Oversized Objects with Impact
Early in my MFA program, Pinkney Benedict presented a craft talk on the importance of objects to character and plot, with illustrations ranging from Achilles’ shield to Harry Potter’s wand. Though I have yet to write a story with a weapon or a magical device in it, rereading my thesis stories shows that many of my stories revolve around a central object (a plant, a dress, a painting, a bra, a doll, a quilt). The objects in my stories were items of exchange or contested in ownership. I recently came across two stories that used oversized and astonishing objects—a room-size model of the human heart and a two-story statue of a human head—to different effect than that of exchange or possession.
Janet Frame’s “You Are Now Entering the Human Heart” is told in first person POV by an unnamed and undescribed narrator, an “I” that any reader may occupy. The story begins and ends in a train station in Philadelphia, currently hosting an exhibit of a human heart “ceiling high and from wherever you stood in the hall you could hear it’s beating, thum-thump-thum-thump.” Though intrigued by the opportunity to enter the heart and walk along its arteries, the narrator opts to visit the Natural Science Museum across the street, where the narrator witnesses a museum worker attempting to teach children, supervised by their teacher Miss Aitcheson, not to fear snakes.
The museum worker swiftly drapes a garden snake around Miss Aitcheson’s neck. The narrator judges “She must be nearing retiring age. A city woman. Never handled a snake in her life. Her face was pale. She just managed to drag the fear from her eyes to some place in their depths, where it looked like a dark stain. Surely the attendant and children noticed.”
As the children interact with the snake Miss Aitcheson bravely contains her terror until the snake “moved around to face Miss Aitcheson and thrust its head towards her cheek.” She screams, throws off the snake, and collapses crying in a chair. The narrator notes that the children “were shut against her…because she could not promise to love and preserve what she feared.” At this point the narrator departs to catch his or her train, ruing that “The journey through the human heart would have to wait until another time.”
Juxtaposing the possibility of entering a more-than-life-sized model of the human heart and the narrator’s witnessing Miss Aitcheson’s spiritual journey through crisis and defeat, the author invites the reader to decide who entered the human heart and when. The museum worker, confident in his knowledge that snakes are not dangerous, shows no empathy for the terrified woman. The children, disappointed by their teacher’s failure, “were shut against her.” Even though the narrator witnesses the woman’s discomfort, the narrator offers her no comfort. The heart is capable of compassion and empathy, but it is also capable of cruelty and indifference. What could have been a maudlin, brief incident becomes ironic and poignant by the presence in the train station of an oversize rendition of a human heart sitting outside of any—or every—body hat passes by.
Metta Sáma’s story “Lillian Is An Ordinary Child” uses an oversized object, “the largest sculpture in the park: the head of a man who wears a very long earring…” as catalyst for engaging the main character’s imagination.
Lillian, “over stimulated with the compare-contrast analysis teachings and exercises,” has surrendered her imagination for the power and precision of the analytic, factual and empirical thinking as she moves from second to sixth grade. “Lillian’s mother wonders when her daughter’s imagination slipped out of her spirit, when it began to dodge her mind, when her body stopped bumping into the impossible, when her heart turned into a cold, green chalkboard.” On her eleventh birthday her parents attempt to revive her imagination with a field trip to a sculpture park. The girls are given supplies to foster their interactions with the sculptures (cameras, journals, binoculars, mechanical pencils and water). But it’s not these items that jump-start Lillian’s imagination—it’s the impact of the two-story statue of the bodiless head. Lillian discovers that “the man’s ear is an open doorway. She peeps inside the head and sees a staircase.” Walking around the head again, she wonders “if the walk up the man’s head will be worth it….” She returns to the ear/doorway “unsure of her next move.”
To underscore the significance of this moment, the omniscient narrator enters the text and addresses the reader: “What will Lillian do?” and sketches multiple “non-parallel planes” in which Lillian behaves differently and has different futures. In one, Lillian refuses to enter; in one Lillian ponders whether entering is a good idea, her mother, described as “the most curious of them all”, “wandered into the head.” The narrator informs that “Lillian will never see her mother again, but she doesn’t know that yet.” On another plane, the narrator speculates, “if Lillian allows her imagination to fatten up, to gain a pounding heart rhythm, to flex its spirit muscles, she will see her mother again…” Finally, Lillian enters the head and experiences her mother’s fate: She “will slip into another dimension—that of the imagination of the giant, bodiless head.”
Through the characters entering the head and their imagination stimulated, both mother and daughter are now lost in thought; that is, they—and the reader—are experiencing the power and capacity of the imagination such that the statue of a man’s head becomes sentient and captivating.
Considered from a craft point of view, the objects create effects vital to the story, effects that their realistic presentation at their proper size, in their proper place, could not. The over-sized heart, now exteriorized and independent of a body, provides a frame for interpreting the interaction between the museum worker and Miss Aitcheson. The gigantic head, separated from its body and enlarged, is an apt metaphor for the scope of the imagination.