Prodigal Summer Class Notes

I. Introduction

A. Berry—more on 1991 poem—about eating and food

B. Gary Snyder poem about Berry

C. Kingsolver biography: http://www.kingsolver.com/home/index.asp

D. Relation to previous readings

1. Almanac—structure defined by season

2. Georgic—Agriculture and values; adversity and simpolicity

3. Invitation—Come Away, Prothalamion=spring hymn to love and reproduction; pheromones; inhaling scent—37 irresistible and uncanny

4. Solitude—isolation—retreat—to reintegration

5. Storm and adventure

6. Gender—Mary Austin

7. Leopold—tracking—berry pressing face to wood for smell 3

a) Sense of smell

b) Land ethic; community of people and natural beings

8. Berry—pursuit of eternity; reproduction; death and rebirth

E. New genre: novel

1. Extended fiction in prose

2. Components: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/courses/Paradigm.html

II. Plot--Structure

A. Three-strand braid of alternating chapters

1. Predators, Moth Love, Old Chestnuts

2. Interlinks: three couples on the land

Lusa would like to meet Deanna 354

B. Overall

1. first 150 pages:—loss and conflict growing

2. second 150 pages: antagonisms and divisions resolving; understanding and empathy growing

a) Deanna finds the coyotes and she and Eddie communicate

b) Lusa finds ways to stay and connect with family, become part of the kin, learns about Cole, connect with ghosts and next generation

c) Garnett and Nannie battle but soften toward each other

3. Last 150 pages

a) Conception and rebirth

b) New family configurations

C. Throughout, the past and future become present

1. Composing letter to Nannie—coming down from the mountain; asks to stay with her. [old chestnuts and babies]

2. Jewel’s husband, Crystal and Lowell’s father is Garnett’s son

III. Characters

A. Relationships: conflict and attraction

1. Parallel opposites,

a) Male vs. female

b) anti vs. pro nature and the wild 45

c) enlightened vs. crude

2. Eventually they reconcile and combine

B. Who cast for the movie?

IV. Themes

A. Loss and recovery; death and rebirth; natural cycles

1. Of spouse, parent, child, land (Zayda), solitude, chestnuts, mental and physical capacity with old age

2. Ghosts

3. Place left by the dead

4. People inside nature—seasons, breeding, predating, subject to cosmic cycles; the moon, having sex with the sky 244

a) undercurrent of tragedy that went with farming 322 Life and death always there in your line of sight…living takes life.

5. Searching for eternity

a) body’s decision, no choice, pursuit of eternity 24, collision of strangers 26

b) God is three billion years old.

c) Her interpretation of passage from Genesis 217—God gave us the mystery of a world that can recreate itself again and again…he’s looking out for the salamanders there…weeds and pond algae are sacred because they’re salamander food.

d) Fireworks like flinging seeds: woman cycling with the moon and a tribe of men trying to have sex with the sky. 244…cosmic framework

e) Mother spends a whole year raising her young…a big chunk of his mother’s whole life chance at replacing herself 320

f) What worse grief …than to be old without young ones to treasure coming up after you 283

g) She has to keep farm for the ghosts—the people who have lost things—certain kinds of love you cant see. 357

(1) Senses other than sight—our limited perspectives

(2) Lusa reverses her position on honeysuckle; it’s got to be controlled 359—a non native weed; asks Cole’s forgiveness. Communication with spirits. [the dead are present]

B. Antagonism and estrangement vs. understanding and love

1. Discovers “Rough and tumble, sharper edges of family love”225

2. His tenderness 261 promise that he’d leave her something to remember him by

3. Story of Rachel the angel, go back to heaven [tenderness of this and previous chapter; delving into past; people learning about each other] [Lusa’s drunkenness, Deanna’s illness]

4. Advice about laughing at oneself and not at others (Chapter 14)

5. He cut off his own son—throw away living child—she then comforts him…Goodness we are just a pair of old folks—growing compassion and understanding 283

6. Changes her mind about scorning Hannie Mavis. “You had to be so careful with big families. Who knew how things would turn around, whom youd need in the end 302

7. Hostile child—another gap crossed. Lusa fearful. Lets Crystal drive mower.

8. Story of the dress—Lois cut up her corduroys and made her wear dress; she broke the praying hands statue. More understanding: I told jesus if I wore them clothes every day hed make Mama get better. 295

9. She asks him to teach him about chestnuts that dying old breed

10. She gives him old chestnuts to reproduce; he will give her shingles; they regenerate 343

11. Differences of dialect decoded: hail and hell

12. Finding bugs and her grandfather’s dialect spilling through.

13. Departure of snake; Diana’s acceptance 365

C. Solitude vs. society and family—kinship selection

1. Deanna’s happiness vs. shack wacky and escapism—53; diamond solitaire of a life

2. When Lusa reads about kinship selection, Hannie Mavis reports on progress of cancer and falls in Lusa’s arms 298

3. More filling in on how family saw Cole, and his departure to Lexington—the problem is Progeny: the family line. 307

4. Life of top carnivore is most expensive item in the pyramid—great chain of being; sequence of creation. Mother spends a whole year raising her young…a big chunk of his mother’s whole life chance at replacing herself 320

5. Adopting Crys and Lowell 380; getting release from father; put children on deed of farm; keep the farm in the family—she feels Cole’s ghost like this 383 She’s taking Widener name

6. She was stepping from realm of ghosts to commit herself to the living. 386 Coming undone from herself 388 She can remember Eddie and recreate him after he’s gone. Composing letter to Nannie—coming down from the mountain; asks to stay with her. [old chestnuts and babies]

D. Male and female

1. Lust, love, desire

a) Squeamishness of Garnett and traditional family vs. openness of Nannie and Lusa and Crystal

b) Garnett’s Valentine 373

c) Nannie’s lecture: beginnings of sexual reproduction bring about change—mutation—That is God almighty. There’s nothing so important as having variety…sex, that’s the miracle of it. It’s the greatest invention life ever made. 390

2. Fertility and parenthood

3. Gender roles

a) Three enlightened, educated, self sufficient, fertile, females

b) Three studly but stupid males

c) Matriarchy—the departing male

(1) Coyote female society, males as stud; also Turkeys and goats

(2) Lusa and Jewel

(3) Nannie and Deanna

(4) Crystal and Lowell-ambiguity of gender identity

(5) Male butterflies sucking mineral to gift to females; spermatophore—science of sex to teenager

(6) Eddie Bondo as hunter-provider-impregnator

(7) Garnett’s valentine 373

E. Place; rural life; agriculture

1. Values

2. Corruption

3. Loss and restoration

4. Krogers vs. Amish

5. Poisons vs. organics

6. undercurrent of tragedy that went with farming 322 Life and death always there in your line of sight…living takes life.

F. Culture

1. Race

2. Religion

3. Urban/Rural

4. Cultural history in the land—Landscape and Memory

5. language/dialect

a) semiotics of tracking—animal dialects—smell and sound

b) reading the signs, going beyond ones own language

c) tracks also provide explanations 2, 3

G. Wildness and cultivation

1. epigraph—for family and wildness: two values

2. Deanna’s love for woods and coyotes, but the storm is too wild

3. Lusa’s love for the wildness of insects and goats; her acceptance of the need for cultivation, trimming the honeysuckle, also controlling sexuality in dance

4. wildness of lust

5. Nannies trees were outlaws, illegitimate children, Like Luther burbank’s laboratory, renegade products of bee sex and fox thievery.

H. Science themes

1. The value and beauty of natural knowledge and observation; the sadness of ignorance--—the obvious animal facts people refused to know about their kind 93

a) Vergil, Thoreau, Aldo

b) Deanna, Lusa, Nannie, Garnett, the families, the goats,

c) What kind of knowledge

2. What did you learn?

a) Adaptation 8-9

b) Coyote families-18; 57

c) pubic hairs 46

d) predation and restoration of ecosystem vs. extinction 59, 64

e) pesticides vs. organics

f) farm economics; tobacco crop 107

g) canning cherries 119

h) plant breeding—chestnut restoration 130

i) sang and molly moochers 194

j) preparing and cooking a wild turkey 315

k)

3. elements of animal behavior in humans

a) territoriality—25

b) dominance—Lusa and sisters in law

c) erotic attraction and fertility

4. Evolution and ecology

a) Darwin—quote at beginning and end—Lusa’s reading

b) Interwoveness of all life

(1) extermination and extinction

(a) human role—parakeets and wolves

(b) negative consequences

(c) efforts at restoration

(2) introduction of exotics

(a) kudzu and chestnut blight

(3) restoration—chestnuts and wolves and rural culture

c) Predation

(1) relationships of predator and prey

(2) life and death; living is death

(3) numerousness of prey, rarity of predators

(4) balance—predators are necessary; population control; culling

(5) food chain: predators become prey

d) Sexuality

(1) cloning vs. crossing—most basic principle

(a) variation, adaptation, diversity, development

(2) plants (pollination), animals, humans

(3) prothalamion—pastoral hymeneal, seasonal, come away, biblical and renaissance; pheromones

e) Adaptation

(1) succession of bloom up the mountain 8-9

f) Agriculture

(1) Canning cherries

(2) Breeding goats 211

I. Magic and Miracles

V. Language

A. Poetic description—sound and sense

B. Strong dialog

C. Too much sex—too literal?

1. License to swear—squeamishness—appropriate places for language and behavior—see Garnett Walker and Nannie 347

2. Birds and the bees

D. Varieties of dialect

E. Onomastics and allusions

1. Book Title—51

a) Summer

(1) seasonal, calendar, pastoral-georgic structure

(a) meaningful to plants, animals and people alike, human rhythms absorbed in natural ones

b) Prodigal

(1) abundant, overproductive,

(2) wasteful, ranging, divergent, but ultimately returning redeemed

(3) biblical reference: story of the prodigal son—richness of biblical allusion

(4) OED: 4b. Having or providing a lavish amount of a resource or quality; generously or abundantly supplied with. Also: extravagant or unrestrained in the provision of something, the performance of an action, etc. 2. Of a person: that has lived a reckless or extravagant life away from home, but subsequently made a repentant return. Also more generally and fig.: that has gone astray; errant, wayward; wandering. Freq. in prodigal son (also daughter, child), with allusion to Luke 15:11-32

(5) 50 “prodigal summer this season of extravagant creation” return of the birds—long descriptive passage

2. Lusa Landowska—light and music

3. Deanna Wolfe—goddess and wolf

4. Nannie the goat

5. Eddie Bondo—he bonds her to community

6. Cole (Coal) and obacco

7. Garnet: semiprecious; hard

F. Biblical allusion

1. Title: prodigal

2. Garnett vs. Nannie’s interpretation of Genesis: dominion

VI. individual chapters: beginning, middle and end, with turning points

A. chapter 1P—the seduction of Diana

1. freedom, release, loving pursuit of coyote

a) solitary tracker, happy, unself conscious, intent woman, exuberant with spring and freedom

b) her two year quest, excited search for trail, ambiguity, feline vs. canid; wilderness woman, expertise

c) tracking lessons for reader

2. surprise of being observed and tracked by another tracker

a) p. 3—boots, camo, rifle—her opposite and antagonist

3. a wild, natural courting ritual

a) overwhelming sexuality of nature as in Song of Songs, and genesis, generation

(1) prodigal spring, flowers, 8

(2) dreams of him; bats mating 6

(3) lacewings—urgent search for mates, egg laying, eternal life 16

(4) the mating redtails

(5) her immediate desire/attraction

b) aggression and struggle—attraction and dominance

(1) rough and sudden, power struggle for dominance between male and female vs. surrender and tenderness;

(2) crackling dialogue—conversational wrestling 4, mockery, withholding speech and information, overtopping answers—flyting

(3) “cocky” and cocked; younger man; attractive; appearance and disappearance; gets her heated up;

(4) reappearance; doesn’t want him behind her, likes being behind him, impressed with his woods skills

(5) playing hide and seek

(6) she reveals what she tracks; discussion of predation

(7) getting to know each other—asking questions

(8) explanation of predation principles; value of coyotes and wolves; their matriarchal social structure, need and don’t need males—her dominance in conversation

(9) he’s pumping her for information, she equivocates

c) transition

(1) her love of coyotes (“schoolgirl crush” as replacement for lost husband) 18-19

(2) distracted by touch of his sleeve

4. She succumbs to hostile or invites loving takeover

a) Struggle between Deanna, (Artemis—virgin huntress) and Bondo—age and size differentials

b) they hook up 20, “spend the night in my cabin”—pink orchids, scrota

c) orchid forces pollinator—they lie down in leaves, roll downhill—no sleep all night

d) body’s decision, no choice, pursuit of eternity 24, collision of strangers 26

e) He pees off her porch, marking territory

f) discovery he’s sheep rancher and on bounty hunt for coyotes—in deep 29

B. chapter 2ML—the courtship and loss of Cole

1. transition parallels:

a) power of spring; natural sexuality overcomes women and men; aggression and love combine in courtship

b) smells and fragrances—pheromones vs. pee and predatory tracking of previous chapter

c) the land as a man in her life 32

d) poisoning honeysuckle and insects—extermination

e) moth’s mortal involvement with love 34

f) the hunter–rancher vs. environmentalist

g) educated woman biologist struggling for dominance

h) skilled women—her cooking and domestic farming 34

2. incidents

a) the honesuckle,

b) the backstory of conflict and love

c) Cole’s death

3. love and conflict; love and death

a) she hides with books about moths; her love of insects vs. his and his family’s hatred of them—and coyotes

b) disagreement over nature: the farmer and the environmentalist

c) she wants to bring in honeysuckle to dispel the ghosts of family

(1) an alien invasive

(2) her wanting to leave; her alienation from the place and yet her accommodation to it Zebulon—the mountain getting into her

(3) poison vs. tending the wild

(a) place associated with poisons and murdering things in column—gardening in Eden—32

(i) Zebulon vs. Lexington

(4) he wants to eradicate honeysuckle, but brings her a sprig like a moth

d) city vs. country attitudes: about meat and hunting and eradication of weeds and pests

(1) she’s an entomologist, loves bugs, but taught him IPM

e) she and father study pheromones: moth love; ways of creating sterility rather than using poisons

4. their animal attraction through touch and smell overcomes the cultural barriers between them

a) she ovulates during his visit

b) her desire to farm—but the old way

5. their lovemaking and his death—sudden and fated

C. chapter 3OC—awakening to grief—Garnet’s sadness at spring

1. Garnett’s awakening to grief at the sound of the May birds; turning to God in place of wife [erotic displacements]—solitude

2. on the land many generations

3. old age; loss of the past—sad prothalamion

D. chapter 4P—spring solitude and the appearance of the coyote

1. springtime; the birds; Deanna’s diamond of a life of solitude; wildlife management; coyote lore; restoration; search for the coyote, which at the chapter’s end arrives.

2. Her love of solitude; hearing the birds; her longing for Eddie; her vicarious engagement in the coyote family; the blind; the voyeur; coyotes are social 59 not solitary

3. Grant proposal—restoration 59—thesis research

4. Examining scats 61

5. Coyotes been spying on her, just like eddie bondo 62

6. Keystone predator—disaster of eliminating; sliding into niche

7. Mice have pooped her soup mix; throws out seeds

8. We think she’ll see coyote, but it’s luna moth—like Lusa

9. Then she sees coyote. 67

E. chapter 5ML—death and restoration of Cole—Lazarus

1. Textbook quote about moth navigation

a) Alternate realities of creatures—cf. Austin

2. Setting: the funeral parlor—her alienation; she’s dissociated, numbness—the wake

3. Sister in law’s strange dialect

a) Encounter with Nannie, wise woman 73

b) Dead person leaves a space behind to love

4. Isolation from her own father and mother

5. Mother in law’s kitchen, sisters taking over

6. Jewel’s empathy—she like a moth or a ghost, also lost husband 77

7. Dream of embrace with husband as mountain and moth[transformations] 79

8. Loss is not the whole truth

F. Chapter 6OC—Garnett vs. Nannie technology vs. primitive; poison vs. organic

1. Remembering Indian tunnel, the overlarge tree cut down—realizing it was his grandfather—generations on the land; [the immortality of place]

2. Looking for God’s purpose in that mistake: the answer is the value of today’s technology

3. vs. Nannie Rawly, who is primitive, bane of his life—shameless in bearing fatherless child—but sweet and charming to everybody. He fears her as witch—God’s purpose in making her his neighbor: trial and tempt him

4. Her sign: No Spray Zone—organic vs. herbicide; her lack of respect of property

5. Wants 2-4-D, worried neighbors will gossip about unkempt frontage [cf. Aldo and the Silphium] 84

6. She’s organic and worried about drift. 86 Certification

7. Success without chemicals impossible

8. Like Frankenstein’s monster—cf. technology

9. Worried about stroke while carrying back sign to her property

10. She rescues him; discovers turtle—out looking for mate

11. He wont let her get it off; she hates them, because they prey on her ducks—predation

12. He took down sign, but too late

G. Chapter 7P—Deanna’s second fall

1. Eddie returns; she says because he smelled her ovulation day

2. Puffballs and spores 93

3. He asks how she knows—her special forms of knowledge 93—the obvious animal facts people refused to know about their kind.

4. Spring fever, lust—her predacious lust: she wanted to stop and tear him apart on the trail, swallow him alive, suck his juices, and lick him from her fingers. 94

5. The tree—that Garnett remembers—her private place, his campsite—territoriality 95

6. Bite sex in hollow tree, like lions—woods sex—he uses condom

7. She’s 45, he’s in his twenties—cocky

8. Her fury—mountain lion

9. Watching me like some damn predator 99

10. Fungal blight takes down all chestnuts (her self-sufficiency) in a moment

11. Feels mountain exhale—mountain as character

12. He takes the mountain’s magic

H. Chapter 8ML—Economy and understandings: Lusa and Jewel

1. Rain and memories of Zayda Landowska—former landowner, expropriated, Klesmer musician—loss of land

2. Herb and big Rickie visit in the rain

3. Jewel’s husband ran off as Zayda did

4. She claims her farm; they treat her as invisible 105

5. Farm economics—tobacco as only cash crop 107

6. Value of tobacco—keeps forever and travels well; export

7. She stands up to them and is proud of her cherry crop which they admire 109

8. Jewel arrives

9. Techniques of cherry pitting and preserving; old instruments 111 [little house in the big woods]

10. Sharing secrets and working together; two blamed women

11. Jewel asking for help with kids; finding out about land ownership 116

12. Lusa talks about her father’s losses 116

13. Economics of the farm—marginality

14. Back to details of canning 119

15. Crystal—ambiguous gender

a) Child’s innate identity—being herself 122

16. Farmers trapped 122

17. Wont log woods

18. Cole’s not smoking and experimenting with vegetables and failing; potatoes don’t work because they take Idaho ones

19. Lusa learning about her husband after he dies from Jewel and others

20. Mom Palestinian, Dad a Polish Jew—local misunderstanding of her naming behavior 126

21. Culture clashes resolving

I. Chapter 9OC—Chestnuts and town trip—poor old Garnett

1. Garnett’s Elegy for chestnuts 128

a) Aesthetic, building, food, economic values

b) His religion—gods plan; faith. God takes away and gives.

2. His vision; to restore the chestnut

a) Interbreed with Chinese chestnut; crossing and backcrossing; Noah in his ark

b) Driven by arboreal ghosts 130

c) Walker American chestnut; restore landscape of father’s manhood—dreams of restoration

d) Hand pollinating and bagging

3. Japanese beetles; get Malathion, Sevin dust

a) Vs. compost piles and bug traps

4. Amish market vs. Krogers, Unitarian vs Baptist; evolution transcendentalism 131; women in college

5. Trip to town

a) Shopping list: poisons

b) Pinkies fish dinner

6. Doing laundry—modesty his habit; no physical touch 135

7. Old fashioned shingles he withholds for spite 135

8. Disclosures about Nanny—his obsession with her

a) No mother

b) To college in 1950s

c) Illegitimate daughter mental deficiencies—Rachel Carson Rawley

9. Landscapes loss: bobwhite, bunchgrasses 138

10. Theology: Gods plan 139—species were for our use—vs. care about endangered species

11. The Amish 140—getting along nicely—organic market

12. Losing his powers in the store—he’s ten years older than Nannie

13. Weed killer

14. Mistakes Nannies conversation about snapper lawnmower for mocking him and turtle 143 (comic gimmick) and he stole bottle of malathion. Senility.

J. Chapter 10ML Little Rickie—the goat scheme—release from trauma

1. Aggressive swallows. Lusa milking cow—on letting down milk

2. Tobacco plan abandoned; her anger

3. He smokes—her excessively aggressive interpretation of their refusal—swallows—reversed. Milk comes down

4. Down in cellar, friendly and close

5. Cole and Little Rickie were friends

6. Animals can tell what’s