As I Lay Dying - some notes 2

It's true, I think, that reading is a dynamic process and that we select after the fact. The shape a book takes in our heads after we have completed the reading of it differs from the shape it takes as we read it. A reading of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury might illustrate this even more dramatically than a reading of As I Lay Dying. Most readers who come to this text for the first time without prior knowledge of it will be profoundly disoriented in the first section of the novel. Only once you come to the second section can you begin to sort out what went on in the first section. And of course when your read the book a second time, this all changes. In As I Lay Dying Darl is an interesting case. The book offers enough gaps for the reader to question whether Darl is sane or not, whether Darl might not "narrate" the entire novel, and whether or not the book is about Darl as he lies dying. As we read we constantly make assumptions about what any given passage means in the light of what has happened in the text and in light of what we expect to happen. How much control any text exerts on these assumptions is what interests both Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser. In effect, both these guys are interested in how texts teach their readers to read. As we enter a text we begin to pick up clues on how to read the text. In fact, these clues are apparent even before we begin reading. Covers usually signal such things as genre or seriousness of the book, and our assumptions begin right here.

It might be sensible to enter here into the discussion of actual and implied readers. This particularizing of readers is not as simple as it may appear. Every text has a real reader, an implied reader, and perhaps a narratee. The narratee is the person addressed by the narrator, say the group on the boat to whom Marlow tells his story about the heart of darkness. In As I Lay Dying, some sections appear to be directed at a particular narratee, vague as this person may be; at other times sections appear entirely inward, directed only to the mind that delivers them. The implied reader is, according to Gerald Prince's Dictionary of Narratology, the "audience presupposed by a text" (43). The implied reader is the reader "inferrable from the entire text," whereas the narratee is the person or persons directly addressed in the text. In other words, the implied reader does not exist in the real world and exists only theoretically in the fictional world. Lastly, we have the real reader who is the bundle of presuppositions and predispositions, resistances and personal quirks who actually holds the physical book and reads it. The real reader is akin to the real author in that each exists, but neither might be visible in the text itself. From the point of view of Stanley Fish real readers are not individuals; rather, they are communities. The only individual reader who exists is the implied reader, and even he or she is an amalgam of the author's idea of a kind of or a general reader (i.e. a reader who represents a community). The distinction between implied and real reader is important for both structuralists and for response critics. A critic such as Iser works from the premise of the implied reader--texts contain gaps and blanks that are put there for a particular kind of reader, and therefore these gaps imply a specific reader, one who comes to the text capable of dealing with the illusions the text creates.

For example, the implied reader of As I Lay Dying is someone who comes to the act of reading fiction armed with a sophisticated sense of literary history. The very title implies a reader who can pick up an erudite allusion. How many real readers know right away that the title alludes to The Odyssey? Likewise, the first page of the book presupposes a reader who understands the first person convention. Most readers will grasp right away that the chapter heading "Darl" refers to the "I" that appears as the third word, but to grasp this the reader needs to have familiarity with a certain narrative convention or at least be willing to have the patience to learn a new narrative convention. Again, certain details in this first paragraph imply a reader with certain knowledge. What's a "cottonhouse"? And what does "Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat" communicate? These details will communicate nothing to a reader who has little or no experience of rural life in southern America. The straw hat implies a reader who has familiarity both with farm life and perhaps with Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Some potential real readers conceivably will not have any experience of these things. Finally, this first paragraph implies a reader willing to think about perspective. It's worth asking whether the change of perspective in this first paragraph--the switching to the cottonhouse to see the two people walking single file, with the one behind looming above the one in front--would have been possible before the advent of film in which this kind of switch (a cut in film) in perspective is common? Faulkner's prose here and throughout the novel implies a reader sensitive to lyric density and to musings of a philosophical sort. References to the Bible imply a reader conversant with the texts upon which the characters draw. In short, the reader implied by As I Lay Dying is a reader willing to accept the challenge of a densely written text, what Barthes calls a "writerly text," a text that sets up barriers to easy comprehension in that its codes are unfamiliar.

We might articulate the difference between Iser and Fish this way: Iser's interest is in the implied reader and Fish's is in the actual or real reader. Iser wants the reader to accept the position of the implied reader; in other words, Iser's reader, in the final analysis, needs to accept the authority of the text. Fish, on the other hand, wants the reader to understand his community context; in other words, Fish's reader needs to accept the authority of a reading community. Neither of these positions looks at the real reader as an individual who might read from private or personal feelings which emanate from his or her psychological make-up.

For Louise Rosenblatt, on the other hand, writers don't write for critics; rather they write for common readers. And doing so, they offer readers both an aesthetic and a pleasurable experience. Here is a democratic approach. This implies, of course, that neither Iser's nor Fish's approach is democratric.

The virtual text, in Iser's theory, is the text that exists in that liminal zone between the text as written object and the reader as an individual with unique thoughts, feelings, and values. In other words, according to this theory one reader's virtual text will not be the same as another reader's. In the virtual text, the original text and the reader come together giving rise to what Ingarden calls "a particular world" (214). The "world" of the text is, then, phenomenological in that it contains both the text and the reader. To read and interpret As I Lay Dying is to enter into Faulkner's world and to have that world enter into ours, although strictly speaking Faulkner's world is the meeting place of text and mind. We get the dynamic situation called the hermeneutic circle. Just as the text influences the reader, so too does the reader influence the text. "She hit the woman with the book." The idea is that this sentence has a meaning which is irreducibly ambiguous. But is it? No sentence lives without a context and a context for this sentence will begin to delimit its possible meanings. This is why we can decode the words outside most elevators on campus: "Do not use in case of fire." The context in which we meet words and sentences affects the way we read these words and sentences. The words by the elevators might, in some context, mean "do not use the elevator in case you start a fire by using it," but of course none of us in our context reads them this way.

Writing from an Anglo-American context (Iser writes from a European context), Fish takes on the formidable positions of the New Criticism. We have already seen that he attacks the new critical position that states that for interpretive purposes the importance of the affect of a literary text on the reader is a fallacy. He also takes issue with the second great fallacy identified by new criticism: the intentional fallacy. Reading Fish here we must accept a sleight of hand. He reinvests the idea of "intention" giving it a twist. Traditionally, the idea of intention had to do with an author, a speaker, or anyone who delivers a message. What is the author's or speaker's intended message or meaning? At one time it was possible both to accept the common sense assumption that anyone who speaks or writes does so with an intention to communicate a specific meaning, and to accept the distinct possibility of a recipient of the speaker's words or a reader of a writer's work being able to understand this intended meaning. The investigations into the arbitrariness of language by psychoanalysis, linguistics, and deconstruction have damaged our ability to believe in this simple possibility of a reader grasping an author's intention, even when that reader is the author himself or herself. The New Critics had another concern; this was the use of an author's supposed intention as a means of evaluation. Was the intention of an author honourable or worthwhile? If the answer was no, then the work could be shelved as bad, tossed aside as an inferior work of literature. Fish wants to take issue with this stand, but he does so not from a position of complete relativity, nor from a desire to reinstate the authority of the author.

Fish's argument sets out with the premise that all readers look for meaning in the texts they read. This quest for meaning is tantamount to a desire to understand what the author meant. And this is what the reader finds--the author's intended meaning. The catch is that the author's intended meaning is no less created in the act of reading as it was in the act of writing. As Fish has it: "interpretation creates intention and its formal realization, by creating the conditions in which it becomes possible to pick them out" (322). Just as the formal features of any text are a feature of our interpretive strategies--for example, a myth critic coming to As I Lay Dying will find the quest motif and the wasteland images clear, whereas a psychoanalytic critic will find the internal monologues and emphasis on desire as formal features of the text--so too are intentions. What we find when we interpret any work of literature is what we take to be the intended meaning. If we did not take the meaning we find to be intended, then we would have no basis for hazarding that the meaning we find is the right one. Our interpretations must be right because they were intended. Another circular argument. Our interpretations verify intentions--nothing more, nothing less. Fish's hermeneutic is, as I say, circular: we look for meaning in a text, but in order to begin our search we bring to the text certain strategies which ensure we will find meaning; consequently we find the meaning our strategies allow us to find and yet we say that those meanings are there in the text before we bring our strategies to bear on it. What gets Fish out of this vicious circle is his notion of interpretive communities since these sanction the strategies readers use and give our interpretations "objectivity." What counts is the interpretive community we belong to, and these change all the time a little like fashion.

As I Lay Dying - some notes

Before we start looking at characters in the novel, we might reflect on the gender of the author. Who wrote this book? Obviously someone named William Faulkner. Would this book be any different had someone named Wilhemina Faulkner written it? This may be a silly question, but let's bear with it for the moment. William, not Wilhemina wrote the book. At first blush, I think, Faulkner seems genuinely sympathetic to women; he seems to understand the difficulties they face, especially in the context of poverty and isolation in a rural community. Addie comes across as something of a tragedy: an intellectually capable woman whose life falls into ruin when she marries Anse or maybe even earlier when she takes to heart her father's (I wonder what advice her mother might have had) wisdom about living being a getting ready for dying. Clearly women are domestic drudges; they keep the home fires burning, as it were. This means they serve their husbands' (or non husbands' if we remember Lafe and MacGowan) desires; these desires are mostly physical: food and sex. I think we can see this with Cora, Addie, and Dewey Dell. But what's going on here? Are these women presented to us as examples of exploited womanhood in order that Faulkner can criticize patriarchy? Or does Faulkner fall into the usual male trap of seeing women as either angel or whore? Before answering this question, some consideration of "angel" and "whore" is in order. These words are, of course, metaphors, ways of categorizing women. The angel refers to a woman who has a spiritual quality. But wait, "spiritual" here means "docile," "pliant," "nurturing," "domestic." The angel combines qualities associated with mother and daughter; she accedes to a man's wishes and keeps him comfortable. In other words, the notion of "spirituality" is somewhat specious here because clearly this angel has a physical function in her duty to comfort man. In this the angel is little different from the whore. The whore is the angel upside down, as it were. She both attracts and repels man. Her physicality is open, candid, above board. Because of this, she is both attractive and frightening. In any case, what I want to point to here is the idea that both angel and whore are really "of the earth." The woman, whatever the metaphor we use to describe her, is under patriarchy asssociated with mother nature.

I suspect Dewey Dell is important here. Her name is redolent of the earth. Once we see this, we might note how the women in the book are associated with the earth. They are the earth; they are that which man plants and from which he gains satisfaction and nourishment. Dewey Dell has associations with the cow, the dark, the breeze. She remarks that she feels "like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth." She will be a mother. I guess what I'm driving at here is the suggestion that Faulkner perceives women as earth mothers--nothing more, nothing less. They may be hard put upon in this terrible world, but they are nonetheless to be perceived as important because of their fecundity, their nurturing qualities, their passivity, their sort-of cow-like acceptance of their lot. You might demur and say, but Addie is different, she has a voice. True Addie has a voice. But I'd prefer to put it this way: Faulkner allows Addie to speak, but only after she is dead. The only woman capable of speech is the dead woman whose words do not reach the living (at least within the novel). Even Rachael, who confirms the male attidtude to women, that they are intractable and fundamentally myterious and irrational, is not allowed to speak for herself. Her words come to us through her husband.

What I'm trying to articulate here is Faulkner's patriarchal view of women. Women are domestic, passive, inarticulate, and irrational creatures. They are associated with the body. They sacrifice for their men and for their families. Is this Faulkner's view and can we deconstruct this view?

What about Cora Tull who does seem to have a voice? She is something of a foil to Addie: pious where Addie is something of a libertine (at least inwardly); a gossip, self-centered and proud, nosy. She is practical and religious. She is also dominated by her husband; she is a good wife. She accepts what the partriarchy tells her; this is evident in the section on pp. 166-167 where she admonishes Addie for being proud and not adhering to the tenets of the church. I'm not certain what to conclude here except to say that Cora exhibits hypocrisy and self-concern just as many of the characters do. She offers the reader little in the way of a critique of patriarchy unless we see her as a representative of what patriarchy produces. She herself has internalized the patriarchal norms. She is, in effect, a spokesperson for patriarchy.

Next came Anse. Here's a buzzard. Anse suppresses women, but then Anse Bundren will suppress anyone he comes in contact with. He must be just about the most no-account character in fiction. He is long suffering. He lets others do for him. He allows Addie to work like a horse. (Jewel's mother is a horse.) He parades his manliness as stoicism when it is really laziness and self-interest. Anse is like Cora in that he spouts the Protestant ethic: "Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit" and "I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth" (pp. 110-111). It's true that Faulkner can't have a lot of sympathy for Anse, although I suspect he has some. Anse Bundren is a type of character fondly paraded before the reader in American culture: the lovable scoundrel, the confidence man. He's Huck Finn's father, Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, the Wizard of Oz, Ralph Cramden, Archie Bunker, Al Bundy, and so on. He is, in short, a survivor. A feminist spin on Anse could not be kind, but I doubt that this is what we have in the novel. Anse is either a misogynistic pig that the reader is supposed to reject, or he is someone who confirms Faulkner's own deeply misogynistic feeling. Note that Anse gets the girl as well as the new teeth as well as the graphophone. One out, one in for Anse Bundren.

Back to Dewey Dell and her "female trouble." Dewey Dell strikes me as important to Faulkner's sense of value. She reminds me of Eula Varner from The Hamlet and Lena Grove from Light in August. These are women who are similar in that they are redolent of the earth and its connections with sex and fertility. Dewey Dell is a sex object. She raises every man's libido into action, even her brother Darl's. Remember when Dewey describes Darl's eyes passing over her body: "They begin at my feet and rise along my body to my face, and then my dress is gone: I sit naked on the seat above the unhurrying mules, above the travail" (121). She is like a tableaux--an earth goddess oozing the attractions of the body. Lady Gadiva. I think Faulkner constructs woman as a sex object or a domestic drudge. As domestic, the woman becomes something of a harridan, as we see in the example of Rachael, wife of Samson. Angela pointed out that everyone uses Addie; the same might be said of Dewey Dell. Even her name smacks of the misogynist's sneer.

Whatever else we might say about these characters, we can't say that any of them would remain unnoticed at Old Miss or better yet at Princeton or Harvard. In other words, they are not the brightest people in the world. Yet they have wisdom of some kind. Even if you don't accept this, you might accept that they grapple with serious and even deep problems. They think. Funny as it might be, and I confess that I find it very funny, the scene in which Dewey struggles with her desire for Lafe in the cotton field presents us with Faulkner's attitude to women. Perhaps we might remember the first page of the novel on which Darl mentions "laidby cotton." We might say the same of Dewey Dell: laid by cotton, so to speak. Anyhow, Dewey seems to me genuinely conflicted as to whether to accede to Lafe's advances. She tries to make a plan, a plan which Lafe foils by picking into her sack. He picks into her sack all right. And the fact that I can make these wry nudge-nudge jokes at Dewey's expense strikes me as an indication of Faulkner's use of Dewey. He sets her up, just as Lafe does, just as I'm doing in the male's inveterate game to one-upmanship the female. When Dewey says, "I could not help it," I think we are to see this as a confession of weakness on her part, but from a feminist perspective I suspect that what we have here is a simple statement of fact. Women in Dewey's world can't help doing what importunate and opportunistic men want.

The rest of the passage is also interesting from a feminist perspective. Dewey goes on to say that an understanding exists between her and Darl: "then I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without words" (27). The passage goes on with more about this unspoken communication between Darl and Dewey. We know from Addie's section that words are "just a shape to fill a lack" 172). Men use words to attempt to repair the gap that opens up between their desire and its satisfaction after the Oedipal stage of development. They also use words as weapons--weapons to attain that which they desire. Women, on the other hand, have less need of language because of their closeness to the mother. We've seen all this before. Communication for a woman is more immediate, more direct, more literal, more honest than for a man. At first this might seem to place Dewey in a position of privilege or to suggest that she has a wisdom not open to men. But we might remember the long-standing connection between women and fools. Darl is this book's fool. Women and fools might have wisdom, but they cannot function adequately in the patriarchal world in which they find themselves. Fools end up in institutions and women end up victimised in one way or another. However we read section I've been looking at we can't but conclude that Dewey gets a raw deal. She may have wisdom, but what good does it do her? Her wisdom is the wisdom of the earth, according to Faulkner, and as noble and sanctified (I'm using Faulknerisms here) as this may be, it doesn't cut much ice in the world Dewey has to deal with. She remains an object in the eyes of men.

Before I leave Dewey, I must mention Dewey's masculine language when she describes a woman's situation. I refer to her remark to the two druggists that she has the "female trouble." I ought to note that Dewey does not report these trips to the druggist; we receive this information from the two men: Moseley and MacGowan. In effect, men speak for Dewey here; she is silenced. The first of these men is a self-righteous prig and a hypocrite. He's willing to judge Dewey: "it's a crime and a shame" (201). Note that he says this before he knows what she means by the "female trouble." For him, the very fact that women have the "female trouble," that is their monthly cycle, is a crime and a shame. The very fact that Dewey is a woman is enough for Moseley to judge her a criminal and a shameful person. He means "crime" literally; Dewey has contravened God's law by being a woman because she is a daughter of Eve who first contravened God's law. Moseley is like many of the characters in the novel in that he spouts Protestant pieties thoughtlessly and self-righteously. He also means "shame" in a similarly literal way; Dewey has shamed herself, that is put herself beyond the pale of respectable and decent people by having the "female trouble." She is marked with sin, set apart, outside community. She is, in effect, cursed. Yet he's also willing to take advantage of her: "but after all, they'll buy it from somebody." Once he learns the truth, that Dewey is pregnant, he assumes a paternal position towards her, advising her to go home and get her father to force Lafe into marriage. For him, marriage is the only answer to Dewey's trouble, and she needs to have recourse to her father to set things right.

The second druggist, MacGowan, is even worse. He sees Dewey only as an opportunity to satisfy his libido. He treats her with no respect, no feeling, no honesty, no humanity, no fairness. He tricks her. He takes advantage of her. And I could go on. The question is: what are we to make of this? Clearly, Faulkner cannot have sympathy for these men, especially the second. On the other hand, giving us the narrative from their point of view allows Dewey no voice here. We are allowed to think of her as Moseley and MacGowan do: a simple gullible, even ignorant, country girl easily dubed, stupid when it comes to dealing with men. We have little or no idea what goes on in her head during these encounters. Can we even imagine what she is thinking here? Anyhow, Dewey's world is a masculine world. She has few female role models. Is she an example of a woman who has internalized the values and language of patriarchy?

Perhaps the most spectacular instance of male appropriation of the female occurs right at the end when Anse returns to the wagon and ends the novel with the words: "Meet Mrs. Bundren." Who is this person? What is her name? What does she think? For Anse, she's just another acquisition, like his new teeth. Hey, look what I've got, a new wife. When did they get married? Faulkner's point here tells us a lot about Anse; it confirms his selfishness and his devious ways. but might it not also tell us a lot about Faulkner? To make this comic point about Anse's hangdog will to conquer, Faulkner uses a woman. And I say "uses" deliberately. The woman has no voice, no history, no identity. She's a mere object, chattel. Women, children, black people--these are the disenfranchised in Faulkner's world and we might argue of these three groups women are the most disenfranchised.

Demonic, Parodic and Young Goodman Brown

1. Why do I like Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"? Because the story reminds me of those many stories, now unremembered in detail and name, which turned up in the old E.C. Comics, on such TV programmes as The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and even Star Trek, and which deal with the weird edges of unconscious experience in which the familiar people and places of our waking life appear in parodic forms of themselves. The story also brings to mind Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street where the dream world is a dangerous place. I think I like this kind of story because it is so foreign a form to me. I mean 'foreign' in the sense of unfamiliar. Goodman Brown's experience, horrific as it is, is possibly a dream experience, and dreams are a part of my life I rarely, if ever, touch. From what those who know these things tell us, all of us dream; I, however, cannot recall my dreams. Reading "Young Goodman Brown," I wonder whether this psychic mechanism of dream amnesia is fortuitous, a form of gloom management. Are my dreams so unspeakable, so unrememberable because they depict desires as wicked as those of Goodman Brown? Frankly, I don't know and I don't care to know. I would rather share the dreams of a Goodman Brown than my own, if these are similar.

2. Perhaps this resistance on my part to my own dreams explains another difficulty I have: entering a fiction in a visceral way. I rarely have what I suppose to be an emotional response to story. Well, this is true to a point; obviously I like some things more than I like others, and also obviously this is because some stories speak to me more powerfully than others. The truth is that poems speak to me more intensely than stories. When I like stories, the reason is usually attached to a poetic element in the story. In the case of "Young Goodman Brown," I react to the story's language. Hawthorne invests his prose with the intensity of poetry. Why I should like this, is unclear to me, although I suppose this is my substitute for ritual and ceremony. I have no interest or liking for the usual rituals of our culture, but I do react more strongly to the forms of literature--what I here refer to as its ritual power--than to its content. But this too is probably not entirely genuous.

3. I guess that Hawthorne has tapped into something universal in this story. That is, he not only presents material which is quintessentially American--an expose or a satire on the Puritan ethos--but he also enlarges on what is distinctly historical and Puritan to give us insight into the workings of human desire. In other words, I don't think the story depends upon the reader having knowledge of its historical dimensions. It may be appreciated for its internal structures. From the beginning, this story sets up a contrast between male and female--the male is about to depart from home, while the female (and wife) remains homebound. Male desire takes the man on a journey into the depths of consciousness and of experience. But what is it that the male desires? Well he desires everything he does not have, everything he lacks: knowledge, the power to transgress, to break away from all that restricts such as home, community, and personal history. That this is the perennial quest of the male is indicated by references of one kind and another to Goodman Brown's father and to his grandfather. It is the son's destiny to desire release from the wearying and uncanny repetition of the father's lot. Ironically, however, his journey away from home, away from his origins, away from the maternal (whether mother or wife) can lead only into the father's footsteps. And recall the father's relationship with the mother. In other words, what the son quests for is the mother. His journey into the forest, at night, to find a demonic and parodic ceremony redolent of snakes, phallic staffs and trees, flames, and fatherly encouragement to accept the authority of wicked power structures, is a journey into the law of the father. Goodman Brown is doomed to repeat the journey of his father and of his father before him.

4. If this sounds as if Goodman Brown is trapped, that's because he is; Goodman Brown is caught in the necessary repetition of male desire. He cannot think his way--either in consciousness or unconsciousness--out of a belief in power structures. He cannot think his way out of male modes of thought. Either he accepts the invitation of the devil to take part in the wickedness of the world's sexual, social, and political tyrannies, or he retreats into a world of gloom in which he perpetuates individual need for power anyway. Either way, he is doomed to fail because what the mind wants--fulfillment--is beyond reach. Fulfillment is beyond reach precisely because to be fulfilled is to establish oneself in a place where language is no longer necessary, where experience is one of unity rather than uniformity, and where separation from others is no longer. The journey to the forest is the demonic version of this fulfillment. Brown descends into a dark, enclosed space where initiates into the ways of wickedness appear unified by laughter and by the ceremonies of desire. This is, of course, a false laughter and a false desire.

5. The only way for Goodman Brown to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of group power or individual power (social conformity or solipsistic projection) is for him to embrace Faith at the beginning of the story, to stay home in compliance with her wish. So as you can see, I don't read this story in any theological, spiritual, or religious sense. Rather I read it psychologically. The story is for me a powerful reminder of the mind's workings. We might, if we so desired, read the story from a Jungian point of view and see Faith as Goodman Brown's anima forever split from him by his failure to overcome selfhood as manifested in the Shadow figure of the elder man, the devil, the demonic father. Finally, all I am really saying in this brief exercise is that I find stories which use such psychologically charged images as the forest, the father, the fire, the anima, the crone, the shadow, the journey, the underworld experience, and so on powerful.

6. I also like Hawthorne's refusal to be clear on such things as dream and reality, truth and falsehood, and narrative position. This story seems plain enough on the surface: for some mysterious reason newly married Goodman Brown has agreed to meet an elderly man in the forest; he leaves his wife to fulfill his agreement; he meets the elderly man and walks with him for a while; then he walks by himself seeing familiar people in unfamiliar circumstances until he arrives at a strange place in the woods where a kind of black mass is being celebrated. Here Goodman Brown sees his wife Faith; the vision prompts him to stop his slide into wickedness. The whole thing seems a dream, but Goodman Brown takes it as a reality and his days are herafter darkened. Was it a vision or a dream? What does the whole thing mean? How did Faith get into the forest? Was Goodman Brown's mother there? Was the old man the devil? These questions and more beg to be asked, but answers remain, for me, elusive. I like stories that leave more questions unanswered than answered. I like stories that remain uncanny, mysterious, open-ended, incomplete in the sense that they refuse simple reduction to paraphrase. I don't mind living with doubts and uncertainties. Goodman Brown is a person who needs certainties and look where that need leaves him.