Hi, Shaiza. Maybe we've been framed? I read The Incident frame unaware the first two or three times.
The intro didn't seem superfluous to me at all. The man relates how he is losing his humanity to detestable work. How can the story work without that context? Moreover, I have worked those jobs myself! So right away I had a clue. The idea …
Hi, Shaiza. Maybe we've been framed? I read The Incident frame unaware the first two or three times.
The intro didn't seem superfluous to me at all. The man relates how he is losing his humanity to detestable work. How can the story work without that context? Moreover, I have worked those jobs myself! So right away I had a clue. The idea of a life punctuated by seminal events didn't seem contrived either. Nor a life punctuated by ruminations over fateful incidents in the past. I simply didn't snag on the intro.
The conclusion I found trickier. Yet "the Club" often demonstrates that the beauty of a story is somehow proportional to our generosity how we are disposed toward it. I didn't feel cheapened by it. It is clearly cast as the narrator's reaction to the incident and not represented as a moral teaching. If the ending is satirical, then this piece would have been very courageous in its day and in keeping with the author's reputation.
So the framedness didn't make me like it less.
I'm on the record as loving the parable of the Good Samaritan and identifying its similarities to The Incident.
You won't get all the juiciness of that parable just from reading King James though. It's a shame. To get close, I now and then consult "Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus" by Klyne R. Snodgrass.
The Good Samaritan is a framed story too.
With a little generosity, you will see that the intro or epilogue of that makes Christ look like a gunslinger at high noon in Dodge City. The drama is huge. His challenger, an expert on scripture, is testing his knowledge with a not so veiled accusation of false prophesy, which then was a capital offense. So, if Christ doesn't produce a good answer, he could be stoned to death on the spot. That all happens in about three lines. And not incidentally, it also introduces the radical concept of a hierarchy of laws in scripture and the meanings of love and neighbor in their significance to the life of (a religious) person.
It's old-school flash fiction, really old-school, denser than a fruit cake and told with simple words and words that have harmonic effects.
It's the antiquity of the story that I think has some bearing on the Club and how we read. It makes it easier to see how quickly we slip into the murkiness of "context" and "text". Context has everything to do with what we need to know to get to the narrative. In that sense, intros are context provided by the author and, on this point, I almost don't understand what difference it makes if we call that framing or not.
The context not given by the author is at least if not more vital. This context is the rest of the context we provide as readers. As the Club has discussed, the style of The Incident, e.g. the epilogue, may have been influenced by a desire to mitigate the risks to the author's life and liberty upon the story's publication. So, maybe the older the story or the more remote or obscure the cultural context, the more vigorously we have to exert generosity with the text.
Hi, Shaiza. Maybe we've been framed? I read The Incident frame unaware the first two or three times.
The intro didn't seem superfluous to me at all. The man relates how he is losing his humanity to detestable work. How can the story work without that context? Moreover, I have worked those jobs myself! So right away I had a clue. The idea of a life punctuated by seminal events didn't seem contrived either. Nor a life punctuated by ruminations over fateful incidents in the past. I simply didn't snag on the intro.
The conclusion I found trickier. Yet "the Club" often demonstrates that the beauty of a story is somehow proportional to our generosity how we are disposed toward it. I didn't feel cheapened by it. It is clearly cast as the narrator's reaction to the incident and not represented as a moral teaching. If the ending is satirical, then this piece would have been very courageous in its day and in keeping with the author's reputation.
So the framedness didn't make me like it less.
I'm on the record as loving the parable of the Good Samaritan and identifying its similarities to The Incident.
You won't get all the juiciness of that parable just from reading King James though. It's a shame. To get close, I now and then consult "Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus" by Klyne R. Snodgrass.
The Good Samaritan is a framed story too.
With a little generosity, you will see that the intro or epilogue of that makes Christ look like a gunslinger at high noon in Dodge City. The drama is huge. His challenger, an expert on scripture, is testing his knowledge with a not so veiled accusation of false prophesy, which then was a capital offense. So, if Christ doesn't produce a good answer, he could be stoned to death on the spot. That all happens in about three lines. And not incidentally, it also introduces the radical concept of a hierarchy of laws in scripture and the meanings of love and neighbor in their significance to the life of (a religious) person.
It's old-school flash fiction, really old-school, denser than a fruit cake and told with simple words and words that have harmonic effects.
It's the antiquity of the story that I think has some bearing on the Club and how we read. It makes it easier to see how quickly we slip into the murkiness of "context" and "text". Context has everything to do with what we need to know to get to the narrative. In that sense, intros are context provided by the author and, on this point, I almost don't understand what difference it makes if we call that framing or not.
The context not given by the author is at least if not more vital. This context is the rest of the context we provide as readers. As the Club has discussed, the style of The Incident, e.g. the epilogue, may have been influenced by a desire to mitigate the risks to the author's life and liberty upon the story's publication. So, maybe the older the story or the more remote or obscure the cultural context, the more vigorously we have to exert generosity with the text.
Thanks for your helpful comments.
Cheers,
John