Both pieces are told in the past tense from a male retrospective narrator, in a very conversational way – they are just casually explaining to us these moments of their lives. An example of this is on page 317 in the Left Handed excerpt:
“Down I went to this place, the place called Dry Spring. I was just thinking about the horses and cattle; the cattle were up on the mountain, and I let them go too, because they were way up on the mountain. I just went ahead with my herd. All at once I came upon a lake, and I started toward that lake. I just kept going to this lake. I didn’t know whether I was thinking or not. Maybe I was moving around, maybe not. I didn’t know. I just couldn’t tell what I was doing. All I knew was I was after my herd; that was all I knew. So I just kept on riding after my herd, down to this lake.”
At moments, they reflect, such as in the Garland piece on page 123 when he starts a sentence by saying “Most authors in writing of ‘the merry merry farmer’ just leave out experiences like this…” and a gain on page 129 when he says “As I write I am back in that marvelous time…” These places really jolted me out of the story, and I’m not sure what their purpose is in the excerpt. We get a similar style in the Left Handed excerpt on page 319 when the author says “I went to sleep, oh, quite a while, I guess.” and also when we’re told “At that time, I had good eye-sight.”
While each piece covers a different length of time – the Garland one a year and the Left Handed one only a day – the passage of time is shown in a similar way: often through animals. In the beginning and end of the Garland piece we are shown time passing and the seasons changing through the migrating birds over the first few pages. In the Left Handed piece, we are shown how time passes through the night with the narrator getting up to chase the sheep and horses back to the place where he wants them. Both authors also set up model tellings to give us the sense of routine: we get all of the tedious farm work in the Garland piece that goes with each season and the fun of riding horses and looking for cattle; and we get the chasing of the herd in the Left Handed piece. By doing this, the authors also create a sense of authority; they are obviously masters at their jobs (even though the narrator in the Left Handed piece’s animals get away from him – but even still, I believe that he is a true cowboy). Both authors really make the animals the scenery into characters themselves. We get really vivid imagery around the animals, such as on page 125 of the Garland piece:
“Sometimes a lone steer ranging the sod came suddenly upon a trace of blood. Like a hound he paused, snuffling the earth. Then with wide mouth and outthrust, curling tongue, uttered voice. Wild as the tiger’s food-sick cry, his warning roar burst forth, ending in a strange, upward explosive whine. Instantly every head in the herd was lifted, even the old cows heavy with milk stood as if suddenly renewing their youth, alert and watchful.
Again it came, that prehistoric bawling cry, and with one mind the herd began to center, rushing with menacing swiftness, like warriors answering their chieftain’s call for aid. With awkward lope or jolting trot, snorting with fury they hastened to the rescue, only to meet in blind bewildered mass, swirling to and fro in search of an imaginery cause of some ancestral danger.”
This vivid imagery of animals is also apparent in the Left Handed piece on page 317:
“Soon as I got there and the herd was so thirsty they sure made a noise when they saw this lake. Running down, trying to get drink, they were just going as hard as they could go so they could get water… After the sheep had drunk they stopped there at the lake. They lay around there in the shadows…”
Both of these stories pack a lot into a short space. Not only do they have similar cowboy-type themes, it seems that they also used similar craft techniques.
-Kris
Welcome to the Blog for Craft of Creative Non-Fiction at Mills, English 226, Fall 2011. Here is where you write your reader responses for the books we are reading this semester. These responses examine the scaffolding of the book in regards to presence and identity of the narrator. Don't forget to respond to your colleagues' blogs as well.
you're right Kris, there's something very plainsman cowboy about it even with the heavy handed language of Harland...the passage of time contrasts with each other, you make good points about how the animals are time markers.
ReplyDeletee
Kris,
ReplyDeleteI like what you have to say about the way that our sense of time is developed similarly in both pieces, through routine and repetition as well as animal behavior, even though the two pieces cover such dramatically different spaces of time. I'm especially interested in the idea that our sense of time can be controlled in these ways by using objects or animals. I've certainly used this kind of thing to tag time shifts -- for example: a young version of a character will have long hair, and an old version will have short; when you see the hair length, you know what time you're in -- but I don't see either Garland or Left Handed using this technique as a tag or a gimmick in that way. It's somehow more organic and less contrived. Perhaps the difference is that my tags are forced )a character does not need to grow a beard or have long hair) whereas these are inherent (birds WILL migrate, the herd WILL disperse when you're sleeping).