The Cake You Can’t Stuff Up

There’s only one way you can mess this cake up, and that’s by putting it into the oven and completely forgetting about it. But actually, I’ve done that too, and it was a little on the dry side but still edible.

Although the recipe requires three eggs, one time I was partway through making the mixture when I realised I had none. So I went ahead and made the cake sans eggs, and it was no different. You’d think that three eggs would make a difference, wouldn’t you? And in many recipes it would. But this cake held together just fine, in true stoic fashion.

This last escapade in the kitchen unfolded in a similar way; this time I had neither lemon nor almond essence, and I know just enough about baking to know not to try ‘peppermint essence’ just because it’s in a similar bottle. So I left that out and… whaddayaknow… still tastes the same to me.

Here it is, the haven’t-yet-failed

SULTANA CAKE

• 2 C sultanas
• 250g butter, chopped in small pieces
• 2 C sugar
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 1/2 tsp lemon essence or almond essence
• 3 C standard plain flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder

Preheat the oven to 160C. (I don’t know why more recipes don’t put this bit first.)

Put sultanas in a pyrex jug, cover with boiling water, then cook in the microwave for 10 minutes. (This is a slight modification of the original recipe, which assumes people only have access to saucepans.)

Drain thoroughly. Add butter. (The butter melts into the sultanas. If not, stick it all in the microwave for a bit longer.)

In a bowl, beat sugar into eggs until well combined. Add sultana mixture and essence. Sift flour and baking powder together. Mix sifted ingredients into fruit mixture. Spoon mixture into a greased and lined 20cm square cake tin. (Actually I’ve tried a lot of different sized tins, and they all work.) Bake at 160C for 1 to 1 1/4 hours or until cake springs back when lightly touched. Leave in tin for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. (I never bother with the wire rack either, but there you go, the proper recipe.)

Here’s the book

Then:

Now:

That, there, is a classic New Zealand the Edmonds Cookery Book.

I used to assume every country had an equivalent cook book. I hadn’t been in London very long when I decided to go to a bookstore and scout out the English equivalent. I went into a WH Smith and said,

“Excuse me, I’m after a cook book with basic English recipes in it, the sort you might find in every household.”

I was told that there is no such thing. I suspect there would have been, before the cook book publishing industry really took off and diversified, but I’m yet to be told what it was.

In contrast, The Edmonds Cookery Book is to be found in almost every New Zealand household, and is full of the sort of recipes your grandmother had memorised: sponges, Russian fudge (do the Russians really eat that much fudge?), tennis cake (who eats cake while playing tennis?), chicken and apple hot-pot, chicken chow-mein (China) – yes, it really says that in brackets, in case you didn’t know.

In New Zealand, you can buy this recipe book from the supermarket, even. You’ll find it in the baking aisle, next to the Edmonds baking powder. I highly recommend this book if your shelf is full of fancy cook books requiring exotic ingredients and entire afternoons in the kitchen. This is cooking at its most basic. The beauty of it is, it doesn’t seem to have been been updated. Ingredients which must’ve been exotic in 1907 are now easily sourced.

Although I’m not going to claim sultana cake as ‘Kiwi Fare’ (I’m sure these recipes mostly come from Britain in the first place), yesterday my husband took a  few slices of Edmonds sultana cake to work and gave a piece to a Kiwi workmate of his.

“Is this the Edmonds sultana cake?” asked Murray From Auckland.

“Er, not sure,” my husband replied, but ran it past me when he got home.

“Yes! Yes! It’s the Edmonds cake!” I said, and all at once I was impressed by Murray’s patriotic tastes, and also reminded of the trials and tribulations of intercultural marriage. How could my own husband not know that this is the Edmonds sultana cake? Do I ever make any other kinds of cake?! Other cakes just don’t work out for me!

Now he knows. If I make anything out of a cook book, it’s an Edmonds. I have several copies of the book, partly because one’s covered in cocoa after a kitchen explosion, and partly in case the book ever goes out of print. I’m future-proofing this household against starvation, you see.

EDIT: I jinxed myself. As it happens, you CAN totally stuff this cake up. I’m not sure how, but I think it’s because I left out two cups of sugar.

Australian vs New Zealand English

the sheep across the road

And yes, it really is ‘versus’. As a New Zealand born immigrant living in Australia, it has got to the point after four an a half years, where I’m making a conscious decision about which word to use in any given circumstance: the New Zealand version, or the Australian version?

In New Zealand, ‘thongs’ are g-strings.

When Aussies say ‘thongs’ they mean flip-flops, but as a Kiwi I would naturally call them ‘jandals’. If I don’t want to produce an amused snigger I must avoid making use of ‘jandals’ (I hear it’s a portmanteau word from ‘Japanese sandal’ – perfectly logical) but I just can’t refer to footwear as ‘thongs’. Those things definitely don’t go on the feet.

‘Duvet’ also sets me apart.

There is a brand of duvet here in Australia whose marketing was so successful that Australians now call their duvets after the brand name: Doona. Against better judgement, I’ve started to call duvets doonas myself, partly because it’s such a satisfying word to say, but mainly because I started saying it long before I immigrated to Australia as a way of taking the piss out of my Australian room-mates in Earls Court. Always be careful when you do that. I knew a guy once who started strutting round in imitation of a particularly annoying swimming coach, and after a while he started doing that strut even when he wasn’t conscious of it.

‘Tramping’ is another word which Australians find comical.

They say ‘hiking’, which to me is no less amusing. When I say ‘tramping’ they must imagine me whacking through dense bush or something. The difference in terminology is indeed indicative of vastly different landscapes between the two countries; in NZ tramping involves a lot of up-hill and down-dale, whereas here in Australia you’re lucky to find any sort of slope which qualifies as a hill let alone a ‘mountain’. I’ve taken to calling Australian mountains ‘speed bumps’. Logically, it makes no sense because Australian mountains are actually pretty high. It’s to do with the vast amount of flat land in comparison, which makes Australian mountains look like pimples on a pumpkin. In New Zealand, the mountains are all around you. That’s what I miss the most about my home landscape: the feeling of being ‘cocooned’ by the topography, in the South Island at least.

SCROGGIN

If a Kiwi makes Australians chuckle by talking about tramping adventures, admitting to taking ‘scroggin’ as sustenance will likely make them double over and drop to the ground dirt. Scroggin is called ‘trail mix’ here in Australia – far more dignified.

SHEEP JOKES

Certain Australians take delight in hassling Kiwis about dirty deeds done with sheep. There are twice as many sheep in Australia, as I’m always keen to point out, but that makes no difference to jokesters. It’s all about the number of sheep in proportion to New Zealand’s relatively low human population, apparently.

Australian jokesters are not particularly interested in updating their knowledge, to learn that New Zealand farmers much prefer dairy farming these days, which has led to a significant decrease in sheep farms in New Zealand. The landscape has changed. A trip to New Zealand won’t necessarily lead you straight to sheep.

(One reason why fewer sheep and more cows is probably a good thing.)

No, that won’t stop the sheep jokes. Instead I must mentally substitute ‘sheep’ for ‘cow’ whenever I’m treated to one. Fortunately that’s not often these days, partly because I sound more and more Australian (I blame the doona), and partly because I live in prime Australian sheep farming country, which means many of my Australian neighbours own sheep of their own to save cutting the lawn paddock. I’ve never been so intimate with sheep since moving to Australia, in fact.

Then there’s ‘pottle’.

In the years we’ve been together my Australian husband has always been dubious that there is any such word as ‘pottle’. He assumed it was part of my ideolect. ie. I made it up myself. In case it is not an internationally recognised thing, a pottle is what Americans call a ‘tub’. You get yoghurt in pottles. Also chutney.

And this week I was vindicated. The local supermarket just started selling New Zealand chutney which – of course – I bought up in bulk because – of course – New Zealand food is far, far superior to Aussie food in every way possible.

Lo, what does it say on the lid? It says, in plain New Zealand English, that chutney comes in a pottle, proving without a shadow of doubt that ‘pottle’ is an actual word, and not just something I dreamed up willy-nilly to suit myself.

Vindicated.

Ewes can all stop laughing now.

 

 

 

The 10pm Question by Kate de Goldi

I love this cover. One big image, interesting texture in the background and handrawn-looking text.

In every junior high school class there is a boy — and if he’s very lucky, he’ll have a partner in crime — who is sensitive, intelligent, nerdy and innocent, even beyond his years. He cares deeply about his family and things affect him.

This is Kate de Goldi’s main character, Frankie Parsons, who asks his mother a deeply troublesome question every night at bedtime. You may know a Frankie yourself. He has a love of words, and has even made up a secret language with his best friend (the language is called Chilun) and he hears a constant ‘rodent voice’ which annoys him constantly by rattling away in his head about his daily worries. If you’re familiar with Kate de Goldi’s (actual) voice from her Radio New Zealand slot on Saturday Morning With Kim Hill, you’ll recognise her sense of humour in Frankie and you’ll also recognise that Frankie shares de Goldi’s love of language and literature.

I highly recommend de Goldi’s children’s book talks — you won’t find a more enthusiastic  or articulate proponent of fiction for younger readers.

The 10pm Question is set in contemporary New Zealand rather than in 1970s North America, but reminds me of a Judy Blume novel. Blume also wrote a number of books which were a snapshot of one developmental stage in a teenager’s life. This novel begins almost as abruptly as it begins; we’re plunged straight in and pulled straight out of Frankie’s life, with the assumption that his life will continue, even after we readers have lost our hole-in-the-wall view of it.

Also, as in many of Judy Blume’s novels, Kate de Goldi’s Frankie Parsons struggles to reconcile family issues (illness — mental illness in this case), with problems in his own world of school and peer relationships.

Unlike many of Blume’s characters, Frankie has not yet reached the stage where he is confronted by his sexuality; the relationship between Frankie and Sydney is a platonic one.

At Frankie’s stage of maturity, he hasn’t quite got past the earwax and bogey stage, though by the end of the book he has started to move away from this and into another phase of his life, where a bf/gf sort of relationship with Sydney may or may not be on his mind.

The 10pm Question has recently been included on an American list of Outstanding International Books for children grades 6-8. And thoroughly deserves to be there.

A Cheap Trip Home

If you come from a big town in a big country (let’s say New York or London), you could spend your entire life reading nothing but books set in your own home town. I’m sure you don’t, but you could.

Certainly, if you come from America, you could spend your entire life reading American books and watching American TV, and although there are regional differences within America, those differences probably don’t constitute any sort of barrier.

Then there are those of us who come from very small countries. Those of us from New Zealand are rarely able to sink into a novel written in exactly our own culture. Instead, we develop the ability to deduce meanings from context. Sometimes I wonder how much harder we work. Sometimes I wonder how well I do.

Oh, there are a number of locally produced novels in my own home town of Christchurch, but not a lifetime’s worth. Only a subset of those are set in contemporary Christchurch, and only a smaller subset are grounded firmly in any particular setting. (I have blogged before about Literary Xenophobia.)

That’s why it is such a joy to read a book set locally. Kate de Goldi’s The 10pm Question is set in Christchurch; not only that, it’s set firmly in North West Christchurch, and I don’t think I’ve ever read anything — ever — in which the main character follows the same route to school that I once followed to school. (Albeit 15 years ago. Albeit, I think de Goldi’s fictional school is made up.)

It was so nice to open the first page and read about a cat eating ‘Go Cat’ rather than ‘Azmira’, or some other foreign brand I’ve had to guess many times from context. Likewise, Frankie Parsons is eating Just Right for breakfast, and I know exactly what Just Right tastes like, because I have eaten it too. I have never eaten Quaker Oats or Go Lean Crunch; and Cheerios are small red-skinned sausages as far as I’m concerned.

Kate de Goldi’s characters speak like people I know. They use the same phrases. I can really imagine the intonation, not just guess at it from what I’ve seen on TV.

When the Christchurch city library crops up, I know exactly what it’s like to sink into a beanbag in the children’s section because I’ve been there myself:

That was the great thing about the library. It was both teeming with people and very private. Everyone was either busy selecting books or returning them or was sprawled in a beanbag, lost in their own reading world.

I’ve been to Sparks in the Park and I remember certain Christchurch personalities:

Transistor man was IH and listened all day to a large old-fashioned transistor radio held on his shoulder.

In fact, it’s as if I’m a character in the book:

He knew the name of every person they passed by and seemed always to have some connection with them, no matter how minute. He knew someone they played Touch with, or who went out with their cousin, or flatted with their sister or had just dumped their brother.

I know the landmarks, sometimes very well:

Between the College of Ed and the Postal Services Centre they went to Havana and sat outside the heater lamps, waiting for hot chocolate.

I don’t know Havana, but Christchurch weather is less suited to al fresco dining than to sitting hunched outside around heater lamps. I know that culture very well.

I know people who grow trees of ‘black boy peaches’. I come from a family who keeps ‘earthquake water bottles and the bird flu bags of rice and pasta’. I know this book. That’s why I enjoyed it so much more than usual. I didn’t have to do any work.

So last week, just as I was absorbed in a Christchurch-centred book, revelling in its familiarity, it was the opposite of serendipity (zemblanity?) to learn that so much of my beautiful home town will never be quite the same again.

Remember the Eighties?

Growing up in small-town New Zealand:

• That stuff on your mother’s dresser was called Oil of Ulay. It came in a glass jar, was filled with a dusty pink liquid and it smelt funny.
• People displayed their full names on letterboxes
• ‘Smoking Permitted’
• Middle aged men wearing shorts with belts and knee-high socks and leather sandals
• Old men with missing limbs, because the old soldiers weren’t dead yet
• Sunshine was brighter
• You had to get off your backside if you wanted to change the channel (Channel One or Channel Two, to be precise).
• Teletext
• Diff’rent Strokes, repeats of Happy Days, and game shows with an old man directing a pretty young woman. No one would’ve believed you if you’d predicted M*A*S*H would still be showing 25 years later.
• If you owned a microwave, a dishwasher and a video cassette recorder, you were definitely rich.
• Few people ever worked out how to programme those $2000VCRs. Those who cracked the code never got out and about enough to make use of its timer.
• Chops were cheaper than chicken
• Milk came in one pint bottles with silver foil lids. A teenage boy jumped off a milk truck each afternoon and left new bottles in the nook of your letterbox.
• Miss Universe played at prime time and it was a big deal.
• Coronation Street, with Deidre wearing a shiny ponytail and huge glasses.
• You rode your bike all around the neighbourhood, climbed tall trees at the park and didn’t once kill yourself.
• You did see a few strange men. You knew they were strange and you kept your distance.
• You don’t remember getting much homework through primary school but you somehow learnt your lessons, eventually.
• Your standard two teacher smoked during class.
• Phones were mounted to walls, there was one per household and if you wanted a long conversation you had to stand right there, in the hall, at the end of a curly cord.
• A 20 minute call to the North Island cost an arm and a leg.
• There was a single Asian boy in your school. He was very slim, drew his sevens funny and nobody noticed he didn’t speak English.
• Your grandmother took you to the circus, where you saw an elephant for the first time.
• You remember a visit to the zoo, and felt sorry for the gorilla, who threw shit against the wall of his cell and fiddled with himself while grunting.
• You went to the annual show, where you admired cows, ate candy floss and had a white-knuckled go on a ferris wheel.
• Even poor people owned caravans at the beach. The poorest ones lived at the beach, all the time.
• Mirrored sunglasses
• Flash-looking cars with pop-up lights
• Fluorescent everything
• Karate kid, Back to the Future, the Garfield movie, Footrot Flats
• Space Invaders and more complicated games which required five different disks to load, and often crashed
• The lone computer at your school, which sat languishing in a corner of the principal’s office because no one really knew how to turn it on
• Addressing all adults as Mr, Miss, Mrs
• ‘Spaceship’ lollies shaped like cigarettes
• Toy guns with ‘bullets’ in little red wheels which smoked when they popped in your brother’s ear
• Frosty Boy, Mr Whippee, Fru-jus and popsicles
• Guy Fawke’s night with sparklers, and bonfires on the beach and scared mutts howling all the livelong night. Fire engines.
• Corner dairies with Coca-Cola signs faded to pink
• Hair gel
• Stubby shorts
• High-waisted skinny jeans
• Leg-warmers
• Jazzercise
• Jump Rope for Heart
• Main Streets with brand-spanking new Kentucky Fried Chickens, and plastic statues of the Colonel darkening their doors
• The town’s first McDonalds and the unexpected horror of gherkins
• Georgie Pie
• Pizza Hut restaurants with roofs shaped like big red hats, where a pizza cost more than a steak and was eaten with knife and fork
• The biggest store in town was called Deka and it smelt of cheap plastic goods.
• Woolworths was a general store, not just a grocery chain
• Glassons sold clothes for middle-aged women
• People rode round on bikes without cycle helmets.
• Rear passenger seat-belts were optional
• Fizzy drinks were a real treat
• Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, Paul Zindel, Robert O’Brien, Robert Cormier, and all that really old stuff you had to read for school.

 

Literary Xenophobia

 

The United States of Australia: pic by kabl1992

 

Sometimes I think it’s just me, and then I read something like this:

G’day

I have joined this and another book forum in search of opinions/analysis on a book called “The Riders” by Tim Winton. … I cannot find reference to the book or to him!! I am amazed. … Now I know Australia is not renownd for literature but someone must have read this book – anyone?

Mosquito

Below, Traycee puts it so well:

Tim Winton is unappreciated outside of this country. I think because what he writes is very Australian.

Whatever I have to say about this issue applies equally to Australian and New Zealand literature, and I suspect it applies to South African literature too.

Some Northern Hemisphere readers don’t want to read about books which are distinctively Australian. I come to this conclusion after

1. Belonging to a writing group made up almost entirely of British and American writers.

2. Submitting work to British publications and having my Australasian-isms edited out for the largely British audience. (I have even been told that ‘Australasian’ is not a widely understood word, with the implication that it is not an accepted word, and that I should therefore change it.)

Margo Lanagan has noticed the same thing and explained in this interview why she got sick of it all and switched to speculative fiction:

Are the marketing restraints any different from the US or UK?

The marketing restraints are all to do with a really limited population (and the limited publishing budgets that go with that), plus (excuse me here, Trent) various kinds of xenophobia that exist in both those countries. US and UK readers are really not very interested in a real-life story that’s set in Australia. Britons are deeply patronising towards us, and Americans, well, you’re a bit mystified — and while you’ll be more than welcoming to an Australian in person, generally speaking you find it hard to make sense of a lot of things that appear in Australian books, like fauna, upside down seasons and turns of phrase!

The main reason I started considering fantasy was because the Australian market is so small that a person is very unlikely to make enough money to live on from writing unless she writes in an international genre. And as crime and romance don’t appeal, that left SF, fantasy and horror! Then there’s the added benefit that you can bung in any old weird Australian animal and mess about with the seasons and the language all you like, and if you call it fantasy, the xenophobia falls away.

Beautifully put.

Tim Winton deals with it differently, refusing to be swayed by anyone else’s expectations:

Well, the fact is, I am an Australian, but it’s not something I think about much, to be honest. Certainly not when I’m writing. I couldn’t imagine being self-consciously Australian. Neither can I understand the studied efforts of others to be ‘cosmopolitan’, whatever that might finally mean. I live and work in the country and the region I was born in. [...] I write about Australians. My work is bound to reflect attitudes and understandings that are particularly antipodean. And foreign readers say that the language is often peculiar. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so blasé about it. Speaking and writing in English have become so homogenized, so ironed flat by American TV and net-speak that I should be grateful for shades of difference, a few remnant nuances that might distinguish communities and their stories. And I’m probably forgetting the many times that American and British editors have done their best to make my language ‘conform’. This takes some mulish resisting. I’m no longer required to provide a glossary with each manuscript for my fellow English speakers, which is a victory of sorts.

*

I suppose this very issue is something I have to live with, as a person from a small part of the world. But Brits and North Americans should remember:

Down here, we grew up in an upside-down culture. Whenever we read your books, we have to deal with the fact that school can mean both school AND university and that it starts at this time of the year, not late Feb/early Jan.

Down here, we must deal with the fact that you lot have squirrels and chipmunks, even though we’ve never seen either one. So you lot can put up with the odd possum.

We deal with the fact that Christmas is in winter, not in summer; that ‘bathrooms’ and ‘WCs’ are what normal people call ‘toilets’, that you Americans have things called ‘pez dispensers’ and ‘jelly’ inside your bread, not jam, and that you Brits have Cheesy Wotsits and pork scratchings, which people, apparently, eat. You call beers ‘bitter’ and we know this, probably from TV, yet if we order a ‘lemon lime and bitter’ in a British pub, well, good luck to us.

Nobody tells us Australians all these things. We have worked them out from context, from lives spent immersed in your culture.

Consider this a special note to editors and people in writing groups: If you can know the meaning from context, don’t expect us to change our words.

The problem may in fact be with the reader, unused to the mental exercise of deduction.

Here’s a sad commentary on this whole topic. I wonder how the Canadians feel about this.

Here’s a perspective from a Kiwi writer of thrillers – Cat Connor – and how she deals with reactions to this fact.

Late At Night by Katherine Mansfield

LATE AT NIGHT TEXT (doc)

LATE AT NIGHT ANNOTATED (doc)

This sketch is straight dramatic monologue. Virginia feels she is getting on in years and has not yet found the love of her life. She sits in front of the fire and moans about it. She sent a pair of socks to a man who thinks she knitted them. She interprets this as arrogance; she’s not about to hand-knit a pair of socks for a man she hardly knows.

This may be regarded as one of Mansfield’s experiments, altering point of view. But ultimately she wrote her most polished stories in the usual first and third person, suggesting she wasn’t happy with the results. One thing is clear: Mansfield was very aware of POV as a device in fiction.

The Woman At The Store by Katherine Mansfield

THE WOMAN AT THE STORE TEXT (doc)

THE WOMAN AT THE STORE ANNOTATED (doc)

*

This is one of Mansfield’s earliest stories, written for the magazine Rhythm. The aesthetic goal of this magazine was pity, brutality and a carefully wrought plot with adequate foreshadowing. It is now thought that this story is far from Mansfield’s best work. The foreshadowing is more like ‘telegraphing’ – far too blatant.

The Story

Three people make a journey on horseback through the rough New Zealand country. They come across a house where a woman is living with her daughter. They stop for the night. The brother, Jo, is starved for female company. Despite the haggard appearance of the woman, he makes arrangements to spend the night with her. The daughter is sent to sleep in the store with the narrator and her husband. Later, the daughter reveals through a drawing that the mother has killed her husband. The next morning the narrator and Jim leave. Jo, left behind, shouts to them that he will catch up.

Narration

Much has been said about the ‘naturalistic technique’. Naturalistic details are used to functional advantage. In its favour, the syntax and word choice (especially the strong verbs) create an oppressive atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the narrator intrudes, and breaks the spell. Details are not allowed to speak for themselves.

Her First Ball by Katherine Mansfield

Leila has turned 18, so must now attend balls in order to find a husband. Her city cousins, The Sheridans, introduce Leila to this exciting, dream-like world.

HER FIRST BALL TEXT (pdf, with line numbering)

HER FIRST BALL ANNOTATED (pdf)

HER FIRST BALL ANNOTATED (doc)

Her First Ball Close Reading Test (doc)

photo by itspaulkelly (flickr, creative commons)

The Fly by Katherine Mansfield

THE FLY TEXT (PDF, with line numbers)

THE FLY TEXT (doc)

THE FLY ANNOTATED (PDF)

THE FLY ANNOTATED (doc, feel free to modify)

The Story

The reader is introduced to a man called only ‘The Boss’, watches him entertain a former employee (Old Woodifield), hears Old Woodifield mention the Boss’ dead son, then watches the boss torture and kill a fly.

Narration

This story is typical of Mansfield’s story-telling technique: The reader is moved through a series of incidents, carried along with the action. It is no more than action until the reader discovers causal relationships.  Honeymoon, The Voyage and Prelude make use of the same narrative technique. Before long, the reader begins to notice certain positionings that form repetitive patterns that  suggest  possible relationships:

Character

• Mr Woodifield is consistently described as a baby even though he is aged and sick.
• Mr Woodifield is consistently contrasted with the Boss, five years older, but still rosy and strong.
• The Boss is immensely proud of all his possessions, most of them recently obtained. His geniality is an expression of his feelings of superiority.
• Mr Woodifield’s perfectly normal response to his own dead son is set next to the Boss’ strange detachment.
• After Mr Woodifield leaves, readers are brought inside the mind of the Boss as he reflects on his son and relationship with him. What the boss says is in strange contrast to what he appears to be. He says that life had no other meaning except for his son and that when he heard of his son’s death 6 years ago, he had left his office ‘a broken man, with his life in ruins’. But the reader sees he does not look like a broken man and his life does not appear to be in ruins at all.

Imagery

The Fly

When the Boss begins to play with the fly, birth imagery appears and readers remembers that Woodifield was described as a baby. As the fly struggles to recover from the persistent blobs of ink the boss drops on him, readers understand that the fly is a symbol for man and struggle is man’s struggle.

Flys also ‘fly’. They can soar through the heavens, escaping earth-bound reality. But eventually flies die too. There is the ordinary lifecycle: birth, youth, old age, death. There is struggle. But along with the struggle there are moments of flight, desires, hopes, aspirations.

The Boss

What role does the Boss play? He appears to be god, giving life and taking it away. This is typical behaviour for him. The Boss is given no name – he is known simply as ‘Boss’ – authority, father figure to both Woodifield and Macey. He gives a little drop of whiskey to Woodifield, insisting it wouldn’t hurt a child, even though alcohol is forbidden to the old man. Did the Boss drop similar metaphorical blobs of ink on his son? Perhaps. The Boss had insisted that the son follow in his footsteps, thereby providing meaning for his own life.

The Boss has hoped to accomplish immortality by living through his son but a greater power than him has dropped a blob of ink on the son and on the Boss. Realising the son’s death for the first time, the Boss acts out a symbolic drama, assuming the role of God.

The Final Sentence

The story comes together with the revelation in the last sentence:

‘For the life of him [the Boss], he could not remember.’

The words ‘for the life of him’ are chosen carefully. At this moment he has an intimate though subconscious knowledge of his own mortality. For the reader, things are set back in balance.

photo by jpctalbot (flickr, creative commons)

For more extended analysis see enotes.