My mother had met her and gave me the names of several people who had been her friends. But I digress, drifting with the memory. The black families had moved in the same direction to escape their hard lives as sharecroppers and a harsher form of racial discrimination. Her most acclaimed work is the novel The Optimist's Daughter, which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, as well as the short stories "Life at the P.O." and "A Worn Path.". What touched me more, and what I remember best now, were the lives around me while growing up. 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. Even the trees have bones that crack when lightning strikes. On rereading the story I soon realized that my instincts had not failed me completely. 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. Of course the well-trained reader races through the possibilities and may stop on his way to consider the myth of the golden bough in the Aeneid. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty. Print. [] Magnolia and live-oak never die. The narration continues to speculate how (who knew?) 11The strongest proof of identity is the capacity to change, to slip from one role to another if necessary, to pass through the modes of being that nature and time demand, but always to remain at one with oneself. She ends One Writers Beginnings 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. Still, casting around for something to say about the way the South (from within and without) seems to have been designed, destined, or doomed, to generate a mythic vision, or visions, often in contradiction with each other, my thoughts could not help going back to The Wide Net.. It begins with the story of a deaf boy whose parents have been killed or captured by the Indians and who is left abandoned in the end, completely alone: He did not know how far he had gone on the Liberty Road when the posse came riding up behind and passed him. 35I met Foots the first day I was hired to work in a local fertilizer plant for the summer. He had never been given much credit for his act, though in the recent biography of Hurston, by Valerie Boyd, written long after my visit home, he is singled out for praise (436). I located myself in these pages and could go straight to the stories and pictures I loved (Welty. Myths are necessary to our lives and imagination, especially as children. 171). The Wide Net, short-story collection by Eudora Welty, published in 1943. 180). I located myself in these pages and could go straight to the stories and pictures I loved (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 8). Wives and girlfriends would be gathered under the windows, and the banter and singing between them and the men in jail are impossible to exaggerate. He hated fighting, but he had never lost a fight, and all his rivals had given up trying. 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). Even though there is no southern history in the story, surely his name is steeped in historical associations. The narration speculates on what he experiences in the solitude of the river bottom: So far down and all alone, had he found Hazel? Summary Themes Questions & Answers Analysis Characters Quotes Start Free Trial . Just as William Wallace is beset on all sides by a welter of signs, until he forgets the name of the Pearl River and takes his dive to the bottom, the reader is mystified by the dazzling parade of mythical allusions until he too reaches the same place. Lush, precise, and unpredictable in every line, The Wide Net is one of the greatest odes to the natural world ever written. [] Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. The town was neatly divided into black and white neighborhoods, but my grandfathers house had been deliberately chosen because it was right on the border between the two and my cousins and I played and talked with black children every day. The more common it is, however, the less likely it can be seized upon for special consideration. References to babies, for example, can be found everywhere, from the little man on the toy-like train, to the baby alligator, all the way to the corn shuck doll waiting by itself on the bench back in Dover. "The Wide Net - Summary" eNotes Publishing . If there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original 46I have talked about William Wallace and The Wide Net, but I have said little about the assigned subject, the myth of the South. Subscribe for more videos like this: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=92YplusWhen Eudora Welty read at 92Y on April 22, 1985, it had been 32 y. I was fifteen years old, and was the only white in the group of workers. He could lift hundred-pound sacks of fertilizer with each hand. Robbie is right to be frightened. Omissions? It was a huge success, a romantic tome so overwritten and full of adjectives that Eudora Welty in her autobiography says her mother told her it used to be recommended to take it out with a chair when watering the roses. Print. There is certainly no question that Williams dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. 26I am ready to plead, however. Eudora Welty could use myth otherwise, as she does in such works as her masterpiece. The absence of history serves the same purpose, I believe, as the excessive abundance of symbol and myth the reader must negotiate before setting his sights on the inner spirit William Wallace possesses to exist all by himself. 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. The more common it is, however, the less likely it can be seized upon for special consideration. 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. Its a Mississippi backwoods flash mob and its just a heck of a lot of fun. 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. eNotes.com, Inc. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the C got through the L in a Coca-Cola sign (Welty, Collected Stories 171). 1 Robbie is right to be frightened. He told me that my grandfather had told him he had left Georgia to come to Florida because he hated the way blacks were treated. A man named William Wallace Jamieson has a pregnant wife called Hazel, and he's been going out a lot lately until finally, one night, he stays out all night. He told me that my grandfather had told him he had left Georgia to come to Florida because he hated the way blacks were treated. 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. Since 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. In the afternoons my friends and I would go down to the icehouse where sacks of ice were filled for the professional fishing boats. The development of the World Wide Web was begun in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. She is in her early twenties (an age we might give to William Wallace) when she discovers the gift of memory, and in her seventies when she confirms it: Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. He walked through the streets of colored town as naturally as he walked to work. They were even stronger reasons to question the myths of the South I later encountered. The one I want to tell about my grandfather concerns another man involved in the Zora Neale Hurston saga. I was not surprised he had been a good friend of Hurston, but I never found any reference to him in the standard biographies. Soon, people begin to ask if the fish are for sale, and William Wallace sells them. Weltys mother refused to have a copy in her house. 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. When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the King of Snakes, William Wallace stares him down. This blend of domestic realism with mythology and ancient fertility tales is characteristic of the entire collection, in which ordinary people are somehow connected to the myths of other cultures. Walker Percy has written somewhere that a boy who has a Hamilton from his grandfather is a true son of the South, and I still have mine. He loves to pontificate, and spends most of the day talking and giving advice. She claims that she was hiding when he read her letter, and he spanks her, insisting that she say she'll never do it again. The Rebellion failed, and Bonnie Prince Charles escaped to become another legend of Scottish resistance. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. When he comes back the next morning, Hazel is gone, and he finds a letter from her telling him she has gone to drown herself in the river. 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. 19Her reaction is more than understandable. The storm in The Wide Net seems bent more on celebration than punishment, however. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the C got through the L in a Coca-Cola sign (Welty. The memory is a living thingit too is in transit. 39These were some of the memories humming in my head when I began reading the books about Southern myth in Chapel Hill. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. The Malones are indistinguishable from each other, and so are the Doyles. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. PBS please bring this back. When William dives into the river, and emerges transformed, the myth-minded reader may then think once more of the Aeneid, and of the river Lethe which the original Virgil tells us must be imbibed by dead souls in order for them to be reborn. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. Boys, he said, I didnt run, but I did some mighty high walking. I hope I have not run away from the myth of the South, but I admit I may have done some high walking. Thank you for the indulgence, and the invitation. If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. In The Wide Net there are too many myths to make a whole. 34I think my grandfathers reputation helped me too in an experience that will stay with me as long as I live. Old Doc reminds me of the old men in another great modern folk story, The Weavers Grave, by the Irish writer Seumas OKelly. I had suspected something like this as a boy, but now it was confirmed. "The Wide Net - Quotes" eNotes Publishing Ed. Twain, Mark. 9Other than Old Doc, the characters making up the search party include two sets of young brothers, the white boys, Brucie and Grady Rippin, and the black boys, Sam and Robbie Bell. 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. References to babies, for example, can be found everywhere, from the little man on the toy-like train, to the baby alligator, all the way to the corn shuck doll waiting by itself on the bench back in Dover. 1943. eNotes.com In the end, they seem happy and content again. 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. 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. (qtd. The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. Failed rebellions are choice makers of myths, as another failed rebellion was to prove a century later. Its going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog thats ripe and have fresh meat to eat. Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Updates? And the final story in The Wide Net (and thus the collection itself) concludes with the portrait of a young woman who is rejected, and is forced to face absolute desolation and a serial rape. It was the county seat, so there were a few imposing public buildings. Foots was in charge. 183). The second date is today's The "Wide Residual Networks" paper linked makes a nice summary at the bottom of p8: . Sunlight was scarce and each turn of the river took one deeper into a ripe darkness smelling of frog spawn and wild magnolia. eNotes Editorial. I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. It was, however, filled with southerners. It did not cost much to have a horse and a small motor boat. [] Any day now the change will come. And if my commentaries, such as they are, do make me vulnerable to all sorts of criticism, especially when judged by the principles of pure scholarship (principles I would be the first to preach), at least I cannot be faulted on what I say about my own autobiography. 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. So I grew up surrounded by southern voices. Engraved in large letters beneath the names was the single word: Murdered. These were the graves of her maternal grandparents who had been viciously axed to death by two men looking for easy prey and a few dollars. Engraved in large letters beneath the names was the single word: Murdered. These were the graves of her maternal grandparents who had been viciously axed to death by two men looking for easy prey and a few dollars. The name of Edna Earle comes from the heroine of the most popular novel in the South after the Civil War, by Augusta Jane Evans. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. His name was Patrick Duval. There doesn't seem to be a regularization effect from very high depth in residual net- works as wide networks with the same number of parameters as thin ones can learn same or better representations. But the town itself was lively and busy and relatively sheltered from the poverty and misery that remained a plague throughout the greater South even in the 1950s. I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. His edition of Alexander Stephens prison diary, Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, was published by L.S.U. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. As the men and boys work together to drag the river, they turn up a bunch of stuff: some fish, a great number of shoes, eels, alligators, and so on. This paper reviews the history, the goals, the organisation and the components of CSNET (the Computer Science Research Network). Once again, however, we cannot escape the fact that names are chosen for us. . 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). 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