the wide net summary

Knowing Eudora Weltys love of Ireland and the Irish, the echo is surely deliberate. and I believe I could find stories, old ones & new ones, and beliefs and songs and violent events all over the place to show what the life here is, to my belief Think of all the people who would be in my bookwonderful Indians to start with, and the Indian tales are beautiful and dramatic and very touching some of themand Aaron Burr & Blennerhassett, and Lafayette, and Audubon, and Jefferson Davis, and the bandits and Lafitte the pirate, and all kinds of remarkable people. The never forgetting is another gift of becoming oneself, the power of memory. She could have easily searched out one of the old Backus crowd willing to share the memory of Beanies role in the funeral and the missing headstone. Failed rebellions are choice makers of myths, as another failed rebellion was to prove a century later. It has been a delightful day of adventure on the river for the Malones, the Doyles, and the others (including the reader), but the wide net (a sort of local myth itself) has caught nothing, except a haul of fish, a big eel, old shoes, the baby alligator, and a string of beads. Of course these signs and symbols enrich the story at the same time they divert William Wallace from his search. His grandfather had been branded by the devil in a storm, Lightnin drawed a pitchfork right on our grandpappys cheek, stayed till he died (Welty. He towered over the others, who were all big and tough. At least this is true of the first half of The Wide Net. The second half is a different matter entirely and herein lies one of the genial transformations that The Wide Net performs as naturally and as completely as one season turns into another. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river. 16What is missing in my account of rereading the story is my misremembering the total absence of southern history, a conspicuous absence. When William dives into the river, and emerges transformed, the myth-minded reader may then think once more of the. Once William and Virgil have gathered everyone together, they take the wide net and all set out walking down the Old Natchez Trace. If we must look for hidden meanings, perhaps the symbolical would be a better avenue to explore than the historical. But there were no old plantations or slave quarters, and no signs to mark the battles of the Civil War since there had been no battles. He told me that my grandfather had told him he had left Georgia to come to Florida because he hated the way blacks were treated. What I remember most about growing up was the joy of being outside for most of the day in a sort of tropical paradise. In fact, it is not a baptism at all. Rereading 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. Its so sad that the culture that could have put these good hearted folks bare-feet in the creek was long ago swallowed up by progress. Subscribe for more videos like this: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=92YplusWhen Eudora Welty read at 92Y on April 22, 1985, it had been 32 y. But more than anything, in rereading the story I realized that my own fading or forgotten memories about growing up in the South had somehow dictated my choice, and that the mythic failures, or inadequacies, of The Wide Net to match the intractable selfhood of the living individual clearly harmonized with my own experience. Even though there is no southern history in the story, surely his name is steeped in historical associations. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by defying convention, but I do not think his prestige in the white community was ever at risk. Life on the Mississippi. The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. He did not smoke the cigar, he chewed it, and as a boy it was best to stay on his windward side. The shifting from one realm to another is a constant possibility. Aeneas needs the golden bough to allow him to safely travel through the underworld to find his father. Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts. 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. What touched me more, and what I remember best now, were the lives around me while growing up. 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. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in. 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. . 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. 2On rereading the story I soon realized that my instincts had not failed me completely. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume Our Wonder World on her sixth or seventh birthday: There were the fairy talesGrimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of Pilgrims Progress and a long piece of Gulliver. And, to tell the truth, the details are daunting, especially as we are led down the old Natchez Trace towards the Pearl River, deeper and deeper into southern river country, a vast cradle of natural wonder that teems with vitality and mystery. In my town there were cattle ranches and orange groves to the west, and a small fleet of shrimping boats chugging back and forth on the Indian River to and from the Atlantic. The thing about this part of the country in the great days is that people like Aaron Burr, J.J. Audubon, Lorenzo Dow, and goodness knows who, were as thick as blackbirds in the pie, and once the pie is opened, they are going to begin to sing (qtd. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. "The Wide Net - Summary" eNotes Publishing But Hazel is no rabbit as Virgil makes clear: Anybody can freeze a. , that wants to he says, and promptly chases the rabbit away: Was you out catching cotton-tails, or was you out catching your wife? (Welty. His name was Patrick Duval. Print. 12Once William and Virgil have gathered everyone together, they take the wide net and all set out walking down the Old Natchez Trace. I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. It was perfect for riding out on the sand dunes at night, and for taking friends to the honky-tonks to hear one of our classmates wail out his versions of the old standards of Hank Williams and the brand new songs of Jerry Lee Lewis. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. But these Georgia tales were of the kind that Eudora Welty describes as old and complete in Asphodel, one of the short stories in. He lets the little infant plant fall free, and from now on the search is over. There doesn't seem to be a regularization effect from very high depth in residual net- works as wide networks with the same number of parameters as thin ones can learn same or better representations. 4. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. For one thing, I think I would have trouble arguing to myself, or to my wife and family, that I never existed, even as a boy, yet Eudora Welty is writing in the tradition of the modern folk tale. 180). Wives and girlfriends would be gathered under the windows, and the banter and singing between them and the men in jail are impossible to exaggerate. Had he suspected down there, like some secret, the real, the true trouble that Hazel had fallen into, about which words in a letter could not speak Or in a myth, I cannot help adding. Summary Themes Questions & Answers Analysis Characters Quotes Start Free Trial . They are just playing out a role for the simple joy of pretending, and will soon return to themselves. He was the county judge, famous for his fairness in court, and loved by everyone who knew him, thus by the entire town. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. She claims that she was hiding when he read her letter, and he spanks her, insisting that she say she'll never do it again. Print. He took me in and introduced me to each worker by name. He made a sign for me to follow him in what was now a blind tunnel steaming with sweat and humidity. In those days the post office had a small shop that sold tobacco and newspapers. in Marrs 103). Since in the South, as I had finally learned in Chapel Hill, history tends to breed myth as a kind of natural law, I needed at least to consider the question. 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. He had never been given much credit for his act, though in the recent biography of Hurston, by Valerie Boyd, written long after my visit home, he is singled out for praise (436). Are there many other collections of the time framed with a stronger cry against the harsh realities of human fate? Though she is changing every day, she has really not changed at all. Like the theater, like the wearing of masks, like the playing of games, myths are ways of trying out the world, testing other lives, often for the sheer joy of forgetting our own predicament. But I learned too that the family prided itself on having been against slavery, and on having never owned a slave. They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. I benefited from these books as much as anyone. The development of the World Wide Web was begun in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. 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. And after a few minutes she took him by the hand and led him into the house, smiling as if she were smiling down on him (Welty, Collected Stories 188). Now that I have tried to do justice to my rereading of the story, which was, and is, my main purpose throughout these reflections, there should be no objection if I back up a bit and mention a few of the memories I carried with me when I entered the new world of the Old South at the university. One day on a summer trip to Homerville, my mother took me to a field in the countryside and showed me two old tombstones under a tree. 46I have talked about William Wallace and The Wide Net, but I have said little about the assigned subject, the myth of the South. New York: A Lisa Drew Book, 2004. I had fished and hunted in the great inland swamps, and had built rafts of giant bamboo to ride with my friends down the St Lucie River, surely as haunting and as hidden away as the Pearl River in The Wide Net. The alligators slept with the water lilies and the night-blooming cereus, and the Spanish moss fell in thick curtains on both banks. In leaving you now, I am reminded of an old story out of Georgia. Myth and meaning in that book are indivisible. They created a protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol ( HTTP ), which standardized communication between servers and clients. 171). It will not be lost on the reader that the structure of The Wide Net roughly follows the same literary source, proceeding from hell, to purgatory, and finally to paradise. I learned that several young ancestors had been killed fighting for the Confederacy or had died soon after the war from disease. No police, no first responders, no telephones, no helicopters just the local men and boys with an old fish net. See production, box office & company info. It was perfect for riding out on the sand dunes at night, and for taking friends to the honky-tonks to hear one of our classmates wail out his versions of the old standards of Hank Williams and the brand new songs of Jerry Lee Lewis. the citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. 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. Job Description Summary: The Executive Assistant is responsible for the management of the Chamber's database and assisting the President & CEO with the day-to-day management of the Chamber office, including governance . Whenever Walter Scott is mentioned in the context of the South, Mark Twains theory of the Civil War and the southern imagination immediately leaps to mind. He no longer fears Hazels mother, and turns away without a flinch when she appears. In The Wide Net there are too many myths to make a whole. Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, Voir la notice dans le catalogue OpenEdition, Plan du site Crdits Flux de syndication, Politique de confidentialit Gestion des cookies, Nous adhrons OpenEdition Journals dit avec Lodel Accs rserv, Vous allez tre redirig vers OpenEdition Search, Special Issue: Representation and Rewriting of Myths in Southern Short Fiction, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me), It might seem odd to find me turning to Eudora Weltys story The Wide Net the day I learned I had been invited to respond to the theme of Southern myth (the all-purpose, made-to-order, sempiternel Southern myth). I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. Shortly after I finished graduate school and began to read more widely about the South I learned that Zora Neale Hurston had lived her last years in my home town, and was buried there. Now that I have tried to do justice to my rereading of the story, which was, and is, my main purpose throughout these reflections, there should be no objection if I back up a bit and mention a few of the memories I carried with me when I entered the new world of the Old South at the university. He was on a mission. In. They have to go and get the wide net,. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. It is more of a distraction than a signpost, unlike, I would be the first to admit, the names of Virgil and Hazel, more fixed in their roles.2 If we must look for hidden meanings, perhaps the symbolical would be a better avenue to explore than the historical. Then there are the other adult members of the search party, the six Doyle brothers and their dogs, and the eight Malone brothers, eight giants with great long black eyelashes (Welty, Collected Stories 173). The memory is a living thingit too is in transit. What I remember most about growing up was the joy of being outside for most of the day in a sort of tropical paradise. Everything just before it changes looks to be made of gold. Immediately William Wallace looked down, as though he thought of Hazel with the shining eyes, sitting at home and looking straight before her, like a piece of pure gold, too precious to touch (Welty, Collected Stories 176). When Virgil finds a string of beads in the river, he gives them to Sam and Robbie. Ed. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. The Wide Net and Other Stories deliberately refuses to shy away from vice, racism, pride, self-indulgence, and violence. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. As far as living space was concerned, however, the town was strictly divided into white and black, and though the blacks were often seen in the white district, there were few whites who ventured into colored town. 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. We may remember his prayer: If only the golden bough/Might shine for us in such a wilderness! (Vergil, 166). Timeless stories from our 172-year archive handpicked to speak to the news of the day. But even children are sensitive to the boundary between the real and the fictional, and would hate to hear their father repeat the soliloquies of Hamlet from breakfast to bedtime even if he made a living as an actor. And if my commentaries, such as they are, do make me vulnerable to all sorts of criticism, especially when judged by the principles of pure scholarship (principles I would be the first to preach), at least I cannot be faulted on what I say about my own autobiography. I was not surprised he had been a good friend of Hurston, but I never found any reference to him in the standard biographies. He goes with them to drag the river. Backus, locally known as Beanie. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in Time Magazine. Subscribe. They all carried their classic illustrations. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. It was the county seat, so there were a few imposing public buildings. . Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. The second is the date of The black families had moved in the same direction to escape their hard lives as sharecroppers and a harsher form of racial discrimination. Walking down Orange Avenue he stopped in each of the three barber shops to tip his hat and say hello, and then picked up his daily cigar at the post office. 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. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by defying convention, but I do not think his prestige in the white community was ever at risk. The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. More important to my purpose here, however, they did help me throw some light on the pluralities of myth and legend that had confused me when I had first read The Wide Net. I realize this is a self-indulgent proposition, but to be honest, I no longer have much faith in finding the definitive myth of the collective South. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. Print. In leaving you now, I am reminded of an old story out of Georgia. As Welty adds in her autobiography, there were Edna Earles all over the South. I say this because when The Wide Net and Other Stories came out as a single volume in 1943, Time Magazine published a review that claimed that the stories were about as human as a fish. Eudora Welty was never much affected by reviews, good or bad, but this one raised her hackles, and she wrote to Diarmuid Russell: I saw the Time review but they say those things just because I happen to live in the southbut nobody else had better say I am unhuman (qtd. As a matter of fact, he was a pillar of the community. When he escaped he went back to his native state of Georgia and lived to a ripe old age. cite this page as follows: "the wide net - summary"enotes publishinged. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of "The Wide Window" by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler). 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. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. The roses needed a lot of water. Beanie deserves his own story. There seemed to be a force in the family that drove it to act or speak out, with or without the common consensus. From the bedroom me in and introduced me to each worker by name, perhaps the would! Page as follows: & quot ; the Wide net - summary & quot ; Lemony... Time Magazine men and boys with an old story out of Georgia and lived to a fault touched me,! 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