Re-Reading

Last time, during my discussion of Samanta Schweblin’s story Eye in the Throat, an audience member questioned the value of re-reading fiction, and today, I hope to address these concerns. (The audience member has been silenced).

I suppose the best reason to re-read a story or novel would be that you like it. I want to argue that because of the complexity of fiction, re-reading also enriches your understanding of a text. Every reading is different, a savant has said. Our friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “You are the book’s book,” meaning, I think, that a book reads you, that is, who you are at the time you read, makes an enormous difference to your reading. If you have the motivation to re-read a text, you will probably get a lot out of the experience. Let’s consider Eye in the Throat.

I mentioned that the beginning of the story raises questions that are only answered at the end—specifically, why is the father of the narrator receiving phone calls in which the caller is silent, and who is calling? Related to this, the father believes the caller is a man named Morris, who owns a gas station used by the family—is the father correct?

One can certainly read through the whole thing and eventually find the answers to these questions. However, there is considerable foreshadowing along the way, foreshadowing that may be missed if one doesn’t know the story. I believe this is less satisfying.

In a sense, Eye in the Throat is a story about the dissolution of a marriage. Of course, it is as much the story of the growing distance between father and son, but neither theme is apparent at the beginning. There, the reader is only confronted with a mystery: the phone call.

The first shift from this beginning was discussed last time. We learn that, “almost six months before,” there was a major accident that left the narrator of the story (never named), breathing through his throat after a tracheotomy that has left his vocal cords permanently damaged. Prior to this, the two-year-old narrator and his father were very close, but the father blames himself for the accident and begins to withdraw—something the narrator doesn’t understand. But the reader does understand, having the omniscient perspective of the story that can see into the father’s perspective (as well as the mother’s).

Then, we go forward in time, but not as far as the beginning. The family is on a car journey to Buenos Aires to get medical testing done for the narrator. They stop at a gas station and the father encounters Morris—the reader perceives it is the same Morris mentioned in the beginning. Morris says, as the father searches his pockets for money to pay for the gas, “Why am I always the one who has to wait for you?” This comment, which certainly speaks to Morris’ bullying character and the tension between the father and Morris, sets up the reason why the father believes it’s Morris who’s making prank phone calls to him later, also speaks to foreshadowing—it is not just Morris who waits for the father, it is also the son.

In a major development, perhaps the story’s main development, we learn that as the parents leave the gas station, the narrator somehow disappears from the parents’ car and reappears at the gas station owned by the enigmatic Morris. The parents blame themselves and each other, and this incident precipitates their separation.

It is explicit that the son is in the car at this point: “’I’m sleeping on the other side of the glass, stretched out with my feet touching the car seat…” However, once the parents return to the car and drive off, there is no longer mention of the narrator being with them. When they return to the car, the mother begins to check on the boy, but the father says, “Leave him be,” and she does, getting into the front seat after reassuring herself with the sight of the boy’s blanket. The narration, mentioned last week, is ambiguous, as it is not strictly from the boy’s perspective. “When she closes her door, the light turns off, and the yellow blanket darkens, momentarily putting distance between me and my mother’s worries.” A surface reading of this sentence might make it seem to be from the boy’s perspective, that he is safely beneath the blanket. But a closer reading shows no actual mention of him, only a reference to “my mother’s worries,” which certainly may be part of a looking back analysis.

It is only after a number of miles of travel and the mother falling asleep (!) that the parents realize he’s missing.

“’He’s not here!’ screams Mom. ‘He’s not here!’”

Frantically, the parents retrace their journey to the gas station.

“It’s strange not to be there. I am nothing of what remains: not the back seat, not the yellow blanket, not my empty car seat. Still there is something of me in everything that has been mine. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me, I say to my father.” This is important foreshadowing of the narrator being aware of the growing distance between he and his father. It’s as if the narrator is still there but has become invisible. With his omniscience, he sees inside both his father and mother. And he sees them sitting in the car.

“But me—where am I, if not here? The plastic I breathe through (his tracheotomy tube) is an orifice, not a nose. (Yet he’s able to smell things—how can this be?). If I’m here, if here is where I’m smelling and yet I don’t know where my body is, where am I exactly?”

“Kay, this is very mysterioso. Where’d this kid go?

“From where am I looking at them? Whatever has happened to me, it has turned me into something else. It has disarmed and expanded me, enlarged me. It is a pain that is outside my body. I am an open plastic valve, and whatever is happening inside me emerges and touches others.”

The best I can make of this, best B, is that the narrator somehow disappears from his parents’ car and claims he has no understanding of how it happened. A realist might demand more explanation, but there is none. And there is no neat tying up of this mystery by the end of the story.

His parents find him back at the gas station, where he’s being cared for by Morris’ wife. She says that her husband, Morris, found the boy and brought him in but doesn’t know where he was found.

The boy embraces his mother, but when his father calls him, he stays in his mother’s arms.

“My father’s voice calls to me again, But I’m no longer able (to respond). I no longer want to, I think. No, no because no. No because it’s not the same now…How is this possible? The child has never rejected his father. Something has happened…Did someone do something to him?”

The family returns home. That night comes the first prank phone call to the boy’s father.

As they continue, the narrator describes him: “He thinks he is learning to listen, for the first time in his life. He thinks that a salesman exposed to such meaninglessness can only develop extraordinary listening skills…my father finds that his telephone sessions bring him an unexpected calm. Whatever it is that comes through the receiver begins to seem ever more familiar. He no longer hangs up but wants to be hung up on.”

This is a beautiful metaphor for the process of maturing beyond one’s parents.

The narrator grows up and is successful. The mother has moved out long ago. The father still gets the calls, only more sporadically. He no longer seems hostile to them. They are reassuring. He lives far away from his son but thinks this distance is good. “He sleeps better knowing the phone isn’t disconnected.”

Twenty years later, he visits the gas station again. Morris explains that, at the time of his disappearance from his parents’ car, the narrator wanted to call his father, and Morris pretended to do it, dialing the number and handing him the phone.

Although it’s not said explicitly, the reader realizes that it’s the narrator who’s been phoning his father and not speaking—this is what’s shown at the beginning of the story.

The story concludes with the narrator describing his reaction to his father’s death seventeen years later. (This story covers a lot of time).

“I sit beside his bed…and I tell him in silence: Don’t worry, Dad, we were happy, at first, and that’s enough. Everything’s going to be okay, Dad. And since he doesn’t answer me, since he has never answered me, I put my finger inside that hole that’s like an eye and I touch inside. I touch my father inside, and I let him go.”

This refers to an earlier fantasy the narrator had that he could reach inside his tracheotomy opening and somehow touch his parents.

Perhaps there is a middle ground between a first reading and a second, and this would be a slow and careful first reading with frequent looks back to what one has already covered. In a story as complex as Eyes in the Throat, this strategy might reveal some of the things mentioned above.

Next time, a new one, best B.

Till then.

#GoodAndEvil #SamantaSchweblin #AlanBray