< previous page | page_100 | next page > |
Page 100 a comment upon Smiley’s use of King Lear within her own writing. “We didn’t ask for what you gave us,” Rose asserts (182). Finally consumed by her father’s poisons, she is unable to see beyond her role in his life. But Smiley, in opening up her narrative to what she comes to view as Shakespeare’s rather warped take on family life in King Lear, voluntarily takes on his perspective. By analogy, Ginny’s ability to penetrate her father’s exterior and to open herself up to what he must have been feeling at his lowest point as a human being—the point at which he hurt her the most—goes beyond the economics of forgiveness: I can imagine what he probably chose never to remember—the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness. This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all others. (371) By re-imagining her father’s experiences, Ginny moves beyond the “impenetrable fog of self” that characterizes his world view and, in many ways, those of her sisters. She is able to reevaluate her legacy, to go beyond the old codes of debts and pay-backs. “No more; the text is foolish,” asserts Ginny’s Shakespearean counterpart (4.2.38). And yet, although the text of our past might seem foolish, it is still a part of who we are. As Ginny tells us at the end of A Thousand Acres: [A]lthough the farm and all its burdens and gifts are scattered, my inheritance is with me, sitting in my chair. Lodged in my every cell, along with the DNA are molecules of topsoil and atrazine and paraquat and anhydrous ammonia and diesel fuel and plant dust.… All of it is present now, here; each particle weighs some fraction of the hundred and thirty-six pounds that attaches me to the earth, perhaps as much as the print weighs in other sorts of histories. (Smiley 1991:369) Ostensibly, the farm is Ginny’s legacy, but beyond this is a final merging of body, landscape, and history. And while Smiley seems to balk at the circumstances of Shakespeare’s play, its cruel twists and violent endings, the resulting tension in A Thousand Acres is brilliant. While Shakespeare, the imported structure of plot and high |
||
< previous page | page_100 | next page > |