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DOI: https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2023.62.02.5
How to Cite:
Starostenko, T., Shcherbakova, O., Shevchenko, A., Yehorova, O., & Nikiforchuk, S. (2023). Semiosis of textual categories of time
and space in short fiction by Breece D’J Pancake. Amazonia Investiga, 12(62), 66-74. https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2023.62.02.5
Semiosis of textual categories of time and space in short fiction by
Breece D’J Pancake
Cеміозис текстових категорій часу і простору в коротких оповіданнях Бріса
Декстера Пенкейка
Received: February 28, 2023 Accepted: March 30, 2023
Written by:
Tetiana Starostenko1
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2343-105X
Olena Shcherbakova2
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9880-8865
Alona Shevchenko3
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9953-1906
Olena Yehorova4
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9103-5118
Svitlana Nikiforchuk5
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9337-1983
Abstract
The article explores the semiosis of textual
categories of time and space in short fiction by
Breece D’J Pancake. The methodology of the
research is based on the works by M. Bakhtin, Yu.
Lotman, G. Genett, P. Ricoeur and U. Eco. It has
been proved that the stories by Pancake replicate
several Biblical plots: the creation of the world and
the origional sin (“Trilobites”), a prodigal son
(“Time and Again”), the whore of Babylon / Mary
Magdalene (“A Room Forever”) and the
apocalyptical mark of the beast (“The Mark”). The
time is static and is marked by seasonality. The
space is segregated into macro-outer world and the
inner space of the towns, engulfing people’s
destinies and predetermining their down-to-earth
existence. The semantic system is represented by
the cross-cultural concepts: the light as a sign of
hope; a room as an embodiment of a shelter; the
hollowness of the night, growing into the
hollowness of life; a rabbit embryo, symbolizing
the mark of the beast; a snake, serving as a symbol
of seduction; a train or a bus as the means of
escapism. Three rounds of coffee in “Trilobite”
1
PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Associate Professor of the Department of English Philology, H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv
National Pedagogical University, Ukraine.
2
Ph.D. in Education, Assistant Professor, Assistant Professor of the Department of Germanic Philology, V.O. Sukhomlynsky National
University, Ukraine.
3
PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Associate Professor of the Department of Practice of Oral and Written English, H.S.
Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University, Ukraine.
4
PhD in Pedagogy, Associate Professor, Associate Professor of the Department of Practice of Oral and Written English, H.S.
Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University, Ukraine.
5
Lecturer at the Department of Germanic Philology, V.O. Sukhomlynsky National University, Ukraine.
Starostenko, T., Shcherbakova, O., Shevchenko, A., Yehorova, O., Nikiforchuk, S. / Volume 12 - Issue 62: 66-74 /
February, 2023
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replicate three circles of Hell in “The Divine
Comedy” by Dante.
Keywords: Biblical symbolism, closed reality,
explicit seasonality, means of escapism, textual
categories.
Introduction
It is the Biblical text that starts measuring the
world and the human existence through the
language with the word as its initial code and
constituent element: “In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through Him all things were made; and without
Him nothing was made that has been made. <…>
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling
among us” (Catholic Online Logo (n/d), 14). The
world gets processed both through the language
and the personal-temporal-spatial coordinates.
Outside temporal and spatial code there is no
existence, no human being, no objective reality
or its perception. Time and space are the essential
forms of every cognition, which define every
cultural phenomenon, every human work, or a
literary text in particular. The narration gets
modelled through the temporal and spatial
system, which forms the skeleton of the literary
text, organizes its structure and shapes its artistic
sense. According to Bakhtin, “every intrusion
into the sphere of senses is committed
exclusively through the gates of chronotope”
(Bakhtin, 1975, p. 406). Thus, the chronotopic
category represents a peculiar meaningful system
of signs.
The exploration of the semiotics of time and
space, is linked to the analysis of language
devices, serving as a key to the unique author’s
code (Kubryakova, 2004). The way the human
mind processes the objective reality gets
reflected in the language and is defined by it.
Traditionally the exploration of the chronotopic
categories leads to the construction of models,
embracing lexico-semantic fields, suggested by
Vsevolodova, 2007 and Guk, 1996. There is a
strain of works, spotlighting the mechanisms of
representation of the chronotopic categories
through the language, among which the
following aspects dominate: morphological
(Vinogradov, 1971, Kubryakova, 2004,
Nikolina, 2007); lexico-semantic (Guk, 1996,
Denisenko, 2002); syntactic (Myaksheva, 2008);
conceptual (Naberezhnova, 2008). In the present
research the analysis of the categories of time and
space will be joined to the detection of the
connection between the sign system and the
process of semiosis of the chronotopic
categories.
The categories of time and space represent “some
hierarchical structure of subordinate senses” in
every literary text (Toporov, 1983, p. 242),
transforming from the geometric and physical
categories into semiotic ones, becoming “a
language, capable to express various meaningful
notions” (Lotman, 1997), which enables us to
speak of semiotic and lingvopoetic character of
the categories of time and space in fiction.
The contemporary linguistic paradigm tends to
be anthropocentric, exploring the language and
culture, the human beings and the sign systems,
generated by them, including the genuine
constants like time and space, participating in
conceptualization of the fictional world. The
topicality of the exploration is conditioned by the
fact that the new contexts, created in Modern,
Postmodern and Metamodern literature, make
different emphasis in the temporal and local
categories.
The works by Breece D’J Pancake, which are in
focus of the current research, get often compared
to those by Ernest Hemingway, William
Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett,
Flannery O’Connoi and other twentieth-century
giants and represent a picture of West Virginian
world of the second half of the XXth century,
processed through the unique perception of a
remarkably promising young author with suicidal
inclinations. “Chekhovian in impetus, but closer
to poetry than prose, these stories often feature a
lonely young man in a dreary small community,
hiding his dreams and thoughts from the world.
This character is surrounded by rough, often
violent, working men – miners, labourers, boxers
– ageing, failing parents and women: despised or
desired, but never granted a soul. This vision of
reality, one senses, is Pancake’s own in both life
and work”, says Karen Altenberg (Altenberg,
2017). Despite their literary value and high
critical acclaim, the text by Pancake, and their
chronotopic fame in particular, have never been
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the object to a literary research. Meanwhile, the
analysis of the chronotopic structure and its
determiners allows to detect numerous semantic
layers coded by the author.
The objective of the article is to provide a
comprehensive analysis of textual categories of
time and space and the mechanisms of their
representation as specific components of
semiotic act in the in short fiction by
Breece D’J Pancake.
Theoretical Framework
The research is based on the works by
M. Bakhtin, Yu. Lotman, G. Genett and
P. Ricoeur, devoted to the exploration of the
categories of time and space in the literary text.
According to Bakhtin, “the temporal features
tend to disclose in space, and the space gets
comprehended and measured by time” (Bakhtin,
1975, p. 235). Lotman proves that the artistic
space represents “a world model of some
particular author, expressed in language of
his/her spatial concepts” (Lotman, 1988,
pp. 252-253). Lotman suggests a range of
dominant spatial forms: open – close space;
linear (directed) – undirected (static) space; real
(living) – magical (imaginary) space; own – alien
space; and pointed – restricted space.
French philologist Gerard Genett focuses on the
discrepancy on the sequence of the events in the
storyline and the type of narration, calling it
anachronism. Anachronism is inherent to every
text and can be represented in two forms:
prolepsis (a narrative approach when the story
anticipates the events to be); analepsis (telling a
story, which took place before the time of the
reader). He also singles out three types of ellipsis
(the gaps in time): a) explicit, when the lost event
is pointed out; b) implicit, when the lost event is
not manifested directly but gets reconstructed by
the reader out of chronological gaps and narrative
disruptions); c) hypothetical, which can’t be
localized and gets detected post factum in some
analepsis (Genett, 1998, p. 138). Genett proves
that the contemporary literary mind expresses
itself exclusively within the textual categories,
which form the figures of “par excellence”,
where the language becomes space, and the space
turning into a language speaks for itself (Genett,
1998, p. 132).
Paul Ricoeur suggests to explore temporality on
the basis of mimesis. Ricoeur uses the notion of
mimesis in Aristotle’s sense (excluding Plato’s
ideas), notably as an artistic imitation of reality,
and not its passive copying. Ricoeur extends it up
to three components: mimesis I (anticipation),
mimesis II (morphogenesis), mimesis III
(transformation). Thus, mimesis I is based on
actual reality, life as an aggregation of facts and
events, deprived of cause-and-effect relations.
Mimesis II is the composition of fiction and
mimesis III is the act of its perception, the ideas
and senses the literary work generates. Thus,
every stage of mimesis is linked to a particular
temporal experience, which ranges the time of
the story according to the following scheme:
mimesis I (the real time of the world) > mimesis
II (the configured time of the artistic world
depicted by the author) > mimesis III (assumed
experience of the time) (Ricoeur, 1998, p. 82).
The exploration of the semiotic system of the text
is grounded on the poststructural concept of a
sign, suggested by Ch. Pierce and U. Eco.
According to Eco, the signified enters into the
semasiological relationships with the signifier
due to the code, which means that the code is a
particular function, the initial zeroth-order
meaning, fixed in the language in a particular
moment of history (Eco, 2007, p. 66). It
constitutes the first stage of semiosis. The second
stage deals with the interpretation of a sign. The
key notion here is the notion of the interpretant
or the “action of the sign”, the sign, which is
created in the mind of the reader, who senses it
and enriches its meaning, either creating a more
developed sign, or, on the contrary, reducing its
meaning (Nyot, 2001, p. 14). Thus, the content of
the sign, created by the author, and the content of
the sign, comprehended by the reader, may
differ. Eco says, that the interpreter defines the
meaning of the sign in this very context, namely
distinguishing its connotation. The third stage of
semiosis by U. Eco dwells on the idea that
potentially limitless semiosis is anyway
determined somehow, and it is the dynamic
objects that plays the restrictive role: “this object,
the sign of which is the sign”, “some particular
state of the outer world” (Eco, 2007, p. 323),
“reality that sends this sign to its representation”
(Usmanova, 2000, p. 128). The dynamic object is
something that reduces senses or, vice versa,
creates a bigger frame for the interpretation of the
sign. According to Eco, in the text of fiction the
semiosis is already restricted by the text itself,
notable by the lexico-grammatical language
devices.
Methodology
Methods and techniques of the research are
determined by the tasks: to describe the structure
and the functions of the categories of time and
space in short fiction by Pancake and determine
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their philosophic, artistic and linguistic
dimensions, to retrace their semiotic potential; to
disclose the nature of semiosis of the categories
of time and space in the author’s prose; to detect
the set of the linguistic devices participating in
the semiosis of the categories of time and space
and structuring the artistic text in the selected
prose. Among the research methods are the
following: the method of semantic analysis, the
method of oppositions, the method of contextual
analysis, the method of chronotopic analysis.
Results and Discussion
The term “semiosis” was first applied by a Greek
doctor Galen from Pergamum (Pergamon)
(139-199) in relation to the symptoms of illness.
However, it is only in the XXth century when the
term “semiosis” gets exploited within the theory
of signs and the sign systems. The new approach
to the definition of the term dates back to F. de
Saussure and is based on the interpretation of the
sign as the dual entity, representing the signifier
and the signified. Hereby within the semiotic
tradition by Saussure, semiosis is defined as an
operation, which determines the relation between
the form of expression and the form of content.
On the other hand, Ch. Peirce suggests the triadic
scheme “the object – the sign – the interpretant”,
where the “interpretant” is the way the sign is
exploited by the man. According to Peirce “every
cognition of an object is possible only through
the exploration of the signs generated by it”
(Pierce, 2009, p. 89).
The fictional space, represented in the stories by
Breece D’J Pancake, is densely coded. The
peculiar locus of West Virginia, embodied in the
author’s writings, shapes peoples’ destinies,
creating the formula of “place over people”
(Gower, 2017). The space of existence by
Pancake bears the down-to-earth philosophy and
produces people of particular class,
chronotopically restricted by their background:
truckdrivers, unemployed miners, tramps,
paroled convicts, runaways, farmers, fatherless
sons, hardened men, and harder women.
Pancake’s protagonist is a chronotopic
abnormality, an error in the code, a lonely person,
“full of a hard-spirited otherness” (Gower,
2017).
Pancake’s fiction represents several circles of
reality: the old times, prior to the mimesis II, the
fictional reality or mimesis II, and the inner
world of the protagonist, formed by experience,
mimesis III. The short fiction, which is supposed
to be what Genett calls analepsis is only
theoretically such. The time, which gets
presented in its common forms (the present, the
past and the future), stays static as nothing
changes, life doesn’t change. West Virginia is,
relatively speaking, a swamp, absorbing
everybody, belonging to its rural static space.
The “world outside” exists, however, is never
reached physically. “Trilobites” is a story built
in circles, where the large circle is the dimension
of a big history, having started million years ago
and going on, and the smaller one is the current
temporality of the locus described. Trilobites
serve as a symbol of eternity, of something
greater than the actual reality, piercing the layers
of time: “I look at Company Hill again, all sort
of worn down and round. A long time ago it was
real craggy and stood like an island in the Teas
River. It took over a million years to make
that smooth little hill, and I've looked all over
it for trilobites. I think how it has always been
there and always will be, at least for as long
as it matters” (Pancake, 1983, p. 21). According
to the Encyclopedia Britannica, trilobite is “any
member of a group of extinct fossil arthropods
easily recognized by their distinctive three-lobed,
three-segmented form. Trilobites, exclusively
marine animals, first appeared at the beginning of
Cambrian Period, about 542 million years ago,
when they dominated the seas” (Britannica,
2023). The protagonist is looking for trilobites as
if trying to link to something bigger than the
actual locality: ““I still can't find a trilobite,” I
say” (Pancake, 1983, p. 22). The personal story
of the protagonist, his feelings and thoughts gets
partially told between the three rounds of coffee
in the café, where Tinker Reilly’s little sister
works. It is between the pots of coffee his initially
embryonic desire grows towards the new object.
Ginny, who manages to cross the chronotopic
parameters of Michigan, stays behind the local
secularity. The primitive sexual desire, visible
for the reader, is still unnoticeable for the
character-narrator, who yet refuses to
acknowledge his emotional transition, the
dominance of the closed reality over the
borderless bigger circle of entity: “She goes to
the counter end and scoffs down the rest of her
sundae. I smile at her, but she's jailbait.
Jailbait and black snakes are two things I
won't touch with a window pole” (Pancake,
1983, p. 22). Basically, the coffee rounds
symbolize the spiritual degradation, the triumph
of baser self over the higher feelings: “Tinker
Reilly's little sister pours my coffee. She has good
hips. They are kind of like Ginny's and they slope
in nice curves to her legs”; “The girl brings
Jim's coffee in his cup, and we watch her pump
back to the kitchen. Good hips”; “Tinker's sister
comes up with her coffeepot to make us for a
tip. I ask her for an aspirin and see she's got a
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pimple on her collarbone. I don't remember
seeing pictures of China. I watch little sister's
hips” (Pancake, 1983, pp. 22-23). At the same
time, the “pictures of China” make a separate
symbol as the postcards themselves. The
postcards are sent by Ginny, the postcards are
shown by the protagonist’s friend, serving as the
sign of existence of a bigger world outside
Michigan, outside the States: “She sends me
postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos
on the front” (Pancake, 1983, p. 21). And his “I
don't remember seeing pictures of China” point
out the protagonist’s concentration on locality,
on the “giggle” of Tinker Reilly’s sister in the
café’s kitchen. There comes a paradox: on the
one hand, the outside locus gets neglected,
ignored in favor of Michigan unpretentious
topos, something carnal, something here and
now, on the other hand, a big historical space,
eternal dimension is the destination the
character-narrator craves for and ultimately
reaches: “I feel my fear moving away in rings
through time for a million years” (Pancake,
1983, p. 37).
It is the locality that provokes changes inside the
characters. According to Lotman, the characters’
behavior is shaped by the space they are in, and
the lapse of the space boosts the transformation
according to the laws of the new space (Lotman,
2022, p. 264). Time and space transform them,
reshaping the nature of the relationships inside
the couple, separated by spaces. During the last
date with Ginny love changes for sex: “I don't
wait. She isn't making love, she's getting laid. All
right, I think, all right. Get laid” (Pancake, 1983,
p. 35). At the same time, the lower feelings are
localized and tied to a particular element of the
local toponymy, the girl from the cafe: “I pull her
pants around her ankles, rut her. I think of
Tinker's sister. Ginny isn't here. Tinker's sister
is under me” (Pancake, 1983, p. 35). Here
comes another spatial symbol, the symbol of a
snake, as a Biblical sign of sin, the sign of a
broken personal rule, a betrayal of personal
principles: “I open my eyes to the floor, smell that
tang of rain-wet wood. Black snakes. It was the
only time he had to whip me” (Pancake, 1983,
p. 35). The snake is “one of the most complicated
and unsolved figures of both the world folklore
and world religion”, characterized by snake
fighting (Propp, 1986, p. 216). The snake
symbolism sobers up the protagonist, boosting
his reverse transformation, which ends up in a
spiritual escapism from the corrupt reality. The
perception of Ginny changes, the circle of the
actual reality intervenes with the eternal
dimension: “I look a long time at the hollow
shadows hiding her eyes. She is somebody I
met a long time ago. I can't remember her
name for a minute, then it comes back to me”
(Pancake, 1983, p. 35). The protagonist
understands that it is the locality which is
responsible for degradation of the whole
generations: “I picture my father – a young hobo
with the Michigan sunset making him squint, the
lake behind him. His face is hard from all the
days and places he fought to live in, and of a
sudden, I know his mistake was coming back here
to set that locust-tree post on the knob”
(Pancake, 1983, 36). At the end of the story there
appears an approaching train as a symbol of
escapism, its device. The protagonist gets ready
to cross the border; he won’t stay: “I get up. I'll
spend tonight at home. I've got eyes to shut in
Michigan – maybe even Germany or China, I
don't know yet. I walk, but I'm not scared”
(Pancake, 1983, p. 37).
Thus, trilobites serve as a guide to the beginning
of the world, the creation of lasting things, like
the hills around, which had seen the millions of
years of human civilization. The common
pinpoint locality, represented by the house, a
concrete patch in the street, the café, the car, the
tractor, the cane, the old mountain, is opposed to
eternal borderless, unlimited macro-objects, like
the sky, the clouds, or the temporal dimension
“long before” and the spatial dimension
“outside” Michigan. As a result, the reader deals
with so-called “splitting of the space”, and the
local objects of two types of locality fulfill the
role of “indexes” that “point at the shift of the
spatial zones and signals, marking the place”
(Chertov, 1999, pp. 140-155). The “splitting”
characterizes the emotional level, the state of
mind, as the physical space of secular life is in-
built into the macro-space of eternity.
The time in the short fiction by Pancake is
marked by explicit seasonality: “the black joints
of river are frosted by this foggy rain”; “the
bowling alley is closed for New Year's” (“A
Room Forever”) (Pancake, 1983, p. 53), “the
passing of an autumn night” (“Fox Hunters”)
(Pancake, 1983, p. 61), with love and the years
counted by summers: “many summers ago he
touched <…>”; “the March wind spraying dust
into little clouds” (“Hollow”) (Pancake, 1983,
p. 39); “The air is smoky with summertime”
(“Trilobites”) (Pancake, 1983, p. 21).
The topos in “Hollow” is subdivided into two
spatial layers – the mine and the world above
opposed to each other: “Buddy was lost in the
rhythm of the truck mine's relay; the glitter of
coal and sandstone in his cap light, the setting
and lifting and pouring”; “heard the pulley
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squeak in the circle of blue above” (Pancake,
1983, p. 39). Mine is a closed space, “a world of
twenty yards” (Pancake, 1983, p. 42), which the
protagonist’s life is linked to in the same way he
is linked to the locality around it. He gets stuck
in the “deep tunnels” feeding him and shaping
the mode of living of people around (Pancake,
1983, p. 39) The dark colour of the mine
dominates, being represented in the dust sprayed
by wind (Pancake, 1983, 39), “the sweet tobacco
juice” (Pancake, 1983, p. 40), “the raw dirty
faces” (Pancake, 1983, p. 41), “coal splinters”
in the air (Pancake, 1983, 41), “the coal face”
(Pancake, 1983, p. 41), ‘the dust in up-down
streams” (Pancake, 1983, 42), the cold air,
“sealing the dirt to his skin” (Pancake, 1983,
p. 42), the hollow of the night (Pancake, 1983,
p. 43). Thus, the darkness transforms into the
hollowness, physical and emotional. The
semiotic circles of the dark restricted space
extend to the hollowness of the place, left by the
girl the protagonist loves, Sally. Thus, the filled-
with-objects-space develops into an empty,
hollow one, which can be defined as atopy
(Palaguta, 2008, p. 2) or non-site (Ozhe, 2017,
p. 136). The vehicle in the story is viewed not as
an escapist device like it is in “Trilobites”, but as
a tool of restoration the past, called to return the
lost elements and people back into their native
topographic parameters: ““Sal's gone, yes, she
is. Yes, she is. Couple of months, an' we'll show
her, yes we will.” He saw himself in Charleston,
in the Club, then taking Sally home in his new
car” (Pancake, 1983, p. 50).
The protagonist of “Hollow” is a person of
reversed perception. Lotman associates the
closed space with darkness, whereas sunshine
and light are linked to freedom. Pancake’s
character relates to darkness and coal dust. His
mode of life, inherited from his father, links him
to the dust of the mine, making it a constant part
of his personal space. The sunlight and the “new
shoes”, on the contrary, get associated with
funerals (Pancake, 1983, p. 45), the killing of a
deer (Pancake, 1983, p. 51), a blood-thirsty cat
and a dog at home (Pancake, 1983, p. 52).
According to Lotman, “memories” is a
reconstruction of the semiotic entity by its
particles (Lotman, 1992, p. 18). The story rests
on retrospection (“Musta been sixty years ago”
(Pancake, 1983, p. 40)) and the present locality,
which the main character wants to preserve.
The plot of “A Room Forever” is based on the
balance between the stability of the universe
around the protagonist-narrator and an eight-
dollar room on New Year, embodying the
temporal toponymy built by the man: “I see the
river in patches between buildings, and the
black joints of river are frosted by this foggy
rain. But on the river it's always the same.
Tomorrow starts another month on the river,
then a month on land - only the tales we tell will
change, wrap around other times and other
names” (Pancake, 1983, p. 53). Thus, the space
is linked to time, which reflects the thesis by
Toporov, who believes that “the center of the
space is the center of time. <…> every full-
fledged description of space presupposes the
definition “here – now”, and not just “here” (as
well as the definition of time is not only focused
on “now”, but on “now – here”)” (Toporov,
1983, p. 223). If the natural space equals the
eternity, the man-constructed world is marked by
finitude. The personal stories are numerous and
alike, coming in succession against the
background, bigger than them.
The parameters of the town in the story,
represented by the streets, the Delmar, the bar on
First Avenue, the smoke of the lobby, the row of
crowded taverns with hardened people’s
destinies inside shrink to the protagonist’s room
“with a kid playing a whore” (Pancake, 1983,
p. 58). The girl is viewed as an alien for the town
element, which is traced in the details of her
portrait: “I can tell right off she is not a chippy.
Her front is more like a kid who had a home once
- jeans, a real raincoat, a plastic scarf on her
head. And she is way too young for this town - the
law won't put up with fresh chicken in this place”
(Pancake, 1983, p. 55). The girl doesn’t belong
to the place or the profession of a hooker: “You
aren’t cut out for this” (Pancake, 1983, p. 57).
The room as a locus for New Year entertainment
could transform into a topos able to save one
destiny: “No, it's just I need a place. I got
to stop moving around, you know?” (Pancake,
1983, p. 57). This room is a sort of a place inside
a bigger space, a town, which is, in turn, inside
of the huge eternal topography. The room forms
a special shelter for two perfect strangers,
creating a heterotopia, “a peculiar space inside of
the common social spaces” familiar to the
protagonist, but not to the girl (Palaguta, 2008).
The mirror serves as a symbol of meeting, as the
holder of the story shared only by two. The
absence of the girl in the mirror at the end of “A
Room Forever” celebrates her escapism,
unnoticeable for the others: “I look for her in
the mirror but she is gone. I would have seen
her going out the front, so I head for the back
door to look for her. She is sitting against a
building in the rain, passed out cold. When I
shake her, I see that she has cut both wrists down
to the leaders, but the cold rain has clotted the
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blood so that only a little ooze out when I move
her. I go back inside” (Pancake, 1983, p. 59).
Here comes the symbol of shit washed away by
the river together with the town secrets. In the
same way the blood of the girl gets washed by the
rain: “I walk along the avenue thinking how shit
always sinks, and how all these towns dump their
shit for the river to push it down to the delta. Then
I think about that girl sitting in the alley, sitting in
her own slough, and I shake my head. I have not
gotten that low” (Pancake, 1983, pp. 59-60).
Water washes away the dirt of the local
civilization. The wasted lives turn into water,
which is eternal and will stay when the people are
gone. According to Pellegrino, a rural space “is a
collective space of a village”, whereas “the urban
space is centered” and is represented “by the
individual space of the subject” (Pallegrino,
1989). The topography of “A Room Forever” is
a town, which generates some ambiguity of the
space. On the one hand, the plot of the story
spotlights two individual fates intervened at
some particular moment. On the other, these fates
are similar to all the others in this very locality.
The people portrayed characterize the town
society in the whole. Even though the protagonist
is aware of the dimension of eternity, something
bigger that the lives around, he ultimately returns
into his native imperfect space.
The attempt of the girl to commit suicide equals
to the attempt of people to run away from the
town on the busses. There is no escapism, as the
place is a part of you and will always be: “I stop
in front of the bus station, look in on the waiting
people, and think about all the places they are
going. But I know they can't run away from it or
drink their way out of it or die to get rid of it”
(Pancake, 1983, p. 60). The inner topography of
the story is a hierarchical zoning of the closed
levels of space, controlled by “the cops and the
pimps” (Pancake, 1983, p. 56).
In “Time and Again” there is again a conflict
between the limited topicality and the outer
world, which takes the nearest and dearest. The
burning light in the kitchen serves as a symbol of
hope for the son to return: “I left the kitchen light
burning. This is an empty old house since the old
lady died. When Mr. Weeks doesn't call, I write
everybody I know about my boy. Some of my
letters always come back, and the folks who write
back say nobody knows where he got off to. I
can't help but think he might come home at night
when I am gone, so I let the kitchen light bum and
go on out the door” (Pancake, 1983, p. 83). On
the other hand, the grunting of the hogs not only
characterizes the static nature of the space
depicted, the routine nature of life of the old man,
but also works as a symbol of the futility of
hoping, in the down-to-earth reality miracles
don’t take place: “I pull up beside my house. My
hogs run from their shelter in the backyard and
grunt at me. I stand by my plow and look at the
first rims of light around Sewel Mountain
through the snowy limbs of the trees. Cars hiss by
on the clean road. The kitchen light still bums, and
I know the house is empty. My hogs stare at me,
snort beside their trough. They are waiting for me
to feed them, and I walk to their pen” (Pancake,
1983, p. 88). The cold of the morning stands for
the frozen status of the reality, which took place
after the death of wife and the running away of
the son. “Time and again, I try to count and
can't”, says the protagonist (Pancake, 1983,
p. 88). This “time and again” embodies the
whole nature of his life, which had stopped.
There a movement of actions which don’t lead to
the actual development in life. “I try to count and
can't” show the emotional condition of the
protagonist, stand for his inability to concentrate,
to reconcile with the actual state of things,
arranged after the death of his wife.
The Biblical symbolism gets the most powerful
in the story “The Mark”. The child conceived in
sin with the protagonist’s brother is viewed as a
beast, a rabbit: “She felt the spot where the baby
should be, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine
her blood in the rabbit's veins” (Pancake, 1983,
p. 90). The idea of the beast is repeated on the
several levels – in connection to her brother and
within a story inside the story: “She remembered
her brother Clinton holding a litter of baby
rabbits close to his naked chest while the mowing
machine droned behind him in a dead hum. Was
that the summer she began to want him?”
(Pancake, 1983, 90); ““That baby was born
lookin' just like a monkey,” Carlene said,
bending herself to talk between Reva and the
cage. “Momma swears it's the mark of the
beast”” (Pancake, 1983, p. 97).
Conclusions
Thus, the stories by Breece D’J Pancake replicate
several Biblical plots: the creation of the world
and the origional sin (“Trilobites”), a prodigal
son (“Time and Again”), the whore of Babylon /
Mary Magdalene (“A Room Forever”) and the
apocalyptical mark of the beast (“The Mark”).
The macro-space of West Virginia is an enclosed
structure, “a glass ball”, which doesn’t’ let the
protagonists out; they are tied to their space,
which always a genetic part of them. The spatial
code is inbuilt in the main characters,
predetermining their behavior and predestining
their life path.
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The time in the texts is static, echoing the idea
that nothing changes in the locus described. The
calendar time is represented by four seasons –
summer, autumn, winter and spring, mirroring
the mood of the characters, their state of mind.
Spatially the fictional topography Pancake
includes two macro-layers: the eternal “big”
natural world around and the actual locus of a
town, native to the characters. The town,
embracing the space of buildings (hotels, cafes,
houses) serves as a sort of a restricted structure
with seemingly transparent borders, which the
protagonists fail to cross. Despite the regular
characters, the mass, the protagonists are able to
notice the world’s eternity, comprehend its
limitless nature. However, the protagonists are
observers, thinkers, but not doers.
The semantic system of the author’s texts is
marked by a range of significant symbols,
expressed by the Bible-generated nouns or cross-
cultural concepts: the light as a sign of hope; the
trilobites as markers of the world creation,
something bigger than the town described,
greater than the actual protagonist’s space; a
room as an embodiment of a shelter; the
hollowness of the night, growing into the
hollowness of life; a rabbit, symbolizing the
mark of the beast and a deadly sin; a snake,
serving as a symbol of seduction; a train and a
bus “working” as the means of escapism, never
used by the protagonists. The characters “see”
the way out, but don’t believe that the change of
topicality can lead to spiritual transformation.
Three rounds of coffee in “Trilobite” replicate
three circles of Hell in “The Divine Comedy” by
Dante. At the same time, the sky as an opposition
to down-to-earth everyday reality, is present in
the majority of stories, linking the protagonist to
the universe, making him its part.
In Pancake’s works space dominates over time.
Space predetermines the lives, which are the
same as the succession of lives before them,
because within the depicted locus the trilobite
hills are eternal and they matter, and people just
change, substitute each other against the eternal
landscape around their town, being unable to
leave the maintained circle of things.
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