Analysis
“The White Rooster” is the story with which Ghost and Flesh: Stories and Tales, William Goyen’s first collection, opens. The war between the sexes is being fought out in the hen yard. The story opens and centers upon an unattractive woman who dominates her absent husband, Walter. In his brief appearances, he says little and does not do much, except to obey his domineering wife. According to the code of the Southwest, a woman needs to be mastered in order to be feminine. Marcy Samuels is homicidal. What is ostensibly driving her “insane” is the omnipresence of her scrawny, “white-faced” father-in-law, who scuttles through her house in his wheelchair, hawking and wheezing through his thin white neck. The second thing that aggravates her to dementia is the presence in her backyard of an old, sick white rooster. The scrawny cock is identified with the annoying old man by his movements, his noise, his appearance, and the rage he arouses in her. She determines to kill it while Mr. Samuels, coughing in his wheelchair behind her, recognizes that it is his neck that she would like to be wringing.
Marcy has had many arguments with Walter about putting his father out of the house. The old man has overheard these and is aware of her hatred for him. Marcy bullies Walter into constructing a trap which functions like a guillotine. She sits by the window, the cord pulled taut in her hand, waiting for the rooster to approach so that she can release the rope and decapitate it. At the murdering instant when the white rooster approaches and is about to “get it” in the neck, the old man slits his enemy’s throat from behind with a knife. After murdering her, he devastates the house, smashing everything he can reach from his wheelchair: ripping off the wallpaper, slashing up the pillows, tearing and destroying in impotent fury. Walter finds him dead in this chaos.
The violence initiated by Marcy in her hatred of her father-in-law and deflected to the white rooster ricochets back to the old man, is vented by him against her who began it, and then becomes a storm of passion which demolishes the entire house. Goyen shows that hatred vented against one order of being, the bird, infects the human order, and then grows into a storm which destroys the object world, the house. In parentheses beside the title, it is indicated that this is Walter’s story. In narrative terms, the perspective would have to be his, since he is the only survivor. In emotional terms this is also his story, because he, alone, is culpable. As “master” of this house, now savaged, he should have assumed the masculine role; then there could have been order and peace in his house instead of this explosion of destructive force unleashed by hate.
“A Shape of Light”
The last story in this collection is called “A Shape of Light.” Very different in tone, it is similar rhetorically. The sentences are made of short, repetitive, incantatory phrases. Instead of a linear plot, there are circlings, stalkings, dancings, weavings around an action which the language barely lets the reader glimpse. The author describes the setting of this story in words that might equally apply to his syntax. He says, “you had wandered into a landscape of addict elations, hallucinations and obsessions.”
In passages of sharply contrasted dictions, a childhood memory is reclaimed, in the guise of a ghost’s being fleshed out. The narrator recalls having triumphantly sent up a homemade kite, constructed by him out of shoe-box tissue paper and kindling...
(This entire section contains 1323 words.)
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wood. He sees it in terms of an artifice sent aloft by the artificer, released into a life of its own. Boney Benson, who flags the trains with a lantern, had asked the boy to let him send up a message, which he scribbles in pencil on the page of a lined tablet. The message flies away and the kite falls. The boy wonders what had been written on it. Now an adult, in a dirty city, he identifies with the impulse to send up a message and allow it to fly high above the sordidness. A piece of paper flies up from the street, and on this transitional symbol the narrator imprints Boney’s story.
His wife having died in childbirth, because the baby rose up in her and choked out her breath, Boney lay on her grave to listen for the unborn baby he had so fatally implanted in her. As restitution, he castrates himself and buries his bloody member in Allie’s grave. Each night a light seems to arise from the tomb and Boney follows the flickering light. Four strangers had disinterred Mrs. Benson and found a hole where the child had been, and they join in the search for the light which had issued from the grave. Then the story circles back to its beginning in which a man in a city is writing down “the message that was sent and lost” in that long-ago town which is now “reclaimed and fixed forever in the light of so much darkness.” The tale is told of a man who saddles his horse to follow a ghostly light. Interspersed with these passages are balladlike stanzas in which Allie speaks: “Oh where you agoing Boney Benson, and it nightfall? Why are you leaving the supper table so suddenly you have galloped your food; your supper will get cold and I will get cold.”
This interplay between the real old man and his lantern, the gossip of the town which turns the actuality into a legend through its whispering, and the ballad form which this orally transmitted material assumes resonates against the figure of the author, seated at his writing table in the present inscribing this fiction. Each level of storytelling is indicated in the style appropriate to it. The educated author is presented in poetic prose, the rumors of the townspeople in colloquial speech, the yearnings of Allie in anapestic meter which stomps itself out in primitive rhythms, and the scenes in which the narrator describes his childhood encounter with Boney Benson are in flat, simple sentences. Therefore Goyen can make language, alone, do the work of setting the stage, changing the scenery, identifying the characters, and establishing the mood. He achieves both lighting effects and background music without employing either.
The denouement is implanted in the opening. It is retrospectively illuminated at the end of the story. The reader must return to the beginning to comprehend what he has just experienced. This imposes on the act of reading the same philosophical point made by the story’s theme and by the mode of its narration. All three are engaged in parallel processes symbolized by the pursuit of the flickering light. The quest for the truth is like trying to put flesh on a ghost which ever haunts and eludes the reader. When the reader rereads the story, he discovers that this was the lost message which had been inscribed there in the beginning, which was read, but not yet fully understood:Walking one day I found a child let down from Heaven on a piece of string, standing in a meadow of bluebonnets and paint-brush, leashed out to me. This was my lost child and I told him what he did not know, left my words with him, our covenant, and laid this charge upon him: “speak of this little species that cannot speak for itself; be gesture; and use the light and follow it wherever it may lead you, and lead others to it.”
By recording a local legend that would otherwise have vanished into the darkness and giving the reader simultaneously the popular form and the philosophical implications, Goyen, in the act of writing a story, gave the reader a history of the narrative form, from its inception in inspiration to its embodiment in artifact.
