The overarching theme of these stories is the relationship
between love and hate, especially the connection
between kindness and violence.
In this fictional world, love often begets hate, and
hate, love: a man's capacity for empathy serves as the
catalyst for an act of brutality; a character's loneliness,
his desire for love, causes him to chivvy members of his
church congregation, while the same character's unambiguous
overtures of friendship produce revulsion in the narrator;
the victim of a man's complicity coaxes him to take a
beating that, in effect, heals him; and a sexual encounter,
violent in its impersonality, its objectification of a
woman, gives rise to a comment that awakens the abuser's
conscience as well as his regard for his victim.
One may undermine the other: in the story involving
sexual abuse, the woman treats the men lovingly, like
people, and in so doing erodes their ability to treat her as
something less than human; a character's habitual spite
finds its way into his marriage, damaging the most important
(and the only loving) relationship in his life.
And they sometimes exchange clothes: a man's attacks on
his neighbor and the neighbor's quest for revenge mimic a
courtship, are the beginnings of a relationship; the
character who hurts his wife does it by perverting an act of
love; friends and coworkers express affection by insulting
one another and by pretending to fight.
What is the point of this juxtaposition and mingling of
supposed opposites? To be honest, I'm not sure I know. I
wrote these stories without conscious intent, and gathered
them into the same collection accidentally: there were
others that didn't quite work, and which had nothing much to
do with amity and strife, that might have been included,
too, had they been better or more finished. Still, I, like
any other reader, can divine a few meanings.
With their frequent inversion and mingling of love and
hate, these stories might serve as one piece of evidence
that all things contain the kernel of their opposite. Given
the right circumstances--enough time, a narrative--they will
demonstrate affinity. This Hegelian interdependence of
opposites implies a correlary--narratives procede by dialectic:
love heads into hate, or hate into love, and the
synthesis of these two spawns a hybrid possessing bits of
its progenitors. "Angel of Tough Love" provides an example
of this sublation: boy's complicitous response to a beating
alienates him from himself--thesis; he accepts an invitation
to enter a crucible of hate and love, to do the opposite of
remaining a bystander--antithesis; he emerges whole and yet
changed, at peace for the first time--synthesis.
Another conclusion, one that does not contradict the
first: if love may lead to hate and hate to love, then the
value of each impulse and action depends on context. Fine
motives, however pure, might produce ghastly results if a
full understanding of circumstances, a broad and informed
point of view, is not present, too: perspective, point of
view, is seminal.
And yet--with the possible exception of those with
mystical gifts, who may rely on Dionysian rapture or its
equivalent to grant them views of entire causal chains--our
points of view are limited; we cannot know all the ramifications
of our actions. (And, at least in one sense, it seems
that we aren't supposed to know: a story hatched whole is
bound to be boring and, well, predictable.)
So we are left to examine our motives and anticipate
what consequences we can. It's not much, but it will have
to do. Love conquers all, sometimes. A kind word--or just
an honestly felt one--may change a mind or an afternoon, now
and then. We're all in the same dirt boat, heading somewhere,
so we might as well use the oars provided and hope
that our imaginations, incrementally, will point us in the
right direction. Some of the time, we may row in concert. / Graduation date: 2001
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/32693 |
| Date | 10 May 2000 |
| Creators | Wells, Jerome B. |
| Contributors | Daugherty, Tracy |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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