Week 11 Edgar Sawtelle

With this amazing complex book coming to an end, I couldn’t help but think back to previous chapters, the use of strong images that repeat and transform as they are used throughout the book to form a theme.
I keep returning to the role played by the basic elements in explaining or supporting the events and characters: earth water wind fire. I think DW is making the point that when Edgar is one with these forces he is complete.
Earth. Edgar finally accepts that Almondine is gone. P. 471 “He lay with his forehead pressed to the ground, the scent of iron and loam filling his nostrils and he clutched the dirt and poured it out of his hands. An oceanic roar filled his head. All his memory, all his past rose up to engulf him.”
This earth image incorporates water as well, and there are others, in particular rivers. In the previous section on p.483 Claude takes Trudy to the falls of the Bad River. He quotes a poem about a “sacred river that sinks in tumult to a lifeless ocean.” This is an image of death from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. As the poem continues it states, “and mid this tumult Kubla heard from far, ancestral voices prophesying war.” As we have all mentioned, Claude is the one causing this prophesy to come true. In contrast, when Edgar is dying he sees the smoke swirling above him and he is in the river of Herodotus, the river of life, p. 551, “the image of a river, broad and placid, beginning nowhere and ending nowhere, flowing on and on.”
In the episode about the whirlwind, we see the dog Essay choosing to face down the storm instead of taking shelter. On p. 472 Edgar describes his father looking out at thunderstorms in the same terms. “You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn’t matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything.” (Unlike Claude, the master manipulator.)
As Edgar returns to the farm he seems to have made the same choice. On p. 543 he reflects, “He had never had much of a plan for when he returned except to say what he knew was true and keep saying it.” Now I may be getting silly here but this makes me think of Edgar’s actual name and his pivotal role in this narrative: saw… tell.
As for fire, the most thought-provoking thing I have discovered is that looking back at the crossword scene, Edgar holds back the answer “empyreal,” the word-meaning for the clue “formed of light or fire.” Yet today when I looked this word up in the dictionary, I see that the given definition is, “highest part of the heavens, of sky, heavenly, sublime.” Although Edgar’s fate is sealed by the poison administered by the murderer Claude, his soul is both formed by fire and moving skyward, heavenly, sublime.

Week 10 Edgar Sawtelle

Week 10 – "Trudy"

Sorry for being late, everyone. I have not peeked at your posts and can hardly wait to read them!
In Week 10, we get some valuable insight into Trudy. “As an orphan handed from relation to relation a half dozen times before she was 12, Trudy could wield an insular self-reliance…” p.482. I disagree with the author holding onto this information for so long. First of all, this is the fundamental formative experience of Trudy’s life. She is a main character and perhaps it would have been better to know a bit more about her earlier. I know an author is not supposed to get bogged down in back story at the beginning of the novel, but this is a bit extreme, that we have to wait until the end of the book to learn about Trudy. So basically Trudy’s life was defined by death right from the start. First her parents both die making her an orphan, and then you infer other bad things happening causing her to move a lot and not form any lasting parental-type relationships in her youth. This also to me illuminates the depth of her depression at not being able to form her ideal family, first through having her own children with a man she loves, and then to have it taken from her by Gar’s death. It also means that she had no role models for being a good parent.
Ever since the prologue, the reader has had the idea of poison in the back of their mind. Now I think we are going to see the complexity of this image as DW winds up his story. In this week’s reading we learn about what is “poison” for Trudy: depression, “Every hour spent like that poisoned her, she’d thought, yet the sensation was irresistible, enthralling, equal parts dread and desire.” P. 476. We are also given the black plant image, the extended metaphor from seed to vine to woven cage.
When the wolf pup dies, she resolves, “That night she had made a pact with death itself: she could stay if she allowed death to stay as well. In choosing life she embraced contradiction.” p. 477 I think this means that Trudy has tried her best to overcome all the deaths that have shadowed her since childhood, and to accept death as part of life. She has decided that she will continue to live. Nevertheless, she has had to deal with more than most people. Presumably she has been worried that Edgar has died, because she hasn’t heard from him, and then the death of Almondine has also occurred.
Trudy is also described as insular, but I find that her actions show her to be the opposite of this. She has an unbreakable connection to Gar and Edgar, and her relationship with the dogs is one of complete personal interaction, not the dry paper records that entranced Gar. The dogs are like her pack. Plus she lets Claude into her home and life.
Claude is described as the great distracter, and presented as a wild sort of force but again I feel that in reality he is the ultimate controller not a distracter. Everything is done for a purpose, no matter how random or playful it seems. He has actually taken Gar’s life for his own reasons, and he is manipulating Trudy and Glen. We even see that he is trying to get Edgar to act in a certain way. He makes sure that Edgar gets the money and the key to the Impala so that Edgar will take off again, only this time he will be caught by Glen, who has also been manipulated.
We learn a little more about Claude’s background too. DW tells us, “only classical music bored him with its orderly sterility.” P 483. This is a total contrast to Henry of course, who played the highly structured Bach all the time. As well, this is a bit misleading. Pop music is also written according to a fairly inflexible formula. I have been thinking about why these details have been provided to us. To make us like Claude more? To make him more accessible and human? It has not worked on me!

Week 9 Edgar Sawtelle

I found the chapter called Almondine almost unbearably sad. If Frank hadn't been sitting reading his book beside me I am sure I would have been crying. In the earlier chapter, Edgar is coming to terms with how he has treated Almondine and what he really wants. But, continuing the Shakespeare parallels, between Edgar's thoughts about Almondine and then Almondine's thoughts and actions, it is sure like the end of R & J.
Also, it's almost a year exactly from when I had to take my beautiful Stella Husky to be put to sleep. I still miss her so much, her companionship, trail-loving energy and sense of humour.
I guess some of my comments are going to return to what I wrote last week. Sorry to be a bit limited in my reflections. Much to my surprise, DW has written a bit about the theme of inevitability in the Week 9 chapters. On Page 457, Edgar says, "Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence."
He also addresses the motif of dog training and proofing. Edgar now rejects this cause and effect pattern, and decides on Page 453, "No more commands. Never again." I think this also relates to the earlier passages about whether dogs can analyze a situation and decide for themselves. He is giving this freedom to Essay, and then the whole next chapter is about Almondine's thought processes and her decision. Somehow I feel that the results for the dogs in this book are not going to be any happier than for the human characters.
I see this as a change in Edgar’s world view or personal philosophy. He no longer feels that he can control his future by making decisions. The proofing never worked that well on Essay anyway, yet in her recklessness and disobedience she did survive the waterspout/tornado. Maybe Edgar sees this as a viable alternative, to relinquish planning out his future and follow his heart back home. Or maybe he no longer cares if he is a victim of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”
I also see that Edgar is moving even further away from the real world. Various elements that we would consider part of the world of human relationships and day to day routines are being removed from Edgar by the author. First his father, then the vet, then his friend Henry, then two of the three dogs … not to mention his focused existence on the farm was already unravelling by the time he left. Essay does not have the same bond with him, to tie him to the quotidian. Now Almondine is also gone. His mother and Claude are left, for now.
I really got thinking about two things this week. First, reading tragedy. Once the narrative has been identified as such, by you, the author, critics, or whomever, are you meant to then read through the lens of that structure? Less identification with characters, less personal connection? Or are you supposed to immerse yourself in the sadness?
Secondly, this year on my leave I have spent a lot of my time reading about the craft of writing and editing my novels. I would find it impossible I think to write a tragedy. I can't imagine the experience of living in Edgar's world every day for the number of years that it must have taken to write this book. Maybe I am too much a "method" writer! Or a wimp.
Finally, I found the writing itself in these four chapters to be even more lyrical and beautiful than the rest of the book. I am in awe of DW's descriptive abilities.On Page 456 he says, "He slept beside the dying embers as if trading them for dreams." Edgar has suffered many heartbreaks through making decisions or following his dreams. But to replace them with the beautiful death of a diminishing fire does not seem to forecast a happy future.
As a side note, this week I had a really interesting instance of the convergence offered by technology, the first for me. I had put a message on Twitter, where most of the people I follow are teachers, which in turn appeared automatically on Facebook, about Edgar Sawtelle as YA literature and a companion to Hamlet for senior students. A teacher from somewhere else in Ontario replied on Twitter that she agreed, and noted that in addition to the correspondence of characters and names we have already noted, she feels Almondine is fulfilling the role of Ophelia…

Edgar Sawtelle - Week 7, 8

For me, a lot of the tone of this book derives from a feeling that no matter what Edgar does, events are going to take their course. But actually that is backwards. DW is making sure that Edgar makes choices throughout his story, and the resulting occurences proceed in a logical fashion just like in the domino cliche.
In Outside Lute, Henry comments a couple of times that this "is definitely not an ordinary situation." (p. 377&381) The reason it feels that way to him is that he has made a decision in his own life to let Edgar and the dogs stay with him.In turn, Edgar must deal with Tinder's situation. He decides that Tinder's wound is too severe to travel, and for him to carry the first aid supplies. He seeks outside help, out of the ordinary for him. He even lifts Tinder himself out of the patch of sunflowers and walks back to Henry. Not to mention the break in routine. Ordinary is to keep travelling.
The fact that Henry is getting accustomed to the dogs, although awkwardly, is new to him. He pats them and handles them in odd ways, but he does reach out to them, brings them bones. And it is he who verbalizes the ordinary/extraordinary observations.
There is a passage descrbing a classic cause and effect scenario, when Edgar reaizes he has not trained the dogs for three days, and returns to the routine of proofing commands. (Been there, done that!) But this occurs often enough to be a motif in the novel.
I feel that DW has been almost mathematical in laying this out. Another example is that Edgar feels guilty for stealing, and this is why he also feels he must stay and clean the shed. Action, reaction.At the same time, cleaning the shed is out of the ordinary - both the ghostly previous owner and evidently Henry too have put off this chore.I think Edgar himself has commented on this. In earlier chapters, he says over and over, "Why did I do that?" He knows on some level that he did not cause his father's death, but also that one thing has led to another inevitably.
Even the music. Probably no more complex pattern than the Bach that Henry listens to - but I think hyper-predictable if you are knowledgeable about that sort of thing (which I am not).Even the extraordinary will become part of an inevitable pattern, I think. I am looking forward to finding out if my predictions come true, but also dreading the tragic future that seems to be Edgar's lot.
On different topic, I want to post in another online community (the YAlitchat Ning) today about whether or not ES is a crossover novel. Is it really Young Adult literature, because Edgar is an adolescent? Is it like Miriam Teows' A Complicated Kindness which is now shelved both with adult books and teen books at the library and bookstores? I would say yes, myself.

First Book Club

I can't believe it. I am finally a member of a book club! Thanks to Mandi for enlisting me. Amidst my usual frenzy of mystery and YA novel-reading, I have now delved into The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski which is the book the club is reading. I had to get to page 411 in order to post (because it is an online club) and have now made it.
Well. Someone should offer DW an honourary Canadian citizenship. Or maybe he is actually a secret Canadian who has sneaked over the border to Wisconsin or Colorado or wherever to live. I bet he is penpals with Alastair McLeod and Miriam Toews and re-reads Margaret Laurence for fun. Because this book is just the sort of grim little agricultural tale that I associate with Canadian literary classics.
Yes, it is an amazing work of art, beautiful, readable, can't put it down... and I am sure I will never forget this experience. The book became somewhat more enjoyable once I realized that every single thing was going to turn out bad so I stopped getting my hopes up for Edgar and his dogs and his family. I get that this is a tragedy and Mandi gave me the Hamlet hint before I started. Yet even though this is such a good book, I wonder if there is something amiss when you have to tell yourself to stop identifying with the main character and just step back and admire the writer's accomplishment in weaving his mesmerising tale.
I know I have been reading it like a mystery, at times, hoping that Edgar will piece together the clues and be able to make a difference. But I fear this is not in cards. Don't know for sure, though.
This really reminds me of a quote I read in a book on writing. It said that popular or genre fiction shows a character arc, plot development, etc., and literature simply shows the existence and reflections of the character.
It has also been interesting to put myself for the first time in the shoes (or armchair) of my students - reading and commenting on a set passage and no further, making predictions, etc. But it felt weird to put the book down at page 411 and not read through to the grand finale. Later.