An Opera in the Woods

"The Stone Boy," #2

So, by now, you’ve had the primary experience: you’ve read “The Stone Boy,” felt what you felt, hopefully read it a second time, have written about it – and that’s it.  That’s really all you need.       

Each of you interacted with the story in your own flavor – you liked or disliked it, brought your own life experiences to it, were moved by it (or not).  It has (possibly) become part of your moral-ethical framework and, if you’re a writer, your future trajectory is already being subtly inflected by it. (It’s there in your silo.)

But over the next few posts, let’s talk about it a bit and see if we can come to understand it even better.

To my way of thinking, “The Stone Boy” is one of the most beautiful stories ever written: Biblical in its scope, profound in its understanding of shame and guilt and the ways that a human soul can get shut down forever.

And we’ll get to all that, I hope. 

But, in this post, I want to start small, the way I might in class, by posing a simple question, and asking you to answer in the comments.  I’d also ask that, for now, let’s confine ourselves to just that question (which I’ll ask below).

We could easily imagine a story with the same plot (boy shoots own brother),  in which the description of the shooting is done less well, and we don’t buy it. 

So, my question is: Why do we buy it?

Berriault is asking a lot of us, with this near-operatic development.  A kid kills his beloved older brother on the bottom of the third page of the story.  Not only that, it’s a pretty freakish, unlikely accident – the gun goes off, and it just happens to be pointing at Eugie in a way that kills him almost instantly.  There’s a lot to resist there.  And yet I don’t resist.  I never have, in the dozens of times I’ve read this story.

If we don’t believe Eugie dies – if we don’t see it and feel it – “The Stone Boy” grinds to a halt.  Ceasing to believe, feeling manipulated, we stop reading.  The story can’t go on to do all of the other deep and beautiful things it does. 

So: how did Berriault do it? 

You might want to try to recreate your first reading experience.  What resistances arose?  How did Berriault assuage/deal with these?  What were the charms with which she distracted you?  Where was your attention, at certain critical moments? Where would you normally have resisted? Why didn’t you?  

This is worth thinking about because it relates to the larger question of how a writer convinces the reader of the reality of a physical action, especially an excessive or unusual one.

In a sense, this is the primary tool of the trade: I try to make you believe in something that never occurred. I try to create a memory in your mind, out of nothing, so that you’ll care.

I look forward to reading your replies in the Comments and, in the next post, I’ll provide some of my thoughts on the question.