Supplement
for Chapter 1
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In writing The Flights of Angels, I realized that the story was becoming less
an exercise in mimicking Hemingway’s style and much more of my own novel,
albeit Hemingway-esque and inspired by his fiction (mostly by Big Two Hearted River and The Sun Also Rises). My goal for the
first chapter, in that spirit, was to build a main character, Christopher, that
was both A) born out of my own ideas and themes, yet B) appropriate as an
example of Hemingway’s “wounded psyche.” In fact, rather than create in Chris a
“wounded psyche,” I implanted in him the same things that contribute to
Hemingway’s Nick Adams (post-war) and Jake Barnes characters: longing,
preoccupation, loneliness and separation, and the traveler’s spirit. At the
same time as I tried to emulate Hemingway’s characters’ elements, I tackled his
syntax and, of course, his use of personification and objective correlatives.
Hemingway used the two to create in inanimate objects not just life and
emotion, but meaning and purpose. I also tried to imitate his way of telling
the reader the narrator’s observations that are relevant only to either the
reader’s experience of the narrator’s psyche, even though his main character is
the narrator and therefore there is little exposition. And because so much of what
is important in Hemingway’s stories happens in the main characters’ minds, in
emulating that style I dealt with the task of idealizing and romanticizing in
Chris’ day dreams and thoughts while keeping the melodrama at bay. The nature
of the story I have designed and the mind of the Hemingway male – so cerebral,
so introverted – made keeping the prose from becoming too lofty and melodramatic
very important: it is the hardest part about writing the story thus far. In the
first chapter, therefore, I had a lot of difficulty because I wanted to create
a character with real personality – enough so that one could read the first
chapter and be able to think of Chris and his actions in any other situation –
and maintain the story’s homage to Hemingway.
After studying his writing,
primarily Big Two Hearted River and The Sun Also Rises, I became very aware
of and empathetic to Hemingway’s actual style: specifically, in his use of
literary elements like the objective correlative, his syntax, and his word
choice. Thus, most of my conscious emulation has been derivative not of his
actual writing style, but more so of his themes and motifs: longing, depression,
imagination, the soothing qualities in the infinite (usually nature, although
in my story we haven’t gotten to that yet), and the everlasting quest to complete
oneself and heal the “wounded psyche.”
In writing the first paragraph, I sought
to create an emotional, human quality to the clothes on the line as the wind
blew through them. In
After describing
the dance, I jumped at the occasion to show Chris’ preoccupation with reality
and his own longing as he says that
he “was always at the window and not where [he] really was.” And, just after
that declaration, someone knocks on the door and “the dance stopped.” In adding
that objective correlative, I attempted to illustrate two things: A) the
clothes had stopped moving at the same time the door knocked to show Chris’
annoyance with the disturbance and B) because it is unrealistic to think that
at the same time that he was disturbed the wind stopped blowing, perhaps “the
dance stopped” because Chris’ imagination created in the normal, uninteresting
swaying of the clothes a beautiful dance spawned out of his boredom with his
surroundings and his preoccupation with what was outside his window. It was the car ride to
The knock on the door proves to be Miss
Lilith, the surrogate mother of the orphanage that Chris lives in. In The Sun Also Rises, Brett Ashley
dominates Jake’s preoccupations, leading him on and then fooling around with
his friends. Because the Hemingway (and Fitzgerald) woman has often been
described as “the destroyer of man” or the “bitch goddess,” I felt it quite
prudent to assign Chris’ false mother the name Lilith, the mother of demons and
the baby-stealer.
When Miss Lilith ordered Chris to go down
to dinner, “some books fell off [the] desk.” The idea that there was a stack of
books on Chris’ desk and Miss Lilith had the evil power to topple it without
even entering the room carried the idea that Chris is living under this woman
who is more like a dictator than a mother.
In the same spirit of Hemingway’s love for nature and the natural world, he often described his characters’ actions in a very passive way that truly put their existence into the perspective of a higher and greater world around them that they were only a small part of. As Nick hikes toward the river in Big Two Hearted River: Part 1, rather than saying “he walked over a hill,” Hemingway describes the rise in elevation saying that “the ground rose,” leaving Nick to traverse the earth as it existed and lived, actually rising as if in full, human consciousness. Inspired, I described Chris’ existence very passively alongside the sun’s dominant illumination: “The sun was shining through the window onto the sill where [he] was,” implying that Chris’ existence was completely unrelated to the sun’s lighting of the sill. Literally, Chris could fall out of the window and splatter across the pavement and the sun would still be shining onto the sill.
The rest of the first chapter consists
primarily of Chris’ conversation with his friend, Horatio, at dinner. Similar
to Horatio’s companionship with Hamlet in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Robert Cohn’s relationship with Jake in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Horatio appears to
be Chris’ good friend. Yet, throughout their conversation, we realize more and
more that what the two have is much less of a friendship as it is an
acquaintanceship – just as Jake doesn’t “have the time” to talk to Robert when
he comes by his office and as Hamlet doesn’t pay any attention to Horatio’s
problems or life. Most importantly, Chris tells us that he feels enormous pity
for Horatio, who thinks the food they are served is completely adequate and
doesn’t understand why Chris would be sick of the orphanage. However, by the
time the conversation ends, it becomes apparent that Chris actually pities
himself and wishes that he, too, could feel the way Horatio does about the
orphanage.
Chris doesn’t know a lot about his past,
but he knows that where he is – the orphanage – is not where he is supposed to be. We, as readers,
don’t know exactly how Chris knows this or if it is merely a sensation stemming
from his lack of parental figures. Yet, his knowledge of the unfairness of
where he is living leads him to the preoccupation and longing that Hemingway
illustrated so beautifully in Jake Barnes and Nick Adams – his need to get back
to the “big two hearted river” in order to get “all the old feeling” (In Our Time, 134). Chris hates TV
because of its false appearance of constant perfection, something that he isn’t
privileged enough to experience. In the same sense, he envies the sheet and its
ability fly away on the wind and to “go home.” And so he will dream in the next
chapter about sitting with a perfect family watching TV’s version of time, the
Dick Clark New Year’s show. Essentially,
Chris’ preoccupation leads him to his feeling of longing – his need and wish to
go himself, possibly on a journey, as
did Jake to Pamplona and Nick to the river.
So, when Horatio can’t understand his
need to escape all “the bullshit,” Chris tells us that he is “so sad for him.”
The saddest part of his exclamation is that we know that what is really sad is that everything feels so wrong for
him. It is ironic that Chris says he is so sad for Horatio when, earlier, he
claims that “Horatio was one of the lucky ones.” In fact, Chris pities himself
and his own feeling that he doesn’t belong: he wishes that he could feel like
Horatio about the orphanage but he just
can’t. After he declares his sympathy for Horatio, Chris goes out “into the
yard” to gaze to the sky – to the heavens – and he wishes he could be part of
the “great night out there.” Unfortunately,– and he knows it – Chris cannot be
happy in his current situation because of his absolute infatuation and
preoccupation with the outside world and the restriction he feels within the
confines of his family-less, depressed, orphanage-based life where the only
experiences he values are those of the characters in the books he is “a part
of.”
It is “pretty to think” that one day
Chris may arrive at a place where he achieves the unattainable happiness that
he longs for. Alas, his constant yearning and longing to find his own purpose
and achieve equilibrium – like Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Jake, and Nick – will
make it impossible for him to achieve his dreams: he will not find a family to
watch Dick Clark with, no matter how much he searches or how far he travels. In
that spirit, Chris will make his own hajj in which his
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