Missisippi Delta in 1923. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. The white families, like my own, had migrated there from their farms in South Georgia in the hope of improving their prospects. The second date is today's By Alexa's traffic estimates bigpicture.net placed at 30,366 position over the world, while the largest amount of its visitors comes from India, where it takes 35,646 place. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. 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, Collected Stories 178). He had earned the name by winning a juke joint contest for having the biggest feet in Florida. 9Other than Old Doc, the characters making up the search party include two sets of young brothers, the white boys, Brucie and Grady Rippin, and the black boys, Sam and Robbie Bell. She is one of Hazels cousins. Right after he got back, though, some of his old friends met him at a local tavern and asked him if it were true that he had run away from the fight. Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of The Wide Net and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South. In the afternoons my friends and I would go down to the icehouse where sacks of ice were filled for the professional fishing boats. In the title story, a man quarrels with his pregnant wife, leaves the house, and descends into a mysterious underwater kingdom where he meets The King of the Snakes, who forces him to confront the darker mysteries of nature. 4Rereading 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. enotes editorial.vsenotes.com20 jan. 2023 . eNotes.com 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. They were later given to the University of Florida. It is a plunge into the inner depths that strains every fibre of his being, and tests his spirit to the limit. 183). 13There is certainly no question that Williams dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. 40I have tried to explain, to myself more than to anyone else, that the multiplication of myth and legend in The Wide Net is there, in all its rich jumbling, to nudge the reader elsewhere. Finding an Edna Earle in The Wide Net is like finding a magnolia tree in Mississippi, and should not force us to go back to St Elmo, heaven forbid. Neither does Eudora Welty in her autobiography, and she is one of the most southern writers who ever existed. Print. What I want to single out is not his place in the community, which was central, but his difference from most of the adult white men I knew and observed. They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. review but they say those things just because I happen to live in the southbut nobody else had better say I am unhuman (qtd. Robert Fitzgerald. 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. 180). Once every now and then I rode my horse to school where there was a rail fence and where the teachers allowed us to eat our lunch sitting down by the horses. 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. I should make it clear it was not the quality of the scholarship in what I read that puzzled me, but my consternation in not finding anything of my own life in the popular myths contained in the books. When Alice Walker wrote her essay about finding Hurstons unmarked grave, and lamented the lack of a headstone, she was writing only part of the story. 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. 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. 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. Ed. cite this page as follows: "the wide net - summary"enotes publishinged. Knowing Eudora Weltys love of Ireland and the Irish, the echo is surely deliberate. AccueilNumros67ArticlesConverging Toward the Human: Myth 1It 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). Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. There is the miraculous catch of fish, and the hymns William and Virgil hear while walking back home: They were having the Sacred Harp Sing on the grounds of an old white church glimmering there at the crossroads, far below. When William arrives alone at his house, he sees something he had never seen, a rainbow at night (Welty, Collected Stories 187). 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. Carrying his great string of fish, he enters at the head of the party into Dover which now looked somehow like new after the rain (Welty, Collected Stories 184). Myth may help shape an identity, but memory is the single vital source of selfhood, and the key, I believe, to William Wallace and The Wide Net. Despite the help of the search party, the willingness of the community to lend a hand, William Wallace must forget the outside world before he plunges into the inner, and by so doing, he recovers Hazel, who as Old Doc knows, has been there all the time. At least the small boys have names that set them apart. They were later given to the University of Florida. 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. 178). And the final story in The Wide Net (and thus the collection itself) concludes with the portrait of a young woman who is rejected, and is forced to face absolute desolation and a serial rape. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. 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. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. When he comes back the next morning, Hazel is gone, and he finds a letter from her telling him she has gone to drown herself in the river. It was told by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy. The shock will take a little time to absorb, but he has now found himself, and is beginning to embrace his new role as a father. They stamped the ground and pawed each other, more like horses than men. When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the King of Snakes, William Wallace stares him down. In 1940 she had accepted the offer of Diarmuid Russell (son of the Irish poet George Russell) to be her agent. 90). I like to think too, along these same lines, that the comic folklore of the first half of the story makes his solitary dive in the Pearl River, and his transformation, more unpredictable, and thus more human. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts. in Marrs 70-71). Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the C got through the L in a Coca-Cola sign (Welty, Collected Stories 171). Once again, however, we cannot escape the fact that names are chosen for us. Usually there would be shade trees to stretch out under and cool off, but there were none here. He is holding fast to a little green ribbon of plant, root and all (Welty. 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, What is missing in my account of rereading the story is my misremembering the total absence of southern history, a conspicuous absence. CSNET bridged between the original (closed) ARPANET and the NSFNET (open) by . 3Though I have spent much of my professional life reading and thinking about southern identity and the historical versions of the Old and New South, I really did not encounter anything resembling a theory of the South as a land of myth and mythmaking before I began my graduate studies at Chapel Hill. Though she is changing every day, she has really not changed at all. When they reach the river Old Doc remarks that the world has been turned to gold by the autumn sun: today, in October sun, its all goldsky and tree and water. Download the entire The Wide Net study guide as a printable PDF! 11The strongest proof of identity is the capacity to change, to slip from one role to another if necessary, to pass through the modes of being that nature and time demand, but always to remain at one with oneself. I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. There I was shocked to learn I may have been born into a myth, despite myself. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. I am ready to plead, however. Here is the same confused hodgepodge of myth and fable we can find in The Wide Net. They are the wonderful fictions out of which an adult life finally emerges, but never forgets. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Scottish heroes and William Wallace Jamieson of The Wide Net, surely, we might be tempted to think, the combination brings southern history into the story despite all evidence to the contrary. New York: A Lisa Drew Book, 2004. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. Walker Percy has written somewhere that a boy who has a Hamilton from his grandfather is a true son of the South, and I still have mine. 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. His full name is William Wallace Jamieson. Summary. 8The group that William finally collects is a motley one, all male, but they are of a kind. I did recall that it had fascinated (and puzzled) me by mixing together a multitude of myths and legends, reaching far and wide in time and in place, including the local and the regional. 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. I say this because when, 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. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. [Anthony Herrera; Rachel McPherson; Marcus Viscidi; Kyra Sedgwick; Barry Tubb; Tim Ransom; M Josef Sommer; Glen Roven; Eudora Welty;] -- Set in rural Mississippi, the story focuses on the turbulent relationship of a young married couple, William Wallace and his wife Hazel, in the American South in 1933. [] Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. What interests me more as the years go on is the life story of the individual southerner. This is the advantage of relying on memory rather than myth when digging back for the truth. 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. In Life on the Mississippi, one of Eudora Weltys favorite books, Twain makes the outrageous, though irresistible, claim that Scott and his historical romances helped cause the Civil War by promoting a mythical vision of history, and by shaping the southern character: It was Sir Walter Scott that made every gentleman in the South a Major or Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making the southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible (266). He lets the little infant plant fall free, and from now on the search is over. When we went to the movies on Saturday night, we would never hesitate to stop outside the county jail across the street from the Sunrise Theater. Still, if I should apologize, I do. Like my grandfather, Beanie was color blind as far as race was concerned. The Malones are like horses, and the Doyles are never without their dogs. After all, where else can I look for a better source? He himself would have been too modest to mention it. Of course the well-trained reader races through the possibilities and may stop on his way to consider the myth of the golden bough in the, . Walker Percy has written somewhere that a boy who has a Hamilton from his grandfather is a true son of the South, and I still have mine. . County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. It was a far better show than the movie. The Golden Apples. The only shade was provided by a long tin shed next to the sludge bin. In The Wide Net, William Wallace must make his own way, and history, southern or otherwise, mythical or not, does not provide him (or the reader) with any guidelines. The human drama is my main concern, however, and the one day in the life of William Wallace, wild as it is, is much easier to summarize. Its a Mississippi backwoods flash mob and its just a heck of a lot of fun. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. As Welty adds in her autobiography, there were Edna Earles all over the South. deliberately refuses to shy away from vice, racism, pride, self-indulgence, and violence. 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). The white families, like my own, had migrated there from their farms in South Georgia in the hope of improving their prospects. He lets the little infant plant fall free, and from now on the search is over. William Wallace takes the lead back to Dover, and back to Hazel who has never left their house. Now us got scales, Sam cried out. 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. Once William and Virgil have gathered everyone together, they take the wide net and all set out walking down the Old Natchez Trace. Backus, locally known as Beanie. In 1940 she had accepted the offer of Diarmuid Russell (son of the Irish poet George Russell) to be her agent. The name of Edna Earle comes from the heroine of the most popular novel in the South after the Civil War, by Augusta Jane Evans. 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. Hazels name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. He saw that the bodies of the frozen birds had fallen out of the trees, and he fell down and wept for his father and mother, to whom he had not said good-bye (Welty, First Love, Collected Stories 168). They all carried their classic illustrations. The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. Ignorant as I was, I had no doubt I was southern, born and bred. What was missing in this southern town was southern history, or at least any striking display of history. The first page of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for the World Wide Web, written in March 1989 (Image: CERN) Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and his second proposal in May 1990.Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a management proposal in November 1990. Myths and legends and symbols are filled with wisdom, but it is the human spirit which has done the filling, and not the other way around. What I remember most about growing up was the joy of being outside for most of the day in a sort of tropical paradise. It was the county seat, so there were a few imposing public buildings. What touched me more, and what I remember best now, were the lives around me while growing up. An Edna Earle is the narrator of Weltys novella, . 29A few of these stories were comic, but most of them dwelled on hardship and tragedy. Hazel wands were traditionally used as dowsing rods. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1781. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. Engraved in large letters beneath the names was the single word: Murdered. These were the graves of her maternal grandparents who had been viciously axed to death by two men looking for easy prey and a few dollars. Print. The never forgetting is another gift of becoming oneself, the power of memory. The group that William finally collects is a motley one, all male, but they are of a kind. When Mother Nature, with majestic abandon, unleashes a storm for the ages (or the makers of myths) to show who will always rule the roost, William Wallace is not deterred or disturbed. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. I was fifteen years old, and was the only white in the group of workers. He plays his role well, lost in his own performance, an unstoppable gramophone of platitudes, talking just to hear himself talk, but sometimes, almost despite himself, repeating nuggets of wisdom that bear directly on the quest itself: Were walking along in the changing-time. Each visitor makes around 4.39 page views on average. The storm in The Wide Net seems bent more on celebration than punishment, however. online is the same, and will be the first date in the citation. It is then, after they've eaten, that they see a giant snake that they call the King of the Snakes. 27Even as I write, the memories come flooding, but two or three should be enough to make my case. He could lift hundred-pound sacks of fertilizer with each hand. That was only part of the legend. 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. I began this paper with a confession. 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