, or why else would they have exasperated themselves trying to explain the myriad ways in which they are perfect for her? In this type of story though, it is most certainly his job to make light and little of every discrepancy which may arise so he has a better chance with the princess (17).
The culmination of these “happily ever after” tales is found only after miscommunication (a pitfall of all romances, in fiction and reality) by Bernard to Leigh-Cheri, during which she leaves him for the suitor whom her parents support. Here is where the stories begin to blend; on one hand, we find the Aladdin to Leigh-Cheri's Jasmine imprisoned and incapable of reaching out to her, on the other, the suitor whom she finds herself with is not the distasteful and evil Jafar, but rather a physically satisfying A'ben, who proved to be a far better man than she had imagined and who breaks her desire to imagine Bernard when they share her bed once a week. The Jafar in Still Life, A'ben, still ends up thoroughly unhappy with the situation though, and chooses, fittingly, to lock the lovers in a pyramid. Oddly, this is awfully close to Aladdin in that the final fight between Aladdin and Jafar involved breaking Jasmine out of another stereotypical Saharan story element, the genie lamp. However, here it is the princess who saves her Aladdin, Wrangle, from their prison. In an effort to maintain that one plot is similar to another specific plot as a whole, the similarities between this scene in Still Life and sequels to the Disney movie, Aladdin, will not be discussed. Like the Beauty, eventually the princess ends up, again, with Bernard, and it is now that the king and queen realize, like Maurice father of Belle, that perhaps the Beast is best for their daughter because, while they disliked him quite thoroughly upon first meeting, he is who she truly loves. Still, they don't really like him, and he is never honestly accepted by the world for what he is or has done because he doesn't change in the slightest, as the Beast does (18).
This love story is, to a point on page 264, like Romeo and Juliet; two people from two very different worlds fall in love and end up trying to kill themselves in hopes that they will end up together because they cannot live without one another. This parallel extends, as I said, until page 264, when they both believe they are going to die to be together, and then, for lack of a more dramatic wording, they don't. Beforehand, we find the lovers meeting in hidden union, speaking to one another through trusted links, and trying to convince (Leigh-Cheri's only, here) surrounding family and friends that their love is not unlawful or wrong, and that they should be allowed to be together, though each half of the couple has backing reasons why they should never be a couple.
That being said, it should now be hard to debate the standing of Still Life with Woodpecker as a fairy tale romance, because while it does exhibit elements outside the realm of “traditional” fairy tales, it also shares quite a few character elements with some of the most well-established fairy tale romances and love stories I am aware of. This book is arguably a fairy tale for adults, it establishes events which are highly unlikely in the course of reality, thought they stand as equal a chance of happening as being hit with a bolt of lightening, it is liberal in its description of lustful and tragic scenes, and it is, of course, a love story, as many fairy tales are (19).
1 The tie-in to this opener is just plain lame, I'll admit it willingly.
2 All zaps are zoozles, but not all zoozles are zaps
3 I'm going to call "morbid" an understatement. I mean MORBID
4 And if that last quarter had really been like that, the culture gap between me (21) and my boyfriend (29) would be unbearable. I would probably egg him.
5 I love you, vault. Please bring the world another gift of yore that we might experience joy again?
6 But I'm probably going to find a way to make it happen.
7 Ah, look. There I go...
8 I believe in a thing called love, just listen the rhythm of my heart...
9 Starving heathens that they are
10 Who, the entire time, I made me wonder, "Good lord, princess, WHY DID YOU DRINK THE MOCKINGBIRDS?"
11 Can you imagine Pocahontas with rum involved? Somehow I don't think the settlers would have cared much about gold after that.
12 Except that what the Beast did was heartfelt and kind, and what Wrangle did was molestation, but that's not part of my "love fest" argument, is it?
13 My favorite banter being "Well, I was a waitress at the last supper," to which Wrangle replies, "I'm so old I remember when McDonald's had only sold 100 hamburgers." Leigh-Cheri is forced to concede that Wrangle is older.
14 I'm not wrong, so it didn't get edited out
15 Her mother? Is a moron
16 Gulietta made the book far more tolerable, from her total lack of inhibitions, to the frog she has a very strange attachment to, to her amazingly resilient coke habit
17 Which is a nice way of saying "get in her pants," harem or blue jean
18 That whole paragraph- so convoluted, yet so very true.
19 Although I personally feel that this one bit the dust despite all the sticky situations (20)
20 Have read that over, am mortified with myself and may have to excuse myself to expel my lunch
21 Still gross
Initially, I'd like to bring up the fact that, unlike the tales in the storied vault to which this book will never be permitted (5), the wedding cake shared by these two lovers is not their own. They feed off of the wedding cake meant for Leigh-Cheri and her fiance, A'ben, to live through their imprisonment in the princess' wedding gift, a great pyramid. Arguing that this is symbolic, that the cake somehow represents the traditional union neither the princess or Wrangle are destined to have, much less between themselves, goes against the track that Robbins set out on with this novel, to write the story of an object for its own sake (6). However, I insist that to argue this is quite in the vein of Robbins' point (7). The function of a wedding cake, the story of it, reaches its finale when the cake is shared by the newlyweds and given by them to their attending loved ones. This is not the story of this wedding cake, and so I contend that Robbins must have had some hidden agenda when he changed the traditional relationship to this world that a wedding cake has. This change in the story should not go unnoticed because it hearkens their survival and the continuance of their relationship; they have ingested something that suggests forever (8), that is only fed upon in in union, and something that is not for them (9). In eating this cake, they crush any preconceptions of traditional marriage or romantic relationship in favor of something a bit more flecked with incongruities between tradition and reality. This cake, though, comes towards the end of their story, so let's begin at the beginning.
Upon her first interaction with Bernard, we find the princess in a Beauty and The Beast situation; Bernard is not your typical good-looking, hunky prince, and in fact is described to behold quite unattractive features, including the sweet smile of “a retarded jack-o-lantern” (Robbins, Still Life, 46) (10). The romances begin in much the same way, though Robbins' moves much more quickly into the realm of attraction, as Disney is yet to employ alcohol as a means by which two characters discover their attraction to one another (11). As Belle is forced into close quarters with The Beast, so Leigh-Cheri is forced into close confines with Bernard; their first meeting is on a plane, and the man is immediately to her distaste. Upon the princess getting drunk and in a state of uncertainty, as Belle overturns her carriage and faces a pack of hungry wolves, Bernard rescues her from her many silly thoughts of rationality and reasonable thinking much like the Beast saves Belle from wolves and the cold (12). From here, of course, the responsibility of Leigh-Cheri to hold up Bernard as he wavers in a tequila-induced haze falls much as the equally guilty/nurturing duty falls on Belle to revive the wounded Beast. These initial character interactions are, admittedly, humorous, but also carry a great slew of non-sequiturs, which commonly fit into the same genre of work that blatantly sarcastic and ironic interactions do (13).
From here, the story moves into more into an Aladdin-like plot, still in the realm of a bastard Disney/Terry Gilliam movie (14); the princess is quite like Jasmine in that she as been pressured by parental figure(s) to find a suitable husband, but refuses the advances of all those who might express interest, she is considered very beautiful, she presents with an absent mother figure (though here, it is because her mother is awfully dull, mentally absent, and not because she is absent altogether (15)), and she keeps the company of, primarily, only one other character. That other character, in Still Life the housemaid Gulietta, strangely enough, is in both stories one who hardly communicates with a language the audience can understand, and who wanders around naked for a great bit of the story (16). Princess Leigh-Cheri is now faced with a commoner, Bernard, who makes himself out to be an awful lot more than he is, which is to say, he's only human but makes himself out to be the savior of humankind in the most roundabout way possible. This relationship is forced to develop under some strange pretenses, much like Jasmine and Aladdin's; Bernard is living as an outlaw who tries to lightly corrupt a princess whom he finds mesmerizing because of the color of her hair, all while trying to convince her not to arrest him for being a serial bomber, and attempting to convince her that the bombings are totally necessary to his way of life and, truly, to everyone else's. Sure, it's not the heavily layered commoner/prince act that Aladdin must keep up, but the fact still stands that while the many facets of Bernard's history are true while Aladdin's are false, both men are trying to convince the woman they do/will love of the rationale of their lifestyle and how it blends perfectly with hers despite conflicts between the two that both woman and audience recognize immediately. I personally give the benefit of the doubt to those male characters in these stories and theorize that they, too, somehow must have recognized the immediate conflicts of their lifestyles and those of their lady-loves, or why else would they have exasperated themselves trying to explain the myriad ways in which they are perfect for her? In this type of story though, it is most certainly his job to make light and little of every discrepancy which may arise so he has a better chance with the princess (17).
The culmination of these “happily ever after” tales is found only after miscommunication (a pitfall of all romances, in fiction and reality) by Bernard to Leigh-Cheri, during which she leaves him for the suitor whom her parents support. Here is where the stories begin to blend; on one hand, we find the Aladdin to Leigh-Cheri's Jasmine imprisoned and incapable of reaching out to her, on the other, the suitor whom she finds herself with is not the distasteful and evil Jafar, but rather a physically satisfying A'ben, who proved to be a far better man than she had imagined and who breaks her desire to imagine Bernard when they share her bed once a week. The Jafar in Still Life, A'ben, still ends up thoroughly unhappy with the situation though, and chooses, fittingly, to lock the lovers in a pyramid. Oddly, this is awfully close to Aladdin in that the final fight between Aladdin and Jafar involved breaking Jasmine out of another stereotypical Saharan story element, the genie lamp. However, here it is the princess who saves her Aladdin, Wrangle, from their prison. In an effort to maintain that one plot is similar to another specific plot as a whole, the similarities between this scene in Still Life and sequels to the Disney movie, Aladdin, will not be discussed. Like the Beauty, eventually the princess ends up, again, with Bernard, and it is now that the king and queen realize, like Maurice father of Belle, that perhaps the Beast is best for their daughter because, while they disliked him quite thoroughly upon first meeting, he is who she truly loves. Still, they don't really like him, and he is never honestly accepted by the world for what he is or has done because he doesn't change in the slightest, as the Beast does (18).
This love story is, to a point on page 264, like Romeo and Juliet; two people from two very different worlds fall in love and end up trying to kill themselves in hopes that they will end up together because they cannot live without one another. This parallel extends, as I said, until page 264, when they both believe they are going to die to be together, and then, for lack of a more dramatic wording, they don't. Beforehand, we find the lovers meeting in hidden union, speaking to one another through trusted links, and trying to convince (Leigh-Cheri's only, here) surrounding family and friends that their love is not unlawful or wrong, and that they should be allowed to be together, though each half of the couple has backing reasons why they should never be a couple.
That being said, it should now be hard to debate the standing of Still Life with Woodpecker as a fairy tale romance, because while it does exhibit elements outside the realm of “traditional” fairy tales, it also shares quite a few character elements with some of the most well-established fairy tale romances and love stories I am aware of. This book is arguably a fairy tale for adults, it establishes events which are highly unlikely in the course of reality, thought they stand as equal a chance of happening as being hit with a bolt of lightening, it is liberal in its description of lustful and tragic scenes, and it is, of course, a love story, as many fairy tales are (19).
1 The tie-in to this opener is just plain lame, I'll admit it willingly.
2 All zaps are zoozles, but not all zoozles are zaps
3 I'm going to call "morbid" an understatement. I mean MORBID
4 And if that last quarter had really been like that, the culture gap between me (21) and my boyfriend (29) would be unbearable. I would probably egg him.
5 I love you, vault. Please bring the world another gift of yore that we might experience joy again?
6 But I'm probably going to find a way to make it happen.
7 Ah, look. There I go...
8 I believe in a thing called love, just listen the rhythm of my heart...
9 Starving heathens that they are
10 Who, the entire time, I made me wonder, "Good lord, princess, WHY DID YOU DRINK THE MOCKINGBIRDS?"
11 Can you imagine Pocahontas with rum involved? Somehow I don't think the settlers would have cared much about gold after that.
12 Except that what the Beast did was heartfelt and kind, and what Wrangle did was molestation, but that's not part of my "love fest" argument, is it?
13 My favorite banter being "Well, I was a waitress at the last supper," to which Wrangle replies, "I'm so old I remember when McDonald's had only sold 100 hamburgers." Leigh-Cheri is forced to concede that Wrangle is older.
14 I'm not wrong, so it didn't get edited out
15 Her mother? Is a moron
16 Gulietta made the book far more tolerable, from her total lack of inhibitions, to the frog she has a very strange attachment to, to her amazingly resilient coke habit
17 Which is a nice way of saying "get in her pants," harem or blue jean
18 That whole paragraph- so convoluted, yet so very true.
19 Although I personally feel that this one bit the dust despite all the sticky situations (20)
20 Have read that over, am mortified with myself and may have to excuse myself to expel my lunch
21 Still gross
Wrangle as an Outlaw
Often in love stories, we find that those in love are in their own little world (1). Sometimes, the rules of the average world no longer seem to apply to them, and they become fidgety in the realm of common things (2). This prompts more than little fantastic happenings and a few outlandish behaviors though, in the case of someone living outside the law, an outlaw. Originally a punishment which made a person legally inhuman, forcing them out of society and branding them as a target, like a wild animal, to be shot on sight, the term outlaw eventually came to commonly reference someone who chose to live by their own rules, someone who tempted the rest of society to live so freely as they, someone who very likely breaks the law often but doesn't see the harm, because they know no laws but their own (3).
While not everything Wrangle, or any outlaw, does is inherently against the law, it stands to reason that if they are not apprehended during the statute of limitations on their individual crimes, everything they do outside of a prison cell is against the law. Because I believe that thought is heavily influenced by surroundings (4), I reason that thoughts themselves, formulated whilst illegally in the free world, become outlaw as well. Our thoughts are our own, and so each thought becomes, inherently, outlaw and threatens the fabric of society; which is not to say that it shouldn't occasionally have its seams torn and re-stitched (5).
Bernard Mickey Wrangle is a strange kind of outlaw for a love story, he is neither of torn and humble beginnings or good looks, his motive is to do what is wrong that must be done in a time when right and wrong are becoming skewed, and he doesn't fight his outlaw ways in the slightest to become more of what the princess seeks in a man, primarily because this princess falls in love with an outlaw, not a project. Bernard is a new kind of outlaw because he is in, and from, a new kind of time. Before, I posited that the work as a whole was an indicator of the time and culture in which it was written, and I stand by that. I argue, now, that these were, and are, outlaw times (6). I allege that those were the times that brought being an outlaw into the mainstream (7), and they are why we have such a radically different world than Robbins and his contemporaries did (8). There were outlaws before, so far back as civilization and group agreements on what was and was not acceptable, and there are outlaws now, but our outlaws are of a much different fabric than Robin Hood (9).
We'll begin with Wrangle's appearance as an outlaw. He seems to fit the original type of outlaw, a man who at first glance might cause a shudder or sneer, he presents as someone who does not tend to himself as society has silently agreed one should, and instead chooses to keep himself up as he pleases. However, he does not fit the modern type-cast of an outlaw, for contrast, I'll suggest Hugh Jackman, in the title role of Van Helsing as having played into today's representation (10). This, strangely, makes him all the more an outlaw; Robbins took a role which has been fantasized by media into some glorious man of bulging pectorals and salon-brand hair and instead reverted back to the more honest outlaw. Where our media has spawned outlaws like Batman, James Bond, and Van Helsing, played by men considered sexually attractive by consensus, Robbins went rogue and spawned an outlaw with bad teeth and an unsettling pair of Donald Duck children's sunglasses which, without certain information, might prompt the reader to question Wrangle's affiliation with NAMBLA (11).
While these men, Wrangle and Batman, etc, share little common ground in the way of looks, they all do share the outlaw necessity of disguise. Where Batman hides Bruce Wayne behind the face of a flying rodent, Wrangle dyes his hair, both in black (12). So long as there have been outlaws, there have been those who had to hide their true colors so they might continue to do what is wrong, that must be done, without facing legal prosecution. From here on, I'll be discussing outlaws purely as Robbins does, one who does what must be done, wrong as it is labeled, “for freedom, for beauty, or for fun,” (Robbins, Still Life, 105).
From here, I'll move on to the motivation of our outlaw. Wrangle is a man captivated not by a criminal agenda, but by his own internal motivation to stir things up, to make people question, and, truthfully, to watch things explode. As he states in many ways, many times, he was never about hurting people or causing anyone pain, but about making them look at things in a new way, question stale issues, and, of course, watch the lovely explosion. Really, the biggest reason the authorities want Wrangle is because he is so terribly random and lacks definable motivation (13), his only crime perpetrated against an actual person was this dismemberment of a student who happened to be in a detonated building, where it was thought experiments aiding the US in warfare were being created, and that student was present unbeknown to Wrangle. Upon finding out that he had maimed the man, and lost him his career, his wife, and subsequently his well-being, Wrangle dedicated himself to the idea that he should face some retribution, that he should pay. However, being an outlaw dictated that he must find a way to punish himself, because no judge could pass a proper sentencing (14).
We see this kind if self-inflicted justice in many outlaws, but again, Wrangle is the odd one in the pack. In more “traditional” outlaws, we find those with heavy hearts who love and care but refuse themselves defined relationships after experiencing terrible loss, for the sake of not hurting anyone, they claim. These outlaws are often linked with women whom they care deeply for, those they would do very nearly anything to protect, but whom they still keep secrets from and try to save by leaving them. They fight for justice and peace, they work outside the scope of the law to do what they believe will free society from fear and random acts against human kind. Yet, they damn themselves to be alone because they must be unto themselves to fight the most violent war, of those who are not afraid to die because they keep nameless and alone, and so no one can name who it is they miss when the outlaw dies.
Wrangle, of course, seems to throw that entire argument out the window (15), but still maintains the life of an outlaw. He is, in this vein, the outlaw among outlaws, he manages to be almost wholly different, and yet not the opposite, and so is still called an outlaw because he is not of the normal fabric. Wrangle is the newest kind outlaw, and so he redefines, instead of opposing, the definition. We might call Wrangle an anti-outlaw the way we label Severus Snape an anti-hero; he is an outlaw in that he rejects the commonalities of outlaws, and ends up appropriately turning himself into a bit of a hero for the every-man (16). Wrangle as an anti-outlaw... it might come as a surprise even to him (17), but as luck would have it he managed to be the savior movement society would never back, and as such it became the only pivotal movement he would ever be willing to support. This movement, to stir the world and detonate for fun, is meant to save human kind in a way often only Wrangle understands, but it is still to save us all. Wrangle is very much the anti-outlaw in his rejection of seclusion and quiet solitude, his strange motivation to do good through destruction of inanimate objects instead of villains, and his proclamations of love and the desire to have it and make it stay (18).
Most oddly though, I contend, is his roundabout goal of a world not far from anarchy (19). One would think that, being a passionate outlaw, he would be content with a society that maintains enough order for his very lifestyle and label to exist. Again, though, we find Wrangle to be the anti-outlaw. While he fights to stir things up and create explosions, both literal and metaphysical, he is the only outlaw I have ever encountered who doesn't seek only to upset society, but to unravel its fabric. Without society as it is, as it was in the time of the text, what is wrong that must be done becomes increasingly more difficult to define because so much more is accepted. For the more disagreeable wrongs committed, a supporting crowd is even likely to form. These times are not to the advantage of Wrangle or his label's well-being, but still he tries to be the outlaw who will wreck havoc until everything wrong that must be done becomes commonplace. By committing his illegal acts, he aims to beget in others an urge to do the same, to create a world of outlaws, and thus destroy law. Because what is law if no one follows it? He seeks to create in every one person the seed to begin a movement that can be begun and supported individually, without so many responsibilities that the leader must find others to distribute labor upon. Of course, this is because if too many people get involved in these individual movements, they simply become organized forces, and eventually the dull and passionless will be hired to perform dull tasks, leading to the demise of the passionate movement. That simply will not do (20).
Wrangle, unlike outlaws before him, does not care to upset society for his own glory, for something to boast about, but in order that the rest of society might live most freely, as he does. His ideal world is one in which the outlaw does not exist because everyone acts in such a way that their desires are fulfilled, their lives are complete, and outlaws aren't necessary. Until then, our anti-outlaw will live as he does to promote the existence of such a world (21).
1 And we hate them for it. Even I hate them for it, and I'm in one swell relationship
2 Like Ariel, and her total inability to be happy with a merman, instead she's got to go loony over the guy with legs
3 James Dean, for example. Or boys in high school with aspirations of being James Dean. ... or burger flippers.
4 Things which may heavily influence your thoughts in your surroundings; your fridge, the bottle of wine in your fridge, the cheese next to the wine, the hussy in the laundry room inciting vengeful anger in you because she won't quit screeching to her friend about her tawdry sex life
5 Restitching, by the by, could be an occurrence like Rosa Parks' stand on the bus... or, evidently, the birth of the Twilight Saga.
6 Sounds like a super-villain newspaper, I know, but it was all I had
7 Tim Leary, anyone?
8 Hannah F*ING Montana should never have been granted a place in this world
9 Because our outlaws put LSD in candy, to "help people." This information courtesy of National Geographic
10 If I didn't pick someone attractive, many of my points would have been invalidated. Is that a poor indicator of the strength of my arguments?
11 Tom Robbins, I'm looking at you. This might be from the 70s, free love, and lots of flower children, but that particular image is very unsettling
12 At the time, I think that was meant to hold some deep, dark significance. Upon writing it, I promptly forgot what that was, but it still sounded pretty good.
13 Cute how this is in keeping with a serial killer, no? Not that I just did a project about them in Psych or anything, and thus may have used some outside knowledge to make a strange point...
14 Because the law is the man, man!
15 And yet, I'm leaving it in the paper. I think it a wise decision.
16 Yep, you caught me. I just compared the NAMBLA would-be to Saint Peter Gibbons
17 Like the kick in the pants I thought of giving him pretty much the entire time. Or maybe that wouldn't surprise him. I'd like to thin one of the Montana (Judy, Molly, or Polly) girls took that initiative at some point
18 Which is kind of strange considering he's wacky as all hell
19 This is the crux of my argument because it literally makes no sense to me that an "outlaw" would want a world where he's not the center of attention. I know I make a case for him as the "hero" type in some really convoluted way, but honestly he reminds me a lot more of The Joker, he's like The Joker, with a heart of gold... or rusted tin, your call
20 I apologize to all the hidden-awesomeness people out there who seem to be very dull at work, I'm sure your kinky sex life totally makes up for the fact that you won't smile at a co-worker on their birthday
21 Also, because he's insane, as evidenced by his "retarded jack o lantern" smile
While not everything Wrangle, or any outlaw, does is inherently against the law, it stands to reason that if they are not apprehended during the statute of limitations on their individual crimes, everything they do outside of a prison cell is against the law. Because I believe that thought is heavily influenced by surroundings (4), I reason that thoughts themselves, formulated whilst illegally in the free world, become outlaw as well. Our thoughts are our own, and so each thought becomes, inherently, outlaw and threatens the fabric of society; which is not to say that it shouldn't occasionally have its seams torn and re-stitched (5).
Bernard Mickey Wrangle is a strange kind of outlaw for a love story, he is neither of torn and humble beginnings or good looks, his motive is to do what is wrong that must be done in a time when right and wrong are becoming skewed, and he doesn't fight his outlaw ways in the slightest to become more of what the princess seeks in a man, primarily because this princess falls in love with an outlaw, not a project. Bernard is a new kind of outlaw because he is in, and from, a new kind of time. Before, I posited that the work as a whole was an indicator of the time and culture in which it was written, and I stand by that. I argue, now, that these were, and are, outlaw times (6). I allege that those were the times that brought being an outlaw into the mainstream (7), and they are why we have such a radically different world than Robbins and his contemporaries did (8). There were outlaws before, so far back as civilization and group agreements on what was and was not acceptable, and there are outlaws now, but our outlaws are of a much different fabric than Robin Hood (9).
We'll begin with Wrangle's appearance as an outlaw. He seems to fit the original type of outlaw, a man who at first glance might cause a shudder or sneer, he presents as someone who does not tend to himself as society has silently agreed one should, and instead chooses to keep himself up as he pleases. However, he does not fit the modern type-cast of an outlaw, for contrast, I'll suggest Hugh Jackman, in the title role of Van Helsing as having played into today's representation (10). This, strangely, makes him all the more an outlaw; Robbins took a role which has been fantasized by media into some glorious man of bulging pectorals and salon-brand hair and instead reverted back to the more honest outlaw. Where our media has spawned outlaws like Batman, James Bond, and Van Helsing, played by men considered sexually attractive by consensus, Robbins went rogue and spawned an outlaw with bad teeth and an unsettling pair of Donald Duck children's sunglasses which, without certain information, might prompt the reader to question Wrangle's affiliation with NAMBLA (11).
While these men, Wrangle and Batman, etc, share little common ground in the way of looks, they all do share the outlaw necessity of disguise. Where Batman hides Bruce Wayne behind the face of a flying rodent, Wrangle dyes his hair, both in black (12). So long as there have been outlaws, there have been those who had to hide their true colors so they might continue to do what is wrong, that must be done, without facing legal prosecution. From here on, I'll be discussing outlaws purely as Robbins does, one who does what must be done, wrong as it is labeled, “for freedom, for beauty, or for fun,” (Robbins, Still Life, 105).
From here, I'll move on to the motivation of our outlaw. Wrangle is a man captivated not by a criminal agenda, but by his own internal motivation to stir things up, to make people question, and, truthfully, to watch things explode. As he states in many ways, many times, he was never about hurting people or causing anyone pain, but about making them look at things in a new way, question stale issues, and, of course, watch the lovely explosion. Really, the biggest reason the authorities want Wrangle is because he is so terribly random and lacks definable motivation (13), his only crime perpetrated against an actual person was this dismemberment of a student who happened to be in a detonated building, where it was thought experiments aiding the US in warfare were being created, and that student was present unbeknown to Wrangle. Upon finding out that he had maimed the man, and lost him his career, his wife, and subsequently his well-being, Wrangle dedicated himself to the idea that he should face some retribution, that he should pay. However, being an outlaw dictated that he must find a way to punish himself, because no judge could pass a proper sentencing (14).
We see this kind if self-inflicted justice in many outlaws, but again, Wrangle is the odd one in the pack. In more “traditional” outlaws, we find those with heavy hearts who love and care but refuse themselves defined relationships after experiencing terrible loss, for the sake of not hurting anyone, they claim. These outlaws are often linked with women whom they care deeply for, those they would do very nearly anything to protect, but whom they still keep secrets from and try to save by leaving them. They fight for justice and peace, they work outside the scope of the law to do what they believe will free society from fear and random acts against human kind. Yet, they damn themselves to be alone because they must be unto themselves to fight the most violent war, of those who are not afraid to die because they keep nameless and alone, and so no one can name who it is they miss when the outlaw dies.
Wrangle, of course, seems to throw that entire argument out the window (15), but still maintains the life of an outlaw. He is, in this vein, the outlaw among outlaws, he manages to be almost wholly different, and yet not the opposite, and so is still called an outlaw because he is not of the normal fabric. Wrangle is the newest kind outlaw, and so he redefines, instead of opposing, the definition. We might call Wrangle an anti-outlaw the way we label Severus Snape an anti-hero; he is an outlaw in that he rejects the commonalities of outlaws, and ends up appropriately turning himself into a bit of a hero for the every-man (16). Wrangle as an anti-outlaw... it might come as a surprise even to him (17), but as luck would have it he managed to be the savior movement society would never back, and as such it became the only pivotal movement he would ever be willing to support. This movement, to stir the world and detonate for fun, is meant to save human kind in a way often only Wrangle understands, but it is still to save us all. Wrangle is very much the anti-outlaw in his rejection of seclusion and quiet solitude, his strange motivation to do good through destruction of inanimate objects instead of villains, and his proclamations of love and the desire to have it and make it stay (18).
Most oddly though, I contend, is his roundabout goal of a world not far from anarchy (19). One would think that, being a passionate outlaw, he would be content with a society that maintains enough order for his very lifestyle and label to exist. Again, though, we find Wrangle to be the anti-outlaw. While he fights to stir things up and create explosions, both literal and metaphysical, he is the only outlaw I have ever encountered who doesn't seek only to upset society, but to unravel its fabric. Without society as it is, as it was in the time of the text, what is wrong that must be done becomes increasingly more difficult to define because so much more is accepted. For the more disagreeable wrongs committed, a supporting crowd is even likely to form. These times are not to the advantage of Wrangle or his label's well-being, but still he tries to be the outlaw who will wreck havoc until everything wrong that must be done becomes commonplace. By committing his illegal acts, he aims to beget in others an urge to do the same, to create a world of outlaws, and thus destroy law. Because what is law if no one follows it? He seeks to create in every one person the seed to begin a movement that can be begun and supported individually, without so many responsibilities that the leader must find others to distribute labor upon. Of course, this is because if too many people get involved in these individual movements, they simply become organized forces, and eventually the dull and passionless will be hired to perform dull tasks, leading to the demise of the passionate movement. That simply will not do (20).
Wrangle, unlike outlaws before him, does not care to upset society for his own glory, for something to boast about, but in order that the rest of society might live most freely, as he does. His ideal world is one in which the outlaw does not exist because everyone acts in such a way that their desires are fulfilled, their lives are complete, and outlaws aren't necessary. Until then, our anti-outlaw will live as he does to promote the existence of such a world (21).
1 And we hate them for it. Even I hate them for it, and I'm in one swell relationship
2 Like Ariel, and her total inability to be happy with a merman, instead she's got to go loony over the guy with legs
3 James Dean, for example. Or boys in high school with aspirations of being James Dean. ... or burger flippers.
4 Things which may heavily influence your thoughts in your surroundings; your fridge, the bottle of wine in your fridge, the cheese next to the wine, the hussy in the laundry room inciting vengeful anger in you because she won't quit screeching to her friend about her tawdry sex life
5 Restitching, by the by, could be an occurrence like Rosa Parks' stand on the bus... or, evidently, the birth of the Twilight Saga.
6 Sounds like a super-villain newspaper, I know, but it was all I had
7 Tim Leary, anyone?
8 Hannah F*ING Montana should never have been granted a place in this world
9 Because our outlaws put LSD in candy, to "help people." This information courtesy of National Geographic
10 If I didn't pick someone attractive, many of my points would have been invalidated. Is that a poor indicator of the strength of my arguments?
11 Tom Robbins, I'm looking at you. This might be from the 70s, free love, and lots of flower children, but that particular image is very unsettling
12 At the time, I think that was meant to hold some deep, dark significance. Upon writing it, I promptly forgot what that was, but it still sounded pretty good.
13 Cute how this is in keeping with a serial killer, no? Not that I just did a project about them in Psych or anything, and thus may have used some outside knowledge to make a strange point...
14 Because the law is the man, man!
15 And yet, I'm leaving it in the paper. I think it a wise decision.
16 Yep, you caught me. I just compared the NAMBLA would-be to Saint Peter Gibbons
17 Like the kick in the pants I thought of giving him pretty much the entire time. Or maybe that wouldn't surprise him. I'd like to thin one of the Montana (Judy, Molly, or Polly) girls took that initiative at some point
18 Which is kind of strange considering he's wacky as all hell
19 This is the crux of my argument because it literally makes no sense to me that an "outlaw" would want a world where he's not the center of attention. I know I make a case for him as the "hero" type in some really convoluted way, but honestly he reminds me a lot more of The Joker, he's like The Joker, with a heart of gold... or rusted tin, your call
20 I apologize to all the hidden-awesomeness people out there who seem to be very dull at work, I'm sure your kinky sex life totally makes up for the fact that you won't smile at a co-worker on their birthday
21 Also, because he's insane, as evidenced by his "retarded jack o lantern" smile
The Conclusion
As discussed above, there are many facets of this text which support its inclusion into the structure of genres, the cultural era in which it was written, even into its own structure (1). In covering Still Life's structural similarity to the works of Vonnegut, Thompson and Dahl, I sought (2) to explain the way in which Robbins' writing fit into that genre of work by way of his sarcasm, magical realism, and the life he lived which spawned such words. Having equated his work with that of those authors, I continued to explain how all four writers must therefor have created works which were indicative of the culture surrounding each author, thus cementing my argument that structuralism dictates they, and their work, are seamlessly integrated into said culture and are signs of its nature (3).
Continuing, my aim became to define the pack face of the Camel cigarettes as part of the very structure of our princess, Leigh-Cheri. The pack itself was, as Robbins intended, a structural facet of the culture in which Leigh-Sheri lived, it was an object as it was intended to be, although the cigarettes inside never reached their full potential (4). That world, though, was integrated into the princess by being none other than a mirror of her internal self, and a thing cannot exist without its opposite (5). As an analogy, a client-centered therapist mimicking her thoughts and feelings, not directing her but guiding her, repeating her own thoughts more clearly to her that she might understand her internal self more thoroughly, the world in the pack face became as much a part of the core of Leigh-Cheri as any experience she had ever lived, as any memory or scar the world had inflicted on her (6).
Later discussed was the relationship of Wrangle and the princess. Less the lovers themselves and more their relationship and the story of it were the focus of my claim that this novel was as much a love story as anything else, and bore signs of that genre. Further, the work was obviously as much a fairy tale romance as anything the Imagineers © of Disney ever put out (7), and worked itself like a burrowing Tombu fly (8) into the genre, becoming the eyesore of the field, though no less a part of it (9). Having defined it as such a fairy tale romance, I contended that the story was, as well, well-suited into the Northrop Frye theory of myths. An overview of the characteristics which fit Robbins into the same culture as Vonnegut, Thompson, and Dahl sufficiently defines why such a work would be sarcastic, tragic, romantic, and comedic enough to hold a spot in such a category, and thus define itself as having structural similarities to many works within the category (10).
Finally, I dissected what made Wrangle the outlaw he was, and what he was that defines him as the newest kind, the anti-outlaw. In the sense that an anti-hero is still a hero, Wrangle as an anti-outlaw is still an outlaw. In fact, he might be said to be the ultimate outlaw because he strives to create a world in which “outlawism” is not just a way of life, but the way of life. Classified as a fellow of the outlaws of Marvel and DC (11), as well as ancient outlaws like Robin Hood (12), Wrangle is easily identified as an outlaw, but of a strange new fabric.
The very structure of an outlaw is to be “other” where everyone else is a checked box, continuing neatly down the page, and to be Still Life with Woodpecker is not simply to check the final box, but to fill in the subsequent line and every margin. This novel is, of course, a work which shares many key structural elements with more traditional texts, but that is not what makes the work the bandit writing it is. It must be argued that it is related to the pirate works of its time, as well as the most common sappy and fantastical love stories, who don't simply check the most pompously traditional boxes, but in fact headed the creation of the form. The very text of Still Life is outlaw then, it has the characteristics of many text who would simply put their marks into appropriate cells, yet it has defined itself by what it chose to opine about itself on every line, in every available margin, and particularly on the pages headed “Do Not Write On This Page, For Official Use Only.” (13)
1Which would sound way better, had I not just covered that specific point... let's say, 50 times very recently
2 or, Pleaded the reader desperately to agree with me
3 Of course, now that I've said I'm right, I must be. Because if I'm not, existence will shortly undo itself
4 Aw, poor cancer sticks :(
5 thus disproving the rational behind Deconstructionism, good thing I didn't pick that criticism style, huh?
6 Many thanks to Professor Brady for making these arguments not only possible, but actually pretty damn logical
7 I apologize to the Imagineers (c)
8 Really, could I have chosen a better analogy here? I'm fairly impressed with my (opposite of) extensive knowledge of African skin-burrowing parasites. Turns out you can make one surface by holding a coke bottle full of cigarette smoke over the entry point. Cool, no?
9 I love you, Disney, a lot more than I'm making clear in this argument
10 Because there was SO much love in Vonnegut's novels...
11 Bernard Mickey Wrangle is not and never will be anywhere near as heroic as Batman or Wolverine, but I had to find someone brooding and heroic to compare him to. Sorry, Spidey, you just didn't make the cut.
12 Whom I would have discussed further, were it not for the fact that I might have accidentally included cruel Sir Hiss, the snake in the Disney cartoon version.
13 All in all, this final paragraph just stuns me. I have no idea where I came up with that whole "boxes and forms" metaphor, but I think it's awfully impressive that I did. Especially considering the current Tyler Durden Red tint my eyes are sporting
Continuing, my aim became to define the pack face of the Camel cigarettes as part of the very structure of our princess, Leigh-Cheri. The pack itself was, as Robbins intended, a structural facet of the culture in which Leigh-Sheri lived, it was an object as it was intended to be, although the cigarettes inside never reached their full potential (4). That world, though, was integrated into the princess by being none other than a mirror of her internal self, and a thing cannot exist without its opposite (5). As an analogy, a client-centered therapist mimicking her thoughts and feelings, not directing her but guiding her, repeating her own thoughts more clearly to her that she might understand her internal self more thoroughly, the world in the pack face became as much a part of the core of Leigh-Cheri as any experience she had ever lived, as any memory or scar the world had inflicted on her (6).
Later discussed was the relationship of Wrangle and the princess. Less the lovers themselves and more their relationship and the story of it were the focus of my claim that this novel was as much a love story as anything else, and bore signs of that genre. Further, the work was obviously as much a fairy tale romance as anything the Imagineers © of Disney ever put out (7), and worked itself like a burrowing Tombu fly (8) into the genre, becoming the eyesore of the field, though no less a part of it (9). Having defined it as such a fairy tale romance, I contended that the story was, as well, well-suited into the Northrop Frye theory of myths. An overview of the characteristics which fit Robbins into the same culture as Vonnegut, Thompson, and Dahl sufficiently defines why such a work would be sarcastic, tragic, romantic, and comedic enough to hold a spot in such a category, and thus define itself as having structural similarities to many works within the category (10).
Finally, I dissected what made Wrangle the outlaw he was, and what he was that defines him as the newest kind, the anti-outlaw. In the sense that an anti-hero is still a hero, Wrangle as an anti-outlaw is still an outlaw. In fact, he might be said to be the ultimate outlaw because he strives to create a world in which “outlawism” is not just a way of life, but the way of life. Classified as a fellow of the outlaws of Marvel and DC (11), as well as ancient outlaws like Robin Hood (12), Wrangle is easily identified as an outlaw, but of a strange new fabric.
The very structure of an outlaw is to be “other” where everyone else is a checked box, continuing neatly down the page, and to be Still Life with Woodpecker is not simply to check the final box, but to fill in the subsequent line and every margin. This novel is, of course, a work which shares many key structural elements with more traditional texts, but that is not what makes the work the bandit writing it is. It must be argued that it is related to the pirate works of its time, as well as the most common sappy and fantastical love stories, who don't simply check the most pompously traditional boxes, but in fact headed the creation of the form. The very text of Still Life is outlaw then, it has the characteristics of many text who would simply put their marks into appropriate cells, yet it has defined itself by what it chose to opine about itself on every line, in every available margin, and particularly on the pages headed “Do Not Write On This Page, For Official Use Only.” (13)
1Which would sound way better, had I not just covered that specific point... let's say, 50 times very recently
2 or, Pleaded the reader desperately to agree with me
3 Of course, now that I've said I'm right, I must be. Because if I'm not, existence will shortly undo itself
4 Aw, poor cancer sticks :(
5 thus disproving the rational behind Deconstructionism, good thing I didn't pick that criticism style, huh?
6 Many thanks to Professor Brady for making these arguments not only possible, but actually pretty damn logical
7 I apologize to the Imagineers (c)
8 Really, could I have chosen a better analogy here? I'm fairly impressed with my (opposite of) extensive knowledge of African skin-burrowing parasites. Turns out you can make one surface by holding a coke bottle full of cigarette smoke over the entry point. Cool, no?
9 I love you, Disney, a lot more than I'm making clear in this argument
10 Because there was SO much love in Vonnegut's novels...
11 Bernard Mickey Wrangle is not and never will be anywhere near as heroic as Batman or Wolverine, but I had to find someone brooding and heroic to compare him to. Sorry, Spidey, you just didn't make the cut.
12 Whom I would have discussed further, were it not for the fact that I might have accidentally included cruel Sir Hiss, the snake in the Disney cartoon version.
13 All in all, this final paragraph just stuns me. I have no idea where I came up with that whole "boxes and forms" metaphor, but I think it's awfully impressive that I did. Especially considering the current Tyler Durden Red tint my eyes are sporting
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
10/10!
As a preface to the blog I will soon be importing and, er, annotating to appease the voice that's been screaming "DO IT" in the back of my head since fifth grade, when Ms. Crabb permanently scarred my soul with the forceful introduction of Johnny Tremain into my literary canon, I'd like to say that, well...
This(1) all seemed like a good idea at the time.
I'd like to point out to the reader that, however ludicrous it might seem that a literary criticism written in my state, the shared state of all waiting-to-exhale college students, could possibly be of merit, it can be. In fact, it is. Maybe not much, and maybe not too well-founded, but merit no less. I have not written these pages uninformed or unskilled, and I have not offered less to them than I did to my work under the watchful eyes of my English teachers of junior and senior year, to whom I'd like to say thank you. Sincerely, thank you. For making damned sure I did my work, dragging the best out of me, and still letting the iced(2) sarcasm and heated(3) arguments slip in on occasion so I still felt the teensy smidgen of rebellion was present enough to make the work mine. ...and still be an A.
Dear Reader, do not be offended, because this work was not meant for your displeasure. To be perfectly honest, it wasn't much meant for your pleasure either. Still, have fun. Really though, please, don't be offended.
M
1 "This" is the bottle of marvelous Riesling, the days without sleep, the empty stomach, and the lunatic (read the book and that will be a pun) idea of writing a paper and going a bit Jackson Pollack on it with my own personal blend of BAM.
2 Frosted
3 Scorched
This(1) all seemed like a good idea at the time.
I'd like to point out to the reader that, however ludicrous it might seem that a literary criticism written in my state, the shared state of all waiting-to-exhale college students, could possibly be of merit, it can be. In fact, it is. Maybe not much, and maybe not too well-founded, but merit no less. I have not written these pages uninformed or unskilled, and I have not offered less to them than I did to my work under the watchful eyes of my English teachers of junior and senior year, to whom I'd like to say thank you. Sincerely, thank you. For making damned sure I did my work, dragging the best out of me, and still letting the iced(2) sarcasm and heated(3) arguments slip in on occasion so I still felt the teensy smidgen of rebellion was present enough to make the work mine. ...and still be an A.
Dear Reader, do not be offended, because this work was not meant for your displeasure. To be perfectly honest, it wasn't much meant for your pleasure either. Still, have fun. Really though, please, don't be offended.
M
1 "This" is the bottle of marvelous Riesling, the days without sleep, the empty stomach, and the lunatic (read the book and that will be a pun) idea of writing a paper and going a bit Jackson Pollack on it with my own personal blend of BAM.
2 Frosted
3 Scorched
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