Mary Swann

[dotinthesky]

Although these questions are for K., feel free to answer them too if you have also read Carol Shields' Mary Swann:

1. Of the four main characters, which one was your favourite? Which one was your least favourite? Which one would you enjoy hanging out with?

2. Of the fragments we read from Mary Swann's poetry, together with the final poem, what do you make of her as a poet? (perhaps you can imagine here that you were also attending the symposium.)

3. What do you think of Mary Swann the person, and of her murder?

4. Sarah Maloney says at one point that women carry all their lives the "full freight of their mother's words." Can this be applied to Frances Swann?

5. Rose says, with relation to the Swann museum exhibition, that "the charm of falsehood is not that it distorts reality, but that it creates reality afresh." How do you think this statement fits in with the characters, Mary Swann's poetry, the book itself?

Comments

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

(No comment on this -- just wanted to say -- genius music choice.)

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

Hehe. :-)

Yeah, their first album was brilliant. I should buy a copy since my original disappeared years ago (listening to them on Last FM at the mo).

[rag-and-bone.livejournal.com]

1. Of the four main characters, which one was your favourite? Which one was your least favourite? Which one would you enjoy hanging out with?

My favorite character was by far Cruzzi. his entire section made me want to weep--reading that section, i suddenly understood what all the hype about carol shields is. he was completely human: flawed, intelligent, passionate (in emotional and violent ways) and introspective. i loved him. i do love him. i underlined something on every page of his section.

my least favorite was morton jimroy. i found him creepy and i felt that his character was just... detestable. pompous, hurtful, cruel, lecherous, obsessive.

as far as hanging out with someone: cruzzi, all the way. cruzzi + kate=BFF.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

Yup, I agree with you on both accounts.

[rag-and-bone.livejournal.com]

2. Of the fragments we read from Mary Swann's poetry, together with the final poem, what do you make of her as a poet? (perhaps you can imagine here that you were also attending the symposium.)

i actually liked her quite a bit. i think that cruzzi and hilde did a wonderful job of picking the words they did in places where they weren't sure, too. the poem everyone kept quoting about blood was really compelling to me--it was sparse and serious and had a sense of foreboding about it. i liked that swann's poetry was so short, i liked that it dealt with such large subject matter and i liked that her vocabulary was essential. i know it seems obvious (even the book pointed it out with disdain) but i like her for the same reasons that i like emily dickinson. she wrote such simple, true pieces about things that, from the outside, it would seem impossible for her to grasp/understand, much less analyze the marrow of. i would read mary swann's poetry. in fact, i wish carol shields would write a companion volume of it. that would be pretty genius, though the time has probably passed.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

I went through conflicting feelings about her poetry. At first, I liked it and wanted to read more; but then I got suspicious that it was a joke on the part of Shields and that i was being suckered in with the rest of them - was it really that good? But I nevertheless felt compelled and mystified every time snippets were given, reading them many times over in order to comprehend what Swann was trying to say, that I think my conclusion is that I liked the poems too.

Emily Dickinson rocks. She was my fave in high school (must revisit her!)

[rag-and-bone.livejournal.com]

3. What do you think of Mary Swann the person, and of her murder?

a few things i have to outline for myself before i can really answer this question:

mary swann wrote really intelligent, "deep" poetry.
mary swann talked about intelligent, "deep" things to no one.
mary swann showed no evidence of her intelligence and depth in her diary.


what bothered me about this aspect of the book is that all of the characters were so disappointed by the fact that there was no evidence of her intelligence and depth outside of the poems. they acted as though this meant that she must have been a simple woman who didn't really understand the magnitude of what she was writing. i, on the other hand, think that mary swann was probably an extremely intelligent woman trapped into a life of the mundane. i don't think that the lack of "proof" of her intelligence in the daily conversations she had with family members (um, hello, one of whom KILLED HER for whatever reason--she obviously wasn't very comfortable being herself around him) has any bearing whatsoever on the fact of her intelligence. while she only felt comfortable expressing it in one place (her poems), i have no doubt that her mind was every bit as intelligent as her poetry all the time--she just did not have inexhaustible outlets.

so instead of being disappointed by her life, her character, i suppose i was more intrigued and very saddened by the seeming incongruities between her poems and her diary/conversations with rose and her daughter. it showed me how stifled her voice and insight were, how caging her life was. i imagined a seething brain.

the murder makes me ill, obviously. i am kind of glad (this is me answering one of my own questions) that we didn't know more about it, as any "reason" for killing someone in a manner so grotesque isn't reason enough. any justification or explanation that shields could have come up with would have seemed like a cop out, so i am glad that she left us in the dark about it. the facts of it are all we had and probably all that really mattered: knowing why her husband did that wouldn't have shed any more light on the meanings or intentions of her poetry, as they transcended her human experience anyway. those details seem to be unnecessary to me, facts for sensationalism. which is what i considered m. jimroy's biography to be looking for: sensationalism.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

Those are great points! I think you hit the nail on the head there... by steering away from the details of the murder, we are also steering away from Jimroy's sensationalism. I guess that's a small mercy.

The symposeum was really troubled by Swann's lack of "intellectual" books in her reading list, which is quite elitest and reductive of them. Why can't a smart person reading something that is not T.S. Elliot or Joyce? I agree with you that they made a lot of assumptions about her intellect based on very scant items that belonged to her. They forgot that the poems themselves were proof of her intelligence (if that proof was required) and that they should satisfy themselves with that and nothing more.

[rag-and-bone.livejournal.com]

4. Sarah Maloney says at one point that women carry all their lives the "full freight of their mother's words." Can this be applied to Frances Swann?

What a wonderful question, ollie.

i loved this passage and dog-eared and underlined it, both. i'm not sure that i agree with or know quite what to make of it, but it was my favorite part of sarah's section, by far.

frances swann seemed to be entirely in denial of her mother's words. the only ones she could recall to jimroy, in fact, were nursery rhymes. she could only remember her mother reading popular fiction. she almost seemed reluctant to admit that her mother had talent or a way with words. she didn't want to talk about her father, for sure, but she also seemed like she didn't want to talk about her mother--unless it was to perpetuate the image of her as a simpleton, a country bumpkin.

that doesn't mean that she wasn't struggling with the "weight" of her mother's words. in fact, it could mean that she was struggling an inordinate amount and that her reaction to that struggle was to eschew them entirely. to remove herself from what happened to her mother, maybe she had to remove herself from the sensation that her mother's work had created in the literary world. by denying her mother's skill, she could lift the weight her mother's words forced her to carry around. maybe mary swann spoke to frances of a million important things, maybe frances knew all of the secrets and spent her life trying to erase them.

this is a great question, seriously. and i have no idea if i have answered it.

[rag-and-bone.livejournal.com]

i'm going to have to think for a couple more days exclusively about number 5. that's a big question, olliefern.