Listening for Language
Wilson, Steve
Seattle's upscale fashion stores, might seem too vacuous to use...
...ed so openly when here own husband had died or when her I continue to be interested in those moments when we or daughter Tess, Mary's mother, had perished while still a our students show ourselves to have tin ears...
...If, in the case of Didion, you don't know that the think, is that little Mary is implicitly being depicted as iden- liturgy unifies the disparate members of the Anglican contifying with her grandmother, the exotic outsider...
...And I might have We learn that secret only when Gussie's sister, Rose, dies continued missing it, too, if I had not sensed a large gap in and Gussie expresses her grief in terrible, almost inhuman their response, a gap I needed to close up if I were to serve howling...
...No, not afraid...
...Seattle's upscale fashion stores, might seem too vacuous to use in making any large point...
...The grown-up McCarthy will become a scourge of bourgeois respectability, including its religious versions...
...Set in the years of the like a rabbit sighted within descent of the anti-Vietnam War movement into the mindthe thick summer growth...
...of Joan Didiori s A Book of Common Prayer...
...over to violence and nihilism...
...My Japanese students were very astute about the gender relationships...
...For Americans young woman, leaving behind four small children...
...But the adult memoirist, per- piction of a total breakdown of order and community...
...critic...
...Steve Wilson But I won't argue the point here...
...But I have alluded to their Carthy and Preston families to be associated with the erotic...
...How, haps recalling Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and his invocation of then, did I spend my summer...
...The se- those moments often occur in the reading of literary texts cret, it's clear, is that the Prestons have never been as real to containing explicit religious ideas and hard-to-detect reliGussie as her own sister, blood of her own Jewish blood...
...The moththe always approaching moment er becomes a drifter, finally offering her life in a revolutionary that might tell all I was cataclysm that takes place in a banana republic wholly given stumbling wordless toward...
...tone-deafness at certain levels...
...It was the religious dimenOverall, she is mysterious, a woman with a secret...
...Well, I think I learned a little "silence, exile, and cunning," sees in the figure of the Jew a about religious reading...
...But, as I read this concluding Listening for Language chapter, McCarthy is suggesting, in the portrait of Gussie, how the little girl Mary will grow into a woman quite contrary, When I listen, the river is far more aggressively so than the self-isolated Jewish grandthe first sound I hear, mother...
...El Commonweal 14 May 5, 2000...
...And yet, I would argue, there are religious inklings, fragments, or seedlings of redemption, amidst this wasteland...
...Here, in the identification with the scarred outsider, its faint brush of light are the beginnings of the adult McCarthy as a radical social over stones a hidden syntax...
...formed by her daughter's involvement in terrorism and disEven of breath, I lean into appearance into the underground to avoid arrest...
...sion in these stories that they were missing...
...Gussie, whose primary ac- ference it may make to teach familiar British and American tivity is looking after her body and making her daily tour of texts on my students' home turf...
...She will Then, some ghost of a wind devote a career to making up for the shame and abuse heaped that slips under the door, on her during her Minneapolis years by her mother's Catholic looks for syllables in spaces, relatives in the terrible aftermath of her parents' sudden death in the evening's soft bowl of silence: when she was six...
...Of course, gregation in communion by way of public prayer, hymns, the child can hardly have been fully aware of the basis of her ritual, and ceremony, you will miss the force of her novel's degrandmother's appeal for her...
...less violence of the Radical Left, it is a story about a vacuous, Not fearing...
...McCarthy makes the point that Gussie had not griev- them as they deserved...
...tianity and Judaism, Christians and Jews, you lose much of the If we ask how this may bear on Mary McCarthy's self-nar- force of Mary McCarthy's characterization of Gussie Morrative of rebellion against her Catholic past, the answer, I ganstern...
...The title evokes It seeks to have a say and fall that of the Church of England's ordering of the liturgy for silent...
...In her gious residues...
...Rather, I mention my intuitions about the McCarthy and Didion texts because I would not have been led to them had I been teaching in a familiar American context...
...When I listen I still Sunday worship...
...If, as with the Japanese students, you have quiet, reclusive way, Gussie had all those years been in exile little knowledge of the historical relationship between Chrisamong Seattle's genteel Christians...
...Yet Didion's novel does not seem, on the face of it, to have any religious content...
...a voice parched from floating I might offer a similarly religiously oriented interpretation so far and unbodied in air...
...As for learning about Japan's culforeshadowing of her own literary role as the rebel who risks ture, I hope to go there some time soon to find out what difbeing marginalized as a pariah...
...well-to-do California matron who sees her empty life transHer eyes flashy, glassy and dark...
Vol. 127 • May 2000 • No. 9
