The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty. He possesses an old mans horde of lifelong certitudes. 1943. Job Description Summary: The Executive Assistant is responsible for the management of the Chamber's database and assisting the President & CEO with the day-to-day management of the Chamber office, including governance . In many respects he cherished the community as much as his family, but it had to be the whole community, white and black. If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. Its going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog thats ripe and have fresh meat to eat. 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. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river. What was her first novel and when was it published? In keeping with the Scottish link, it might be reversed to be read the son of James. 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. 31He was the county judge, famous for his fairness in court, and loved by everyone who knew him, thus by the entire town. 18Since William Wallace cannot be contained in any single myth, or even in a multitude of myths, it should not have surprised me that he is able to exist untouched by history, or at least untouched by a southern identity usually defined and distinguished as being overwhelmed and overdetermined by history. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. I had not forgotten the references to history and to historical figures in some of the stories of The Wide Net and Other Stories, notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. The memory is a living thingit too is in transit. New York: Signet Classics, 1961. 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. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. The workers, all black men, would let us sit on the blocks of ice waiting to be crushed. Backus, locally known as Beanie. I had suspected something like this as a boy, but now it was confirmed. 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. This is fatalism raised, or lowered, to farce, but points to a fear of being victimized by mysterious forces (without and within) that William Wallace himself must struggle against, and defeat. The workers, all black men, would let us sit on the blocks of ice waiting to be crushed. 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. William Wallace has done the real catching, unless of course, it has been Hazel herself. Williams dive is not a baptism for the faint-hearted. 171). 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. 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. Then he announced Boys, look right here, the Judge is his granddaddy. Still, if I should apologize, I do. And finally, on the last page, memory is evoked again, this time in words to be engraved in stone: Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memorythe individual human memory. Lush, precise, and unpredictable in every line, The Wide Net is one of the greatest odes to the natural world ever written. We saw the same films at the same movie theater, even though the whites sat downstairs and the blacks up in the balcony. One day on a summer trip to Homerville, my mother took me to a field in the countryside and showed me two old tombstones under a tree. in Marrs 70-71). Myth and meaning in that book are indivisible. One was the Florida artist A.E. . Print. 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. One of the most famous sons of a James was Bonnie Prince Charles, son of James Stuart, grandson of King James II, and leader of the final Jacobite Rebellion in the middle of the eighteenth century to restore the Scottish Stuarts to the throne of England and Scotland. I believe my shock at having to account to myself as a southerner when I arrived in my early twenties in Chapel Hill, and faced the impressive body of scholarship on southern myth then in fashion, helps explain why. 183). A reality that is, perhaps, a level or two beneath the conventional mode of realism. The Wide Net, short-story collection by Eudora Welty, published in 1943. Myths are necessary to our lives and imagination, especially as children. I had fished and hunted in the great inland swamps, and had built rafts of giant bamboo to ride with my friends down the St Lucie River, surely as haunting and as hidden away as the Pearl River in The Wide Net. The alligators slept with the water lilies and the night-blooming cereus, and the Spanish moss fell in thick curtains on both banks. The never forgetting is another gift of becoming oneself, the power of memory. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. It is enough to make Virgil sigh with despair: when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign (Welty, Collected Stories 179). Hickory tree there will be yellow. (qtd. Hazel is pregnant, and William is baffled by her changing attitude (she would not speak and her eyes glowed). 183). 16What is missing in my account of rereading the story is my misremembering the total absence of southern history, a conspicuous absence. He made a sign for me to follow him in what was now a blind tunnel steaming with sweat and humidity. In 1940 she had accepted the offer of Diarmuid Russell (son of the Irish poet George Russell) to be her agent. What interests me more as the years go on is the life story of the individual southerner. Then there are the other adult members of the search party, the six Doyle brothers and their dogs, and the eight Malone brothers, eight giants with great long black eyelashes (Welty, Collected Stories 173). One of the most famous sons of a James was Bonnie Prince Charles, son of James Stuart, grandson of King James II, and leader of the final Jacobite Rebellion in the middle of the eighteenth century to restore the Scottish Stuarts to the throne of England and Scotland. All of these stories were about life around the old family farms and houses back in Homerville, Georgia, not far from the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. When later on I read Faulkners praise of natural courtesy I thought of Foots at once. If there are two dates, the date of publication and appearance 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. I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. 36There is one more story about my grandfather that I need to relate. 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. , notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. Print. , and of the river Lethe which the original Virgil tells us must be imbibed by dead souls in order for them to be reborn. Ben Forkner, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me),Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 67|Autumn 2016, mis en ligne le 01 dcembre 2018, consult le 02 mars 2023. I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. Welty, Eudora. They all carried their classic illustrations. Print. Shortly after I finished graduate school and began to read more widely about the South I learned that Zora Neale Hurston had lived her last years in my home town, and was buried there. and I believe I could find stories, old ones & new ones, and beliefs and songs and violent events all over the place to show what the life here is, to my belief Think of all the people who would be in my bookwonderful Indians to start with, and the Indian tales are beautiful and dramatic and very touching some of themand Aaron Burr & Blennerhassett, and Lafayette, and Audubon, and Jefferson Davis, and the bandits and Lafitte the pirate, and all kinds of remarkable people. Now us got scales, Sam cried out. 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. A few of these stories were comic, but most of them dwelled on hardship and tragedy. The memory is a living thingit too is in transit. Her reaction is more than understandable. But Hazel is no rabbit as Virgil makes clear: Anybody can freeze a. , that wants to he says, and promptly chases the rabbit away: Was you out catching cotton-tails, or was you out catching your wife? (Welty. At least the small boys have names that set them apart. Now us got scales, Sam cried out. But I could not remember that it had revealed the slightest interest in the South as a subject of focus or reflection. In one of her early letters to him she wrote about her desire to write a Mississippi book: She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? N 102 Library of America Series. I benefited from these books as much as anyone. in Marrs 103). Published in ACM SIGCOMM 83. The web value rate of bigpicture.net is 49,209 USD. They stamped the ground and pawed each other, more like horses than men. Once again, however, we cannot escape the fact that names are chosen for us. And, to tell the truth, the details are daunting, especially as we are led down the old Natchez Trace towards the Pearl River, deeper and deeper into southern river country, a vast cradle of natural wonder that teems with vitality and mystery. William Wallace Jamieson, the first words of the story, and a name I will return to, is a young man who has been married to his wife, Hazel, for a year. with a celebration of memory that for her has now become a personal creed, and has allowed her to begin her life as a writer. 179). 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. The wide net. This is the truth that William Wallace discovers by himself, and somehow memory, lost and found, is crucial to the discovery. The shifting from one realm to another is a constant possibility. She continues several pages later: It is our inward journey that leads us through timeforward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. 42Myth 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. It is a plunge into the inner depths that strains every fibre of his being, and tests his spirit to the limit. He no longer fears Hazels mother, and turns away without a flinch when she appears. Usually there would be shade trees to stretch out under and cool off, but there were none here. Sam wore them around his head, with a knot over his forehead and loops around his ears, and Robbie Bell walked behind and stared at them (Welty, Collected Stories 179). It did not cost much to have a horse and a small motor boat. My mother had met her and gave me the names of several people who had been her friends. When she allows William his ritual role of thinking himself the man of the house by letting him tamely slap and spank her, the reconciliation is complete. And we fished for the same fish from the same piers in the inlet. William Wallace will soon demonstrate a stronger will in a more heroic gesture than catching a rabbit. 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. In those days the post office had a small shop that sold tobacco and newspapers. Still, as Old Doc exclaims to William: Everybody knows Pearl River is named the Pearl River (Welty. [] Any day now the change will come. They have to go and get the wide net, though, and that belongs to a man called Doc. 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. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by defying convention, but I do not think his prestige in the white community was ever at risk. He was a tall dignified man who dressed in a white suit and always had a Stetson hat on his head or in his hand. The thing about this part of the country in the great days is that people like Aaron Burr, J.J. Audubon, Lorenzo Dow, and goodness knows who, were as thick as blackbirds in the pie, and once the pie is opened, they are going to begin to sing (qtd. New York: Signet Classics, 1961. When I was invited to speak about the myth of the South, the thought of Weltys The Wide Net, came to my mind in a flash. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. Doc doesn't believe that Hazel would have drowned herself, but he lends the men the net just the same. Ben and his brothers continue their voyage while developing different theories about . 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. The storm in The Wide Net seems bent more on celebration than punishment, however. Summary Themes Questions & Answers Analysis Characters Quotes Start Free Trial . 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. Einstein activity capture is a powerful productivity-boosting tool that is integrated with Salesforce. 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. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. His full name is William Wallace Jamieson. cite this page as follows: "the wide net - summary"enotes publishinged. I am ready to plead, however. When he surfaces he is still in shock: And when William Wallace came up it was in an agony from submersion, which seemed an agony of the blood and of the very heart, so woeful he looked (Welty, Collected Stories 180). Eudora Welty (April 13, 1909 - July 23, 2001) was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays, best known for her realistic portrayal of the South. He made a sign for me to follow him in what was now a blind tunnel steaming with sweat and humidity. When William Wallace praises Hazels intelligence, Virgil agrees: Shes a lot smarter than her cousins in Beulah Edna Earle never did get to be what youd call a heavy thinker. Print. New York: A Lisa Drew Book, 2004. When Virgil finds a string of beads in the river, he gives them to Sam and Robbie. 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. There is certainly no question that Williams dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. It was, however, filled with southerners. 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). Stories were comic, but he lends the men the Net just same... 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