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| Richard Ford Wins 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence |
In fact, this time through, I went straight to the last line: "Would you think he was anybody like you?"
But before talking about why, I need to mention Alice Munro, who just won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. This wonderful short story author says that she when she reads stories, she dips in and out, entering one way, leaving another, entering again. Originally, she explained this idea in an often-quoted essay: "A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you."
When Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Richard Ford was quoted as saying, "I’m absolutely ecstatic that Alice won; nobody should win if she doesn’t."
Back to Munro's ideas on reading. In an interview with the Atlantic Monthly, she expanded on her idea of the short story as a house: "I thought about the way that I read, which, as I said in that essay is going into the story anywhere. I can tell in a couple of sentences how I feel about a story. Then, I go on reading, and I read frontwards, backwards, all over. It is just like being enclosed in the story and seeing things outside the story in a different way—through the windows of that house. And it's not at all like following a path to see what happens. Quite often, I know what happens as soon as I start reading it. Maybe not the twists the plot will take, but the real story."
Wherever you first started reading "Rock Springs," what happened? Did you feel anything? Did you notice that someone was going on a journey? Did you notice that the first person point of view forced you to identify with a narrator who is, I'll wager, nothing like you? By the end, did you, in Munro's words, see "how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows"? And did "you, the visitor, the reader," become "altered as well by being in this enclosed space"?
There is something that can't be understood about the real story until you get to the change in point of view at the end. When Earl addresses us, the reader, I hear the real challenge: Can we identify and empathize with others' pain? How much can we understand about ourselves by reading fiction? How much can we be altered by writing, reading, and thinking about stories?
Typically, magicians don't ask us to empathize, not really. They want us to marvel, to be amazed. Ford reminds me that literary art is an old, deep magic that goes so much further than what most of us can manage, almost like what might resurrect us from the dead. And by dead I mean stunned, stuck, immobile, pitiless, merciless. Not to go all Aslan on you, but I think that experiencing a new point of view can bring us back to life.
The character of Earl in “Rock Springs” is a chameleon. He pretends to be the doctor whose car he stole and drives in with his family. He’s more cypher than an actual person. And because of that, the last paragraph had no punch for me. Why should I care about a thief who has admitted that he will keep on thieving? And when he asks the reader, “what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn?” Earl, and by extension Richard Ford, are being coy because the obvious answer is that it looks like someone is trying to steal a car. But Ford tries to make Earl seem deeper by waxing poetic about how even criminals have their own problems. But that alone doesn’t make me sympathetic to him. I as a reader know what he’s going to do, steal more cars and who knows what else. Ford and other writers try to make it seem like these people have no agency to their actions. Yeah, life sucks but that doesn’t give you the moral right to be a criminal. But instead, they poorly justify their characters’ criminal lifestyle by pointing at them and saying, “feel bad for them” and when you ask them why, they would respond, “because you should”. So no, I didn’t feel bad for a bad person who has done nothing to earn my sympathy.
ReplyDeleteI can't count how many times I have read "Rock Springs" and each time I read, I go through a similar process as Catherine. I just want to dive right into the trailer home, when Little Tyler scratches the TV screen, leaving a permanent mark for the viewer to see. That is basically what this story does to me after I read it. I have an altered view of the world. It makes me question myself and how I look at the other people around me. To answer Earl's (and thereby Ford's) question at the end, I don't think I would automatically assume that the person was trying to steal a car. The final question rouses us as readers into a space completely outside of the story, so I find it best to ponder on this question as if it is not Earl posing the question. I have actually noticed that I will often steal glances and look inside of cars in parking lots to observe what people have, to see what it might say about them. Then again I am a bit strange. Anyways, this final question, as Catherine put it, brings us back to life, throws our thoughts outside of the framework of "Rock Springs" and back into our own lives.
ReplyDeleteSomething new I noticed this time around reading was that I really despise Edna. I understand she has her own problems, but I think I really don't like her because however much the Earl wants to love her, she is always going to want more than anyone person can provide her. I mean the woman almost throws a hissy fit when Earl answers his daughter before her.
Well, I disagree with Dylan. I feel sympathy for these characters because they feed into my pathos. The reason? These characters are written to appeal as real characters who are both thieve-like and empathetic. You could argue that this is a copout, but there are other indications of how this thief also has good qualities. The questions at the end, "from" the person who was looking through the window, all pertain to his life. Yes, he is a father, and even though he is a shitty father, he also is doing the best he can. He defends his daughter to his lover, and takes care of them despite how poorly he acts. So, I do believe that Ford is justified in trying to make us sympathetic.
ReplyDelete"Rock Springs" is the more interesting story out of these two, because none of the story's problems are actually solved or come to a satisfying conclusion. We don't find out what happens to the car, whether Earl steals a new one, whether he makes it to Florida, or if he ultimately gets caught. We don't even really know much about Edna and Earl's life. Because we've been talking about structure, I thought about what this meant for the plot. The story starts out with exposition about their plan to drive to Florida, then the oil light comes on, and they have to somehow make it to the nearest town in a stolen car before it breaks down. Then comes the story about the monkey which Edna tells. They break down a few miles out and Earl goes to the trailer park to call a cab, meets the woman in the trailer and then the cab comes and they go to the hotel. It all seems like a very simple plot written out like that, nothing all that complicated or even interesting. It makes me think about the final line of the story. If we were looking at these events without knowing the context of any of it, that these people aren't really husband and wife, that they're criminals who stole a car and plan to steal more to get to Florida, would we even think anything of it? Looking at Edna without knowing the monkey story, what would someone think of her? It's very intense to think about stepping outside of our bodies, which I think is the whole point of fiction anyway.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read the works by Richard Ford, I found them to be quite cryptic, or at least ambiguous and open, especially when it comes to Rock Springs. I like how Richard Ford doesn't really let you know 100% what's really going on in the story, or the outcomes of some of the choices and actions that a character makes. It doesn't really say that Earl is a bad guy or not, it's up to you to find that out based on what YOU read. He pretty much allows the reader to judge the characters, like Earl and Edna, by placing them into situations that both accentuate their bad sides and their good sides. Because of this, I could see that different people could read a completely different story than the next. I didn't really like the fact that Ford DID come out and blatantly ask the reader what they think in a series of questions, and how they view the character. I didn't like that he pretty much broke the fourth wall (Well in a literary sense) as it pulled me away from the reading. I do respect it though as it is a different and daring thing to do.
ReplyDeleteRichard Ford has honed the ability to create the kind of characters I have always wanted to create. He gives the reader a character who is on the wrong side of the law and shows the reader that just because Earl has made some poor choices that doesn't make him a terrible person all around. He is a decent father to his daughter, a good partner to Edna, and wasn't ever abusive towards his ex-wife. He even states that he avoids violence.
ReplyDeleteFord gives you these three dimensional people and just goes "what do you think?"
While I may not have fallen head over heels for these stories I do admire Ford's ability to create the kind of characters he does.
In "Rock Springs" we’re left with a cliff-hanger as an ending, without any follow up. As Bre posted, none of the story's problems are actually solved or come to a satisfying conclusion". I completely agree with that, because the reader doesn’t know what happens with the stolen car, with Terrel and the woman, if they steal a car to get back on track to Florida, where Edna ends up, if they actually do get to Florida, and whether Earl finds that "new beginning" he’s searching for. There’s no succeeding chapter for us to follow here, nothing to give us that information this piece is lacking that I feel I need as a reader. One could argue that he isn’t giving up in the end and that it is something beautiful in its ambiguity for authors to utilize as an ending, and I’m guilty of it myself, but as a reader the story it just ends without a real ending. When the story stops, there’s all of these questions that are more rhetorical and philosophical than can be answered in this onslaught of what must the reader is given to believe must have been going through Earl’s head, and then it’s over leaving the reader confused and emotionally paralyzed.
ReplyDeleteThe point Christine brings up with being able to sympathize with criminals reminds me of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ where John Gay uses a leveling technique to make the thieves have the upmost integrity, and the upper-class have no sense of trustworthiness. However, the reader is still forced to sympathize with the unfairness presented to the thieves throughout the play, even though they are in fact thieves. Here Earl is trying to make everything right and do the best that he can to give them all a better second-go at life which is something anyone could find admirable although he hasn’t left his criminal ways in the past.
I found the characters of "Rock Springs" so interesting. They just seemed so incredibly real to me. Earl actually reminds me of a character in a movie, and for the life of me I can't remember the name of it. But it was about a man who wanted to make money and be better than he was so he started to make fake paychecks from an airline and dressed like a pilot and was very successful until people found out he was a fake. Earl reminds me of that other character because he too seems to have this strong desire to make something of himself, and just isn't doing it in the way that most of us would. Despite his criminal behavior, he seems to genuinely care for the people around him, no matter how they are treating him. His character is the most interesting to me because of this sort of contradiction. He's a criminal, yet when the aggressive ex-boyfriend comes he tells us that he just talks to him to calm him down rather than acting aggressive back at him. Edna also feels real to me, because I can sort of identify with her by her changes of attitude, though I'd like to think that mine aren't quite so bad. She is so hopeful in some moments, but when something bad happens she almost gives up and becomes angry about it, as if someone were intentionally trying to ruin her day/life. When she is given a chance out of it though, she becomes almost somber. It's like Earl gave her a chance to get away from everything in her life that was troubling her. I could honestly go on and on about these characters, because even the side ones (like the black woman in the trailer) were so interesting to me. It felt like each of them were someone I knew, and I could almost overlook the bad things they were doing because Earl seemed so caring and Edna seemed like she just desperate to escape from something, which is probably the connecting factor between everyone in this story. Everyone wants to escape from something.
ReplyDeleteSorry for the late response! Ford's characterization in both of his pieces really inspired me! He mastered the art of the "antihero" really well, and brought the reader to understand his or her motives without showing any signs of distrust. As a writer who sometimes drifts towards melodrama, I really admire the fact that Ford can create these surreal situations but not even inch close to " movie writing". The character of Early really inspired me. We understand his motives to help out his family and not once did I think he was doing wrong- even though what he was doing was clearly illegal. He as well as the rest of the characters featured by Ford really do give off that believable set of motives. There is no action that feels unnecessary or unbelievable. Everything is done with a purpose, and whether that purpose is right or wrong, it is never done out of place.
ReplyDeleteEarl is the unconventional bad guy -- he's a thief with a reputation worse than anything he has actually ever done, and he's only trying to find dry ground. What makes Earl so believable are his motives; he only wants to have a good, normal life and when he doesn't find it in one place, he steals a new car, hoping that maybe he'll end up as well off as its previous owner. The last few lines of the story really got to me, because here is Earl, a guy with a history of making what are objectively bad choices, looking at this family vehicle with a whole life practically packed inside. He sees how easy it would be to just drive away with all of the things he wishes he had for a family he wishes he had. His girlfriend who he loves has left him, but he can't stop her because he too is accustomed to leaving when he feels pressure to go, so how can he tell her otherwise? Earl is looking to find the proverbial gold mine in his own life, but he can only look at the hazy image in the distance that appears closer than it actually is. Good people do bad things all the time -- what makes Earl any better or worse?
ReplyDeleteI really like the way that Richard Ford creates characters who are bad guys in a superficial sense, however the way that he brings us into their lives makes them lovable and the good guys in our eyes. At first I kind of pictured Earl as the Johnny Depp from the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, just by how he was driving through the dessert and a shady character. Of course, like I said, that was the very superficial interpretation. As I read, I felt as though these characters became more real, especially the way that Earl cares for his daughter and "wife." That dose of humanity and love showed me that even though he commits crimes and fraud he is still a good guy. I also found this story had an interesting ending. The ending where he is down in the parking lot looking at the cars made me wonder if he was going to leave his "wife" and child behind. I think what gave me that feeling was the way that the wife was so critical of him and how she implied that he was shallow. The way that she treated him like this, pointing out very real character flaws that he had, made me think that perhaps in anger he would exhibit just those flaws as a sort of "Fuck you." I can't explain why he would do that, it's just something that I notice that people do sometimes. Anyway, as he was looking into the car at the toys on the seat and the luggage, I kept expecting him to give up this dream of being a family together and happy, that he was longing so much for, and leave in a car without any toys or luggage, just and empty one, so that he could be empty.
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