Text Explorations

Leads from Formula to Explore:

·      “Troubling details” – what about these details makes them troubling? What do they have in common with each other? What about them makes it strange that I missed them?

·      “Flirts with the fairytale genre” – in what ways does Aimee Bender do this? What elements about The Healer make it not a fairytale?

·      “Too complicated and problematic” – what about Lisa makes her so problematic, more so than the fire girl and the ice girl?

·      “Details of her personal life” – what details do we get? What details don’t we get? Any guesses why?

Passage 1 – page 28

At this point in the text Lisa is taking a break from the action of the story to tell us about J. and her thoughts on him.

I chose this passage because it’s one of the times in the text where Lisa turns the focus on her instead of on the events of the story. By exploring this passage I hope to capture what about Lisa makes her so complicated and 3D that I had to simplify her while I was reading.

Passage:

“Today we focus on Lisa, J.’s voice would sail[1] out, Lisa[2] with the two flesh hands[3]. This is generally where I’d stop[4] – I wasn’t sure what to add[5].”

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1: Word Definition/Wording/Figurative Language/Connection: The OED defines “sail” in a few particularly interesting ways, the most interesting being simply “To dance.” This idea of J.’s voice dancing out has this sort of calm musicality to it. For Lisa, these strange daydreams seem to calm and relax her. They seem to engulf her and lull her to sleep like the red poppy field in The Wizard of Oz. She loses touch completely with reality, another example of this being when she says “I was busy for a second renaming myself Atlanta when I looked over and saw how nervous and scared she was” (Bender 32). She spaces out often, but this in a way humanizes her – it’s something we can relate to. Which is part of the problem. We’re not supposed to relate to the narrator – we’re instead supposed to feel a connection with the characters of the story. She’s not a reliable narrator – she recounts information only being “pretty sure” it’s what actually happened. Her train of thought jumps around like that of Victor in Sherman Alexie’s short story. She is too much of a blend between a protagonist and a 3^rd-party narrator. I had to categorize her as one or the other.

2: Wording/Syntax/Connection: The repetition of Lisa’s name in this sentence seems pointed. It’s like she wants to make sure we know that it’s about her. There’s something strangely self-centered about her in some parts of the story, like her desperate need for the fire girl and the ice girl to know her name (Bender 30). She craves being a part of the two girls’ stories instead of just a bystander. Ah, I’ve come across something! Instead of being a neutral spectator as a narrator is supposed to be, Lisa involves herself in the events that take place. She wants to be more than a narrator.

3: Wording: Lisa feels it necessary to describe herself in relation to others. Fire girl and ice girl have their elemental hands while she only has flesh hands. Interesting, because usually when people compare themselves to others, they look for special things they have that the other person doesn’t. With Lisa it’s the other way around. By holding her flesh hands next to the ice and fire hands, we can’t help but see her as not special, as boring, as normal. That seems to be how she sees herself too.

4: Wording: It says this is “generally” where she stops, implying that she has done this multiple times. It seems to be a common pastime for her. But wouldn’t it get boring after a while, when all she really does is compare herself to the fire girl and the ice girl? If the part about “flesh hands” is fairly regular, wouldn’t it get tiresome?

5: Wording: It says that Lisa “wasn’t sure what to add.” She can say nothing about herself, be it good or bad, unless it is relation to someone else. She actually identifies herself by a comparison to fire girl and ice girl. Lisa doesn’t tell us the story of the fire girl and the ice girl for our benefit because it’s a nice story with a good moral. She tells it for her own benefit because she believes it defines her as a person. She cannot live without them. It’s the highest level of dependency and there’s something almost pitiful about it. Is it possible that, being as wrapped up in herself as she is and yet so insecure, she tells this on purpose to gain our pity?

Passage 2 – page 28

At this point in the text Lisa is gearing up to tell us about the fire girl’s relationship with Roy.

I chose this passage because it exhibits Lisa’s strange narrating style that makes her an unreliable narrator and not the kind ideal for a fairytale. By exploring this passage I hope to deepen my understanding of Lisa’s unusual narration – I think right now I only have a superficial idea of it.

Passage:

“I found[1] them first[2], and it was accidental, and[3] I told no one, so it[4] wasn’t my fault[5].”

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1: Word Definition/Connection: The OED defines “find” as “To come upon by chance or in the course of events” and “To discover the whereabouts of (something hidden or not previously observed).” Both these definitions display the idea of Lisa discovering something new – in this case Roy and the fire girl. Lisa claims that finding them together was “accidental,” much like how she tells us she “wandered into the boys’ bathroom” (Bender 29). She rarely takes responsibility for her actions, insisting that many of these experiences were merely coincidental. It seems unlikely that she just happened to come across Roy and the fire girl together, considering she obsessively stalks the fire girl throughout the course of the book. So she deliberately tries to mislead us.

2: Wording: By saying that she came across fire girl and Roy first, Lisa is not-so-subtly implying that others will come across them later on. She’s foreshadowing… not even that… alluding to a later part of the story, something you rarely see happen in fairytales. If we notice it, it draws us in. Lisa is dangling the information in front of us. Also, when Lisa insists that she found them first, it’s almost like she’s staking a claim. She seems to think we’ll applaud her for it or give her some sort of reward. In this aspect there’s definitely a childish nature to her.

3: Syntax/Connection: The repetition of “and” here not only makes the sentence a run-on, but gives it this sort of uneducated feel. Lisa seems to have a very limited vocabulary – as we said in class discussions, she speaks in choppy sentences. Not something you’d expect from a narrator. It’s one of the many things that makes us wary to trust her story, in addition to her telling us that she only thinks some things happened (Bender 27) and her frequent hallucinations. Narrators, especially of fairytales and fables, are supposed to be trustworthy, because their whole purpose is to convey the message. But as I said before, Lisa doesn’t seem interested in passing along any moral to us at all. Therefore, she feels no obligation to tell the story in a straightforward manner.

4: Wording: Lisa tells us that she is not to blame for “it,” but we the readers have absolutely no idea what it is. She’s being very selective in the information she’s giving us. The main purpose of this sentence for her is to tell us that she’s not at fault, not about what she’s not at fault for. It’s hard to know whether she’s intentionally vague or not, but it sure makes it a bumpy ride for us.

5: Wording: This is pretty much a disclaimer. Lisa wants us to know straight away that she had nothing to do with whatever harm befell her precious fire girl. Telling us that it wasn’t her fault, in her mind, takes priority over recounting the actual information. A fairytale narrator never does this. In fact, when reading fairytales I seriously doubt that people ever suspect the narrator of being guilty of anything. So again, Lisa wants to bend her position as narrator a little. She still has the free will of a protagonist, yet she is tasked with telling the story. Interesting that Bender combines two fairytale “characters,” if you will, into one. But in addition, Lisa telling us that it wasn’t her fault seems to suggest that she assumes we’d have cause to suspect her. So she understands that she’s not a reliable narrator?

The Healer Formula

Status Quo: Troubling, unsettling details in a text stand out to a reader, demanding analysis.

Trouble: Many troubling details surrounding the character of Lisa went over my head while I was reading The Healer by Aimee Bender.

Question: Why did I not pick up on these details while I was reading?

Claim: Not only in the beginning of the story but consistently throughout, Aimee Bender’s story flirts with the fairytale genre. As a reader who hadn’t read much slip-stream before, I felt the need to make The Healer comply with one set genre: that of fairytales. In trying to make it fit into the genre, my thought processing had to emit details about the narrator Lisa, who is too complicated and problematic to fit the archetypal role of the fairytale narrator. I had to simplify her in order to process her. I accepted her as a slightly creepy stalker. However, the problem with Lisa is that throughout the story little troubling details of her personal life pop up. Fairytale narrators don’t start talking about themselves and their issues – their chief purpose is to deliver information about the other characters and the issues they have to deal with. So I had to 2-dimensionalize her to make her fit back in the background, enabling me to zoom in on the central story of the fire girl and the ice girl.

The Healer Exploratory Draft

I’m interested in writing about how while I was reading The Healer by Aimee Bender, there were creepy, disturbing, and extremely troubling details such as those about Roy’s cutting that completely went over my head and that I didn’t even process until we talked about some of them in class. This makes me want to understand why these details, especially since Bender sets them up in a way that would make them seem important, were so easy to skim over. One way to consider this is that because Bender starts the story out as though it were a fairytale, I subconsciously was trying while I was reading to rearrange the rest of the story so it could fit into those fairytale archetypes. In order to do this, my thought processing had to emit details, like those about Roy, that disturbed the fairytale aspect.

So I guess my basic status quo is that troubling details should stick out to a reader, and yet while I was reading The Healer I didn’t pick up on many them. So I should start by exploring these details. Well the main ones that first popped into my head and made me want to pursue this topic are the ones in the scene where we first hear about Roy’s cutting on page 29. It didn’t trouble me that Lisa just happened to wander into the boys’ bathroom. Well it did, but not to the degree it should have. Does that make sense? Alright I’ll continue to peruse that paragraph for the details I overlooked… ah, okay, how Lisa touches the scars on Roy’s body, particularly the ones on Roy’s leg! As we were discussing in class a while back, she couldn’t just have walked into the bathroom and touched his leg. He would’ve had to roll up his pants. So there’s more to their relationship than she’s telling. Yet when I read The Healer before our class discussion I never even noticed this!

And there’s others in that paragraph too… little troubling, unsettling details. The fact that she just walks straight home, doesn’t tell anyone. And that the letters still feel like skin?! It’s so bizarre! There’s other places in the text with problematic details I skimmed over, but this paragraph seems the most shocking, so it’s probably a good example to work with.

So I said in my proposal that it’s surprising I missed these details like the ones about Roy and Lisa in this paragraph because of the way Bender “sets them up.” What I mean is that in this paragraph there is obvious missing information – why Lisa wandered into the boys’ bathroom, the true nature of her relationship with Roy, etc. – which would make me think that the information Bender is giving us is of specific importance, not the kind to be skimmed over. And yet I didn’t pick up on these things!

So my claim about fairytale archetypes… well something that occurred to me is that some problematic, disturbing, troubling details went under my radar while I picked up on others. I didn’t read The Healer, for example, without stopping for a minute and staring blankly at the page when I realized that J. and Roy literally came into the story briefly and then disappeared. So I’ve been considering these past few days why some details stuck and others didn’t. Well, the thing about characters leaving randomly as that it is not totally uncharacteristic of fairytales. In fairytales characters come and go so long as they help the protagonist on their quest, guiding them closer to the moral of the story. Take Cinderella’s godmother for instance. She literally comes into the story, does her thing, and leaves. And that’s okay! We think nothing of it because she served her purpose.

But what purpose do J. and Roy serve? I think this is getting a bit off-topic but it’s an interesting point. If, as a reader who theoretically felt the need to make this story fit into fairytale archetypes, I was fine with J. and Roy coming and going, what purposes did they serve that made them not contradictory to fairytales?

Let me step back a minute. What about Aimee Bender’s writing style would make me feel that I’d have to read her slip-stream story as a fairytale?

Well there’s obviously the beginning, that starts out like a fairytale in the descriptions of the girls and their powers. And the simple writing style. But what else?

Okay, characters coming and going. We can say, for now, that that’s characteristic of fairytales. What about the girls’ magic? While I was reading, nothing (I think) escaped me about the extraordinary fire and ice hands of the two girls. Well, this magical realism concept is common in fairytales. Going back to the Cinderella example, her world is normal and realistic except for the fairy godmother. Their world is normal and realistic except for the fire and ice hands.

            And Lisa, the unseen, unknown narrator. That’s not uncommon in fairytales, is it? They start with “Once upon a time.” They are told by someone who is recounting the story, they already know what happens. So outright Lisa’s role isn’t troubling.

            She doesn’t belong. She feels “out of her league.” She sits in the middle of the class between ice girl and fire girl. She wants to be someone, something. But she isn’t. Not in her mind.

            So she lives vicariously through fire girl and ice girl? Well I guess that’s not unlike fairytale narrators if you think about it.

            But we usually don’t know anything about our fairytale narrators. And we do get some little tidbits about Lisa, however cryptic.

            Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. Follows around fire girl and ice girl to pass the time. Wants to be a speaker like J. or the “runner girl.” And – this is something I didn’t pick up the first time – is a senior, yet is in the same science class as fire girl and ice girl who are both sixteen. So did she get held back?

            And how does Lisa know that “the mothers in particular spent hours on the phone describing over and over the shock of delivery day.” Did she honestly just sit there for hours listening to their conversations?

            We never think about how creepy the narrators in fairytales or anything else for that matter are. How do they know all these things? Why do they know all these things? We never ask those questions.

            When you read a fairytale you’re not supposed to have ideas or questions about the narrator. Your focus should be entirely centered on the main character(s), on the events of the story.

            And yet Lisa is so complicated. She is not a 1D, even 2D, narrator. She has all these troubling problems and issues. Narrators are not supposed to have problems and issues. They’re distracting.

            Distracting! Ah, I see. So did I not pay attention to these troubling details about Lisa because they’re troubling? Because I wanted simplicity?

            These are all interesting points. I’ll have to take them into consideration.

The Healer Essay Proposal

I’m interested in writing about how while I was reading The Healer by Aimee Bender, there were creepy, disturbing, and extremely troubling details such as those about Roy’s cutting that completely went over my head and that I didn’t even process until we talked about some of them in class. This makes me want to understand why these details, especially because the way Bender sets them up would make them seem important, were so easy to skim over. One way to consider this is that because Bender starts the story out as though it were a fairytale, I subconsciously was trying while I was reading to rearrange the rest of the story so it could fit into those fairytale archetypes. In order to do this, my thought processing had to emit details, like those about Roy, that disturbed the fairytale aspect.