I say this because when, published a review that claimed that the stories were about as human as a fish. Eudora Welty was never much affected by reviews, good or bad, but this one raised her hackles, and she wrote to Diarmuid Russell: I saw the. They talked sometimes about a black giant named Foots. 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. The workers filed in, one by one with their lunch bags, and sat down on a wooden bench. 32But I digress, drifting with the memory. A more distant past was hidden behind the Spanish place names and the faces of the Seminole Indians who worked as cowboys on the ranches. He took me in and introduced me to each worker by name. The Rebellion failed, and Bonnie Prince Charles escaped to become another legend of Scottish resistance. In fact, it is not a baptism at all. New York: A Lisa Drew Book, 2004. Since in the South, as I had finally learned in Chapel Hill, history tends to breed myth as a kind of natural law, I needed at least to consider the question. But they remain children, and act their age. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river. Its so sad that the culture that could have put these good hearted folks bare-feet in the creek was long ago swallowed up by progress. Now that I have tried to do justice to my rereading of the story, which was, and is, my main purpose throughout these reflections, there should be no objection if I back up a bit and mention a few of the memories I carried with me when I entered the new world of the Old South at the university. Lush, precise, and unpredictable in every line, The Wide Net is one of the greatest odes to the natural world ever written. Us is the fishes (Welty. And I found a note to myself slipped in the pages of my old single volume edition of the collection relating Eudora Weltys initial concept of writing a fictional history of the Old Natchez Trace. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. After all, there were some brilliant minds at work on the subject, minds who could spot a stereotype or a caricature a hundred miles away, and there was much to learn. I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. Marrs, Suzanne. 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. 12Once William and Virgil have gathered everyone together, they take the wide net and all set out walking down the Old Natchez Trace. He has proven his love to her by spending the whole day looking for her, and he has also bonded with his friends and other other men during the process. If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. 35I met Foots the first day I was hired to work in a local fertilizer plant for the summer. 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. 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. Life on the Mississippi. Of course these signs and symbols enrich the story at the same time they divert William Wallace from his search. Then group returns to town, everyone carrying their heavy strings of fish. As for me, being known as his grandson allowed me, and my two cousins who lived in his house, special status among the blacks, and a carelessness about crossing the color line. When Alice Walker wrote her essay about finding Hurstons unmarked grave, and lamented the lack of a headstone, she was writing only part of the story. review but they say those things just because I happen to live in the southbut nobody else had better say I am unhuman (qtd. At least the small boys have names that set them apart. In those days the post office had a small shop that sold tobacco and newspapers. Packet switching was thought of as a better and faster method to transfer data than the hardware solution to the problem, i.e., the circuitry. The roses needed a lot of water. He walked through the streets of colored town as naturally as he walked to work. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of The Wide Net and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South. 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, . 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. After all, there were some brilliant minds at work on the subject, minds who could spot a stereotype or a caricature a hundred miles away, and there was much to learn. I say this because when The Wide Net and Other Stories came out as a single volume in 1943, Time Magazine published a review that claimed that the stories were about as human as a fish. Eudora Welty was never much affected by reviews, good or bad, but this one raised her hackles, and she wrote to Diarmuid Russell: I saw the Time review but they say those things just because I happen to live in the southbut nobody else had better say I am unhuman (qtd. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Wide-Net-and-Other-Stories. Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. 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. What touched me more, and what I remember best now, were the lives around me while growing up. [] Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. Doc doesn't believe that Hazel would have drowned herself, but he lends the men the net just the same. The never forgetting is another gift of becoming oneself, the power of memory. Hickory tree there will be yellow. Still, going back to William Wallace, I can hear someone somewhere asking about his name. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. Us is the fishes (Welty, Collected Stories 183). As far as living space was concerned, however, the town was strictly divided into white and black, and though the blacks were often seen in the white district, there were few whites who ventured into colored town. When Mother Nature, with majestic abandon, unleashes a storm for the ages (or the makers of myths) to show who will always rule the roost, William Wallace is not deterred or disturbed. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. Shortly after I finished graduate school and began to read more widely about the South I learned that Zora Neale Hurston had lived her last years in my home town, and was buried there. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. 178). For much of the story at least, William Wallace and the other characters are closer to the simple stock figures of song and legend than they are to men and women in the real world. The Rebellion failed, and Bonnie Prince Charles escaped to become another legend of Scottish resistance. When William Wallace praises Hazels intelligence, Virgil agrees: Shes a lot smarter than her cousins in Beulah Edna Earle never did get to be what youd call a heavy thinker. 3. Review and critique podcasts produced by other students as a basis for creating their own segments. They have to go and get the wide net, though, and that belongs to a man called Doc. , and of the river Lethe which the original Virgil tells us must be imbibed by dead souls in order for them to be reborn. Each visitor makes around 4.39 page views on average. 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. Both his grandfather and his father were struck by lightning. Its a Mississippi backwoods flash mob and its just a heck of a lot of fun. Remember that (Welty, Collected Stories 176). If all this seems too good to be true, its only because I choose to stop. It has been a delightful day of adventure on the river for the Malones, the Doyles, and the others (including the reader), but the wide net (a sort of local myth itself) has caught nothing, except a haul of fish, a big eel, old shoes, the baby alligator, and a string of beads. And after a few minutes she took him by the hand and led him into the house, smiling as if she were smiling down on him (Welty, What is missing in my account of rereading the story is my misremembering the total absence of southern history, a conspicuous absence. Get this from a library! William must will himself into a new man, and as a Jamieson, he must cease being a perpetual son, and affirm his status as a father. 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. 40I have tried to explain, to myself more than to anyone else, that the multiplication of myth and legend in The Wide Net is there, in all its rich jumbling, to nudge the reader elsewhere. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. Trans. It seemed odd to me too when I began thinking about the challenge of adding anything new to a debate that as we all know began long before the South became the South. 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. In one of her early letters to him she wrote about her desire to write a Mississippi book: She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? The first page of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for the World Wide Web, written in March 1989 (Image: CERN) Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and his second proposal in May 1990.Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a management proposal in November 1990. The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. It had blossomed overnight during the boom years of the twenties. Subscribe. I should make it clear it was not the quality of the scholarship in what I read that puzzled me, but my consternation in not finding anything of my own life in the popular myths contained in the books. At this point the mythic and symbolic allusions begin to overwhelm, but I believe, as you know by now, that their very proliferation throws into high relief the singular nature of one mans all too human crisis. Old Mr. Winter will be standing in the door. Eudora Welty is a master of subjective impressionism, but there is not an escapist reflex in all her work. When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the King of Snakes, William Wallace stares him down. Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. He was a tall dignified man who dressed in a white suit and always had a Stetson hat on his head or in his hand. 43When I finished rereading The Wide Net I reread Eudora Weltys autobiography, One Writers Beginnings. This is fatalism raised, or lowered, to farce, but points to a fear of being victimized by mysterious forces (without and within) that William Wallace himself must struggle against, and defeat. He did not smoke the cigar, he chewed it, and as a boy it was best to stay on his windward side. 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. He towered over the others, who were all big and tough. William Wallace keeps diving down to search for Hazel until, finally, the group decides to stop and cook some of the fish they've got for a meal. Walking down Orange Avenue he stopped in each of the three barber shops to tip his hat and say hello, and then picked up his daily cigar at the post office. His name was Patrick Duval. I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. Bigpicture.net registered under .NET top-level domain. These were some of the memories humming in my head when I began reading the books about Southern myth in Chapel Hill. Synopsis It looks like we don't have a Synopsis for this title yet. When I was invited to speak about the myth of the South, the thought of Weltys The Wide Net, came to my mind in a flash. originally published: New York : Harcourt Brace and Company 1943 We offered this copy of the first edition in our Catalog 119. reference info. But I learned too that the family prided itself on having been against slavery, and on having never owned a slave. To me, there is more irony than history in the name William Wallace. 18Since 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. At the beginning of the story William Wallace catches a small rabbit and acts as if he wanted to take it off to himself and hold it up and talk to it (Welty, 172). 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. Hazel is pregnant, and William is baffled by her changing attitude (she would not speak and her eyes glowed). He was on a mission. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. 17She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? They all carried their classic illustrations. The storm in The Wide Net seems bent more on celebration than punishment, however. But more than anything, in rereading the story I realized that my own fading or forgotten memories about growing up in the South had somehow dictated my choice, and that the mythic failures, or inadequacies, of The Wide Net to match the intractable selfhood of the living individual clearly harmonized with my own experience. 4. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. Finding an Edna Earle in The Wide Net is like finding a magnolia tree in Mississippi, and should not force us to go back to St Elmo, heaven forbid. In the end, they seem happy and content again. Even as I write, the memories come flooding, but two or three should be enough to make my case. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Foots waited until they were all inside. Apparently, there was one male survivor of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. 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. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. In The Wide Net, William Wallace must make his own way, and history, southern or otherwise, mythical or not, does not provide him (or the reader) with any guidelines. deliberately refuses to shy away from vice, racism, pride, self-indulgence, and violence. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in. In the title story, a man quarrels with his pregnant wife, leaves the house, and descends into a mysterious underwater kingdom where he meets "The King of the Snakes," who forces him to confront the darker mysteries of nature. [] Magnolia and live-oak never die. The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. When William Wallace praises Hazels intelligence, Virgil agrees: Shes a lot smarter than her cousins in Beulah Edna Earle never did get to be what youd call a heavy thinker. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. I learned that several young ancestors had been killed fighting for the Confederacy or had died soon after the war from disease. Internet, a system architecture that has revolutionized communications and methods of commerce by allowing various computer networks around the world to interconnect. . Recollections contains a fifty-page biographical essay by Forkner. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 90). Jamieson takes a bit more twisting to unravel a historical connection. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume Our Wonder World on her sixth or seventh birthday: There were the fairy talesGrimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of Pilgrims Progress and a long piece of Gulliver. Later in the story a violent storm with a blast of wind covers the entire search party with wet leaves. 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. Summary. But the real proof of his character came at noon, when we all stopped to have lunch. At least this is true of the first half of The Wide Net. The second half is a different matter entirely and herein lies one of the genial transformations that The Wide Net performs as naturally and as completely as one season turns into another. 36There is one more story about my grandfather that I need to relate. eNotes.com Myths are necessary to our lives and imagination, especially as children. 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. He walked on. I loved the music, the food, the voices, the family stories, and to this day I cannot imagine life without them. They created a protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol ( HTTP ), which standardized communication between servers and clients. Think of another name in The Wide Net, Edna Earle. When later on I read Faulkners praise of natural courtesy I thought of Foots at once. The Wide Net Episode aired Feb 2, 1987 55 m IMDb RATING 8.6 /10 14 YOUR RATING Rate Comedy Drama Romance Add a plot in your language Director Anthony Herrera Writers Anthony Herrera Eudora Welty (story) Stars Elnora Chapman Boyce Holleman Tim Ransom See production, box office & company info Add to Watchlist 3 User reviews Photos Add photo Top cast 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. At least the small boys have names that set them apart. Scottish heroes and William Wallace Jamieson of The Wide Net, surely, we might be tempted to think, the combination brings southern history into the story despite all evidence to the contrary. They catch a baby alligator and the Malone brothers insist that they want to keep it. 13There is certainly no question that Williams dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. Jump-start your essay with our outlining tool to make sure you have all the main points of your essay covered. The thing about this part of the country in the great days is that people like Aaron Burr, J.J. Audubon, Lorenzo Dow, and goodness knows who, were as thick as blackbirds in the pie, and once the pie is opened, they are going to begin to sing (qtd. When he wakes up he affirms his new sense of power and potency by tying a catfish to his belt and launching into a wild Dionysian dance. . I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. The Aeneid. Once again, however, we cannot escape the fact that names are chosen for us. It runs in our family, Robbie says (Welty. The "Wide Residual Networks" paper linked makes a nice summary at the bottom of p8: . Trans. If there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original I learned my grandfather had been instrumental in having him named the first black deputy in the county. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. He hated fighting, but he had never lost a fight, and all his rivals had given up trying. The Wide Net and Other Stories deliberately refuses to shy away from vice, racism, pride, self-indulgence, and violence. Sam wore them around his head, with a knot over his forehead and loops around his ears, and Robbie Bell walked behind and stared at them (Welty, Collected Stories 179). eNotes Editorial. They were even stronger reasons to question the myths of the South I later encountered. In The Wide Net there are too many myths to make a whole. The only shade was provided by a long tin shed next to the sludge bin. As I have already mentioned, my grandfather lies at the heart of these memories. 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