the wide net summary

Beginning as a folktale of the barely possible innocence of a perennial boy with a cow-lick, at a loss and turning in circles, the story right in the middle changes skin, and the boy and the narrative miraculously transform themselves into a one-of-a-kind human triumph. Eudora Welty is comically playing on the popular refrain that such a collection of rural men and boys could be found only in the Deep South. 30But these Georgia tales were of the kind that Eudora Welty describes as old and complete in Asphodel, one of the short stories in The Wide Net. 22There is, however, a simpler explanation, of the South to be sure, but leaving the story still uncomplicated by history. I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. Life on the Mississippi. My mother had met her and gave me the names of several people who had been her friends. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. Right after he got back, though, some of his old friends met him at a local tavern and asked him if it were true that he had run away from the fight. 178). The Malones are like horses, and the Doyles are never without their dogs. 17She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? My grandfather, as I will discuss later on, was one of the reasons I had trouble with the grand southern myths I discovered at the university. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. Hazels name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. The absence of history serves the same purpose, I believe, as the excessive abundance of symbol and myth the reader must negotiate before setting his sights on the inner spirit William Wallace possesses to exist all by himself. For much of the story at least, William Wallace and the other characters are closer to the simple stock figures of song and legend than they are to men and women in the real world. Print. The strongest proof of identity is the capacity to change, to slip from one role to another if necessary, to pass through the modes of being that nature and time demand, but always to remain at one with oneself. 44Here is the same confused hodgepodge of myth and fable we can find in The Wide Net. They are the wonderful fictions out of which an adult life finally emerges, but never forgets. Both his grandfather and his father were struck by lightning. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in Time Magazine. What was missing in this southern town was southern history, or at least any striking display of history. The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is beginning to dawn on him. The web value rate of bigpicture.net is 49,209 USD. The river never seems the same, yet even when William Wallace forgets its name, its ageless identity is never in question: The winding river looked old sometimes, when it ran wrinkled and deep under high banks where the roots of trees hung down, and sometimes it seemed to be only a young creek, shining with the colors of wildflowers (Welty. Already a member? The Wide Net. Later in the story a violent storm with a blast of wind covers the entire search party with wet leaves. Foots was in charge. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the C got through the L in a Coca-Cola sign (Welty, Collected Stories 171). And I found a note to myself slipped in the pages of my old single volume edition of the collection relating Eudora Weltys initial concept of writing a fictional history of the Old Natchez Trace. They created a protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol ( HTTP ), which standardized communication between servers and clients. Even as I write, the memories come flooding, but two or three should be enough to make my case. May 1942 issue Download PDF From the Archive. I should make it clear it was not the quality of the scholarship in what I read that puzzled me, but my consternation in not finding anything of my own life in the popular myths contained in the books. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). He is holding fast to a little green ribbon of plant, root and all (Welty. Nature is the wide-open playground of both good and evil, and it is best to be wary when the thunder roars. William Wallace Jamieson, the first words of the story, and a name I will return to, is a young man who has been married to his wife, Hazel, for a year. Old Doc reminds me of the old men in another great modern folk story, The Weavers Grave, by the Irish writer Seumas OKelly. Downtown black and white mingled and spoke with each other every day. When they reach the river Old Doc remarks that the world has been turned to gold by the autumn sun: today, in October sun, its all goldsky and tree and water. When William Wallace praises Hazels intelligence, Virgil agrees: Shes a lot smarter than her cousins in Beulah Edna Earle never did get to be what youd call a heavy thinker. An Edna Earle is the narrator of Weltys novella, . He goes inside and there is Hazel! When he wakes up he affirms his new sense of power and potency by tying a catfish to his belt and launching into a wild Dionysian dance. This is the advantage of relying on memory rather than myth when digging back for the truth. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in. Sweet-gum red, hickory yellow, dogwood red, sycamore yellow. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. Still, as Old Doc exclaims to William: Everybody knows Pearl River is named the Pearl River (Welty, Collected Stories 176). They were later given to the University of Florida. They marvel over the snake, but seem to feel satisfied by their feast. They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. Right after he got back, though, some of his old friends met him at a local tavern and asked him if it were true that he had run away from the fight. Us is the fishes (Welty, Collected Stories 183). His name was Patrick Duval. He walked on. Hazel is pregnant, and William is baffled by her changing attitude (she would not speak and her eyes glowed). They were even stronger reasons to question the myths of the South I later encountered. It was written forty years after The Wide Net but I was gratified to find her speak of myth and memory in a way that confirmed what I thought I had found in the story. Me and Benz tight as a pair of shoes. The whole shed shook with laughter, given the reference to his feet, and from that day on I was home free and part of the gang. Both his grandfather and his father were struck by lightning. , one of Eudora Weltys favorite books, Twain makes the outrageous, though irresistible, claim that Scott and his historical romances helped cause the Civil War by promoting a mythical vision of history, and by shaping the southern character: It was Sir Walter Scott that made every gentleman in the South a Major or Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making the southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible (266). Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. Hazel wands were traditionally used as dowsing rods. . The Great Wide Sea (2008), a novel by M. H. Herlong, follows sixteen-year-old Ben Byron, who mourns the loss of his mother with his younger brothers, Gerry and Dylan, while spending a year at sea.As Ben processes his grief, he clashes with his father, until he mysteriously vanishes from the boat one morning. eNotes.com Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of The Wide Net and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South. Still, as Old Doc exclaims to William: Everybody knows Pearl River is named the Pearl River (Welty. Salesforce has a wide range of tools that can be integrated with it to boost productivity. 1 Robbie is right to be frightened. Sir Walter Scott celebrated both William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charles, the latter in the most popular series of historical novels ever written, the Waverly novels. But there is an even better reason not to insist too much on the historical significance of names in The Wide Net. Names are chosen for us, not the other way around, and The Wide Net insists upon individual choice as the primary measure of character. 1. Einstein activity capture is a powerful productivity-boosting tool that is integrated with Salesforce. Robert Fitzgerald. By Alexa's traffic estimates bigpicture.net placed at 30,366 position over the world, while the largest amount of its visitors comes from India, where it takes 35,646 place. He was a black deputy who had saved Hurstons letters and manuscripts from a fire after her death. This is the advantage of relying on memory rather than myth when digging back for the truth. I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. An Edna Earle is the narrator of Weltys novella The Ponder Heart. Myth may help shape an identity, but memory is the single vital source of selfhood, and the key, I believe, to William Wallace and The Wide Net. Despite the help of the search party, the willingness of the community to lend a hand, William Wallace must forget the outside world before he plunges into the inner, and by so doing, he recovers Hazel, who as Old Doc knows, has been there all the time. There seemed to be a force in the family that drove it to act or speak out, with or without the common consensus. The second is the date of The roses needed a lot of water. Even though there is no southern history in the story, surely his name is steeped in historical associations. When he returned to his house, he found Hazel was not there, and she'd left a note saying that she had gone to drown herself in the river and that he'd be sorry for his behavior. To begin with, the southern world I grew up in, a small coastal town in Florida in the years after WWII, was not all that representative of the South. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. I benefited from these books as much as anyone. She had just published a masterpiece of modern realism in which dream and the inner world are as vividly brought to life as the outside, but this is an affirmation of the living human mind, not an evasion. This blend of domestic realism with mythology and ancient fertility tales is characteristic of the entire collection, in which ordinary people are somehow connected to the myths of other cultures. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. He lets the little infant plant fall free, and from now on the search is over. They talked sometimes about a black giant named Foots. Physically, he was everything the legend had promised. (qtd. A more distant past was hidden behind the Spanish place names and the faces of the Seminole Indians who worked as cowboys on the ranches. N 102 Library of America Series. She is in her early twenties (an age we might give to William Wallace) when she discovers the gift of memory, and in her seventies when she confirms it: Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and livesthe old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead (Welty. When I was invited to speak about the myth of the South, the thought of Weltys The Wide Net, came to my mind in a flash. We may take this with a grain of salt, but the fascination with Scottish heroes in the South would have made the name of William Wallace a common choice. When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the King of Snakes, William Wallace stares him down. 4Rereading The Wide Net brought many of these memories back to mind, and it brought back to mind too my dismay in Chapel Hill at fitting them into a theory of myth, or even at weaving them into a common pattern of southern identity. What impressed me most was the incongruity of seeing such a stark inscription on a Baptist tombstone. New York: Signet Classics, 1961. The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. What I want to single out is not his place in the community, which was central, but his difference from most of the adult white men I knew and observed. Physically, he was everything the legend had promised. Ben Forkner, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me),Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 67|Autumn 2016, mis en ligne le 01 dcembre 2018, consult le 02 mars 2023. The Malones are indistinguishable from each other, and so are the Doyles. The shock will take a little time to absorb, but he has now found himself, and is beginning to embrace his new role as a father. And finally, on the last page, memory is evoked again, this time in words to be engraved in stone: Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memorythe individual human memory. The river never seems the same, yet even when William Wallace forgets its name, its ageless identity is never in question: The winding river looked old sometimes, when it ran wrinkled and deep under high banks where the roots of trees hung down, and sometimes it seemed to be only a young creek, shining with the colors of wildflowers (Welty, Collected Stories 178). There I was shocked to learn I may have been born into a myth, despite myself. . Now us got scales, Sam cried out. As the men and boys work together to drag the river, they turn up a bunch of stuff: some fish, a great number of shoes, eels, alligators, and so on. Then he announced Boys, look right here, the Judge is his granddaddy. In the title story, a man quarrels with his pregnant wife, leaves the house, and descends into a mysterious underwater kingdom where he meets "The King of the Snakes," who forces him to confront the darker mysteries of nature. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Belong together in the story still uncomplicated by history to learn I may have been born a! Are indistinguishable from each other, and William is baffled by her changing attitude ( she not... Historical associations his rocking chair old Doc exclaims to William: Everybody knows Pearl River named. Giant named Foots downtown black and white mingled and spoke with each,... 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