Absent Work

Danielle Orner
Absent Work
03/06/07
Reflections on Assigned Stories
Aimee Bender’s “The Remember” interestingly dramatizes the battle between body-based pleasures and intellectual experiences. Ben’s reversed evolution, caused by his desire not to have to think so much and to be able to be physically present, gives his lover time to reflect on their lives. Bender’s details of how the lover must take care of Ben at each stage, from ape to sea turtle, gives the story a sad, sweet tone. The animals Ben becomes are so innocent and, yet, are still sad-eyed like Ben was as a man. It also seems like such a sad way to lose a lover like to an illness that slowly dissolves the person you once love. She is literally watching Ben become simpler and simpler before she has to let him go. The use of reversed evolution is effective because she can still care for the animals while realizing that her lover is already gone.

Barry Yourgrau’s “By the Creek” is strikingly simple and minimalist. He doesn’t describe what the father’s head looks like, or how the boy put it on, or what the woods look like. There is just a simple argument with the mother and then a strange gathering of boys wearing their father’s heads down at the creek. It has almost a primal feel to it because the boys gather without any summoning or discussion as if by instinct. It feels like a rite of passage or some kind of strange boyhood ceremony undertake without adults in nature. The boy is surprised by his mother’s reaction as if it is only natural for a boy to try on his father’s head while his father is asleep. This feeling of community in this bizarre incident is what makes the story interesting. The trying on of the father’s head is not an isolated incident happening to one family. Due to the mother’s reaction, Yourgrau gives the story both a layer of taboo and a layer of natural ritual.
Fernando Sorrentino’s “There’s a Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella” starts out silly but ends with a dark realistic sense of foreboding. The initial image of a normal little man hitting the narrator on the head repeatedly with an umbrella and his struggles to get rid of the man are very comic. The man is described as so plain, average, and harmless that his persistence and the narrator’s embarrassment are very entertaining. Yet, when the narrator confides that he is afraid that the man will stop at the moment he most needs him, the reader is reminded of all the pointless routines he or she carries out each day to create a buffer against the unknown. The man with the umbrella becomes a metaphor for those strange comforts that we need in life.
Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode” treats a man’s affair with a book character realistically by causing it to go rotten just like a real life affair with the same motives play out. Madame Bovary causes the poor professor so many problems because he gets recognized in her book, she rings up a huge hotel bill, and she always seems to want more. There is also a touch of irony in the way magic is used in the story because the magician’s box is obviously handmade and the price for the extraordinary service is only twenty bucks (later to be inflated to twenty-five). There doesn’t seem to be any realization from any of the characters that the magic is any more than a good way for cheating husbands to have fantastic affairs. The fact that the man is a professor makes this more interesting since he should be approaching the situation much more intellectually. Instead of experiencing novels in a new way, all he wants to do is have sex with Madame Bovary. The characters’ attitudes toward the situation and the way the magic is orchestrated is what makes the story unique.